One year after Russia launched a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, the war appears increasingly frozen, with Moscow sending in waves of soldiers and Kyiv’s Western backers flooding it with sophisticated weapons. Yet, while the conflict has turned the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a pariah in many nations, the West’s single-minded focus on Ukraine risks leaving it alienated from large parts of the developing world. That was the gist of a warning issued by the former Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, recently on the margins of the annual Munich Security Conference. Mr Santos knows a thing or two about ending protracted wars: the Nobel Peace laureate helped mastermind a peace deal that led to the culmination of a bloody, decades-long conflict between the Colombian army and left-wing rebels in 2016. Now, he has cautioned that the West’s blinkered vision, which places the war in Ukraine as the pressing global challenge that matters above all else, could in time cut support for Kyiv’s defence against Moscow’s aggression in the Global South. That is advice that the West would do well to heed, even as it ignores other burning hotspots and humanitarian crises amid its obsession to teach Mr Putin a lesson.

A startling example of the phenomenon Mr Santos outlined played out in Turkey last week, when Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO visited. In a country that had lost tens of thousands of people to devastating earthquakes, the headlines from the trip focused on Mr Stoltenberg prodding Turkey — a NATO member — to lift its veto on Sweden and Norway in the alliance. The horrific humanitarian crises in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia, fuelled in good measure by other wars that the United States of America and its allies have waged, are largely forgotten in Western capitals. Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian lands is enabled, while the sanctity of international law is cited over the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, poorer nations across Africa, Asia and Latin America must bear the brunt of food security and energy crises exacerbated by sanctions against Russia. Little wonder then that the West’s homilies sound like hypocrisy to the rest of the world. But this is not just the West’s loss. When principles like sovereignty, democracy, freedom and justice are turned into cynical, selectively deployed geopolitical weapons, it is the weak — who actually depend on these values — who suffer most.