Olexander Scherba, Ukraine's new ambassador to SA. (Photo: Wikipedia) 
Ukraine’s new ambassador to South Africa believes this country could and should play a greater role in mediation for a peace deal to end Russia’s three-and-a-half-year war against his country.
Olexander Scherba arrived in Pretoria last month, happy to be greeted by jacarandas and the smiling faces of a people he says smile more than any he has met in his diplomatic career.
A former ambassador to Austria and a specialist in public diplomacy, he takes over the Pretoria post from the doughty Liubov Abravitova who navigated and then helped to thaw the new and initially very frosty relations between Ukraine and South Africa in the new era created by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The South African government’s failure to join much of the world in condemning that aggression dismayed Ukraine, as well as many others.
Scherba arrives to manage a relationship that has evolved a little. President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Kyiv at the head of an African peace mission in June 2023, South Africa participated in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s international peace talks after that, and he himself visited Pretoria in April this year (his first visit to Africa) and gave Ramaphosa a list of 400 Ukrainian children, abducted by Russia and deported to that country, which he asked the South African president to try to recover.
In August this year, Zane Dangor, director-general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco), visited Kyiv to explore a possible greater role for South Africa in Ukraine’s peace process and on his return stressed the need for all parties to respect territorial integrity and national sovereignty – an apparent, if implicit, message for Moscow. And in September, Dirco issued its first explicit condemnation of Russia’s aggression, deploring what it called an “indiscriminate” air strike on civilians in the village of Yarova, which killed 24 pensioners in a queue.
Scherba told Daily Maverick that he found these shifts very encouraging, especially since trying to involve South Africa more in the Ukraine peace process was top of his to-do list during his ambassadorship.
“There is no secret that we want South Africa to play a role in stopping the war and mending the huge damage and trauma that was caused by this war to millions of Ukrainians.
“In particular, it was agreed by our president that South Africa can and should play a role in helping the kids that have been kidnapped by the Russian empire to return back home.”
Scherba said he would like to go further by bringing Ukrainian children who had been orphaned and traumatised by the war for holidays to South Africa. He thought it would be wonderful for these orphans, during Ukraine’s often-harsh winter, to experience South Africa’s summer, “to learn from the amazing experience of this country and just to see the smiles of the people, which I enjoy so much. It would be a hugely positive experience.
“We know that South Africa has probably more channels of dialogue with Russia than we right now, so we do hope that these channels of dialogue will be used to do this right thing, bring Ukrainian kids back to Ukraine.”
More broadly, Scherba said he hoped Ramaphosa would lead another African peace mission to Ukraine.
“We also would be more than happy to see the foreign minister of South Africa visit Ukraine.
“South Africa is so big and so important. Your voice could make a huge difference in showing that it’s more complicated than what Russia is saying, that the invasion and Russia’s actions are ‘backed by a global majority’, that ‘the Global South is with us while the only West is with Ukraine’.
“And, of course, if it is decided that South Africa would be the venue for future peace talks, that would be once again very welcome for Ukraine,” he said, adding, though, that there remained huge uncertainty about whether peace talks would take place at all and if so, where and in what format.
Read more: War in Ukraine
There have been some suggestions that the G20 summit, which South Africa will host in November, could provide a sort of forum to advance the Ukrainian peace process, and it is no secret that Zelensky would like to attend.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” Scherba said. “President Zelensky coming would be an opportunity for South Africa to play this role of a peacemaker.”
He also welcomed Ramaphosa’s remarks last month in New York, where he suggested that South Africa was well placed, even uniquely placed, to play a mediation role in Ukraine because of its access to Zelensky, Putin and US President Donald Trump.
“Yes, South African diplomacy has been successful in keeping open the channels for dialogue on all sides, and this should be used.”
The prospects for peace are nevertheless very uncertain, regardless of the details of the peace process, not least because of the difficulty in reading the mind of Vladimir Putin.
“In light of America’s statements of foreign policy, in light of how the war has been unfolding in the last three years, in light of Ukraine’s capacities and Russia’s capacities, I think it’s quite obvious that the only way right now to bring fighting to a stop, to halt, is a ceasefire along the current frontline.
“It would be an extremely, extremely hard, difficult, maybe impossible decision for Ukraine because that would mean that we leave millions of our people under occupation. But given how the frontline hasn’t been moving for the last three years, this difficult and seemingly impossible decision for the Ukrainian president seems like the only way forward right now.”
Yet even that outcome remained uncertain because Putin “seems set on continuing the war” – even though he says 15,000 Russian soldiers are dying every month in this war. As many Soviet troops died in the entire 10 years of war in Afghanistan.
Scherba said Russian politicians should be asking: “Is it worth it when taking one medium-sized city like Pokrovsk (in Donetsk province) takes already more than a year, so the frontline is not moving?”
Returning to South Africa, he added that he intended approaching Eskom to see if it could somehow help Ukraine manage its acute energy problem caused by Russia’s constant bombing of its electricity infrastructure – “to make sure that millions of Ukrainians don’t freeze during the coming winter; and winters can be harsh in Ukraine.”
Scherba also described the “huge” potential for growing business and cultural relations between Ukraine and South Africa, reflecting on the South African business delegation that accompanied Dangor to Ukraine, to explore trade and investment opportunities, particularly healthcare, automobiles, digitalisation, logistics, including the possibility of cooperation between the ports of Odessa and Durban, agricultural products, including grain, fruit and poultry.
“Ukraine has a lot to offer,” Scherba said, adding that he had been in the meeting between one of Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturers and Dangor and the South African business leaders. The presentation of the drone company had “made quite a splash” with the South Africans, he said. The potential for using drones in South Africa seems to be largely in agriculture, such as monitoring livestock over large farms. Ukraine’s drone technology has accelerated rapidly during the war.
“Our drones are very, very advanced and not too expensive,” Scherba added.
But if relations between Ukraine and South Africa have thawed quite a lot since the early days of the war, they still have basically different narratives about Russia’s war against Ukraine. Probably the ANC – which still largely dictates South Africa’s foreign policy despite the Government of National Unity – still believes that Putin’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 was justified as a security response to Nato’s extension of its membership up to Russia’s borders.
Ukraine believes Putin’s attack was essentially about nostalgia for Russia’s empire rather than about geopolitics.
Last week, Scherba posted that he had come to South Africa with two profound desires. The first is to learn South Africa’s story. “To learn from a country whose freedom fight was and still is an inspiration for so many.”
Second, he wanted to tell Ukraine’s story, “the story of a war where one side wants to be an empire again, while the other one, Ukraine, just wants to be. We Ukrainians want nothing more than our life, our land and our freedom. The problem is that Russians too want our life, our land and our freedom.”
So the war was “not about geopolitics but about human decency. It’s about freedom versus unfreedom. It’s about good versus evil.”
Scherba told Daily Maverick that he believed the Ukrainian and South African stories could be reconciled, “as long as there is goodwill on both parts. I see a huge amount of goodwill towards South Africa on the part of Ukraine and hope it will reciprocate.”
Scherba is vocal and articulate, having published books and many regular newspaper columns.
“And I hope that it won’t be seen as a megaphone diplomacy if the new Ukrainian ambassador will be active on social media because it’s a part of my persona.” It is no coincidence that his 2021 book was titled Ukraine vs Darkness. Undiplomatic Thoughts.
He demonstrated his independence of thought most clearly in November 2004 when he authored a public statement of protest by Ukrainian diplomats against the rigging of the 21 November presidential elections, in favour of the pro-Putin candidate Viktor Yanukovych over Viktor Yushchenko, who favoured integration with the European Union.
That fraud inspired the Orange Revolution which forced a rerun of the elections in December, which Yuschchenko won, keeping Ukraine on its democratic and pro-Western track.
“That rebellion was the most romantic moment in my diplomatic career,” Scherba recalled this week. “I was 33 back then.” He believes the “diplomatic revolution” contributed to democratic change.
Scherba’s last position was as head of public diplomacy. But he believes his experience as ambassador to Austria from 2014 to 2021 will help him manage relations with South Africa. “Austria was very friendly with Russia, so I know how to deal with this kind of situation.
“And so, I do hope that I find a way to navigate this diplomatic climate.”
Scherba says his tweet about his desire to learn more about South Africa’s freedom story is “deeply personal because I grew up in the Soviet Union, I was a Soviet kid, very much politically interested in things happening in South Africa”.
He started reading about Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Soweto when he was 15 or 16 years old. He also used to listen to Bob Marley’s Zimbabwe and Africa Unite, “and it absolutely resonated with me. I think I was the first and the only student of German linguistics that wrote his thesis on the language of German Rastafaris and the music of Marley!
“So, this is what I mean by learning. For me, it’s just like learning more about what was a big part of my youth. It’s very nostalgic.”
He is accompanied to Pretoria by his wife and their daughter, a schoolgirl, and says they are all excited about exploring the country. He believes that diplomacy is the best job, because it was like “having many lives”, one in each country.
He is trying to study Zulu and as a student spent three months studying Dutch and Afrikaans, “so I have a basic understanding of Afrikaans”.
Scherba is from Kyiv though his family originated in the province of Vinnytsia in the southwest, close to the border with Moldova. It had a very big Jewish population before World War 2. He says his wife is partly Jewish “so we are exploring the Jewish roots of our family, and I know that Jewish life is thriving in South Africa too, so I will be exploring that”.
He and his family have already visited the Holocaust and Genocide Centre and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. “It was important for us to start our exploration of South Africa visiting these iconic places,” he said. DM