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Ukraine
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Hoang Thi Ha
Hoang Thi Ha

Opinion | Ukraine invasion: Asean should have called out Russia’s attack but it chose to stay mute

  • Apart from Singapore, most members of the bloc who rely on Russian arms have shied away from outrightly condemning Moscow’s aggression
  • Asean’s reluctance to take a firm stand on global issues that matter doesn’t augur well for regional security where interests of great powers collide

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Ukrainian soldiers patrol the Independence Square in Kyiv on Monday. Photo: EPA-EFE
Hoang Thi Ha
Joint statements by foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian (Asean) on important regional and international issues are measures of the bloc’s unity and credibility. They also demonstrate how cohesive Asean is internally and how far it could go in projecting itself as an actor with a voice to be heard internationally.
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But as the conflict rages in Ukraine after Russia invaded the former Soviet state last week, Asean has earned more bad marks than credits for its February 26 joint statement on the crisis despite the stakes being high for it to take a firm principled stand against Moscow’s clear act of aggression, including raining missiles on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
The 10-member grouping’s corporate identity and its very success rely on an abiding adherence to sovereign equality, non-aggression, renunciation of the use of force and peaceful settlement of disputes. All Asean Dialogue Partners, including Russia, are also required to accede to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) – the code of conduct for interstate relations in Southeast Asia – which is firmly anchored in these cardinal principles.

Yet, the Asean statement did not call out Russia’s invasion of the eastern European nation by its name and it just expressed deep concerns over “the evolving situation and armed hostilities in Ukraine” – a general description absent of legitimate value judgment over the Russian hostile acts against its neighbour. The statement also called on “all relevant parties to exercise maximum restraint” and stressed that “it is the responsibility of all parties to uphold the principles of mutual respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and equal rights of all nations”.

This equidistant approach in effect apportions the liability between Russia and Ukraine in equal degrees. This in turn attenuates the severity and blatancy with which Moscow has used force against Kyiv despite the latter’s plea for peace and readiness to have talks “with anybody, in any format, on any platform”. By blurring the line between the aggressor and the defender, the statement renders its invocation of “sovereignty, territorial integrity and equal rights of all nations” meaningless and pointless.

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As an intergovernmental organisation, Asean is often “the sum of its parts”. When the parts conflict with each other, what we have is the lowest common denominator that can amount to a zero-sum. The bloc’s declaration is in fact a zero-sum result of very divergent and conflicting positions of its member states regarding the situation in Ukraine.

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