ARTICLE \u2013 Juan Manuel Santos, a former president of Colombia, said the Ukraine war was \u201csucking all the energy\u201d away from fighting other challenges, including climate change.<\/p>\n
MUNICH \u2014 A Nobel Peace Prize winner from South America has warned that the West\u2019s heavy focus on Russia\u2019sinvasion of Ukraine risks alienating much of the rest of the world, which is dealing with the consequences of high erenergy and food prices stemming from the war.
\n\u201cUkraine is sucking all the energy, when there are more than 100 conflicts currently in the world,\u201d said Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia. \u201cThere is a dissonance here\u201d with the global south, he said. \u201cAnd if this war prolongs itself, the risk of finding less and less support for it is very real.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Santos spoke to The New York Times<\/em> over the weekend on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, where leaders from the United States and other Western nations.\u00a0He said that he told Ukraine\u2019s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a visit to Kyiv in August \u201cthat you have to do more outside Europe to find and maintain support in Latin America and Africa,\u201d given the economic costs of the war to the world\u2019spoor.<\/p>\n Mr. Santos said that there is general recognition that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. \u201cBut realities change theperceptions of people,\u201d he went on. \u201cThey\u2019re concerned about the price of oil and lack of food. And when you say that,well, \u2018Brazil can invade Colombia,\u2019 they laugh, because it\u2019s a hypothetical. They want their food.\u201d<\/p>\n Other leaders in Munich also expressed worries about perceptions of the war in the global South, but Mr. Santos was considerably blunter about the extent of the problem.<\/p>\n […]<\/p>\n