Why Saudi Arabia, Arab League invited Zelenskyy to their summit

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been on a whirlwind of foreign visits in recent weeks to shore up diplomatic support for Kyiv’s fight against Russia’s invasion. Last week, he landed in the Saudi city of Jeddah in a previously unannounced visit to attend an Arab League summit and try to broaden support beyond his Western partners.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine 15 months ago, Kyiv has failed to garner substantial backing from Arab states, which have largely remained neutral. Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing Gulf nations have maintained warm ties with the Kremlin.Although most Arab governments have voted to condemn Moscow’s invasion at the United Nations, these states, in line with much of the Global South, have generally avoided taking sides.

Most Arab League members have called for a diplomatic settlement, and none has taken any action against Russia, such as economic sanctions, that might antagonise Moscow.

For the most part, Arab officials have viewed this war as a European crisis to be handled by Western nations and Russia. Conflicts and turmoil within the Arab world – such as in Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Israel and Palestine – are of much greater concern to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states than the Ukraine war.

A ‘rare tour de force’
In Zelenskyy’s address to the Arab League, he accused some of its members of deciding to “turn a blind eye” to Russia’s war against Ukraine while also expressing his belief that “we can all be united in saving people from the cages of Russian prisons.”Joseph A Kéchichian, a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, told Al Jazeera that “independent Arab commentators were impressed by the Ukrainian president’s bold statements, especially when he called on Arabs to ‘reflect on their ties with Russia’.”

Kéchichian called it a “rare tour de force” in which Zelenskyy promised higher levels of Arab-Ukrainian cooperation in the future. For years, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states have maintained important ties with Ukraine across multiple fields, such as wheat imports, energy, non-oil trade and tourism.

Zelenskyy took the opportunity to thank Riyadh for its role in arranging the exchange of political prisoners with Russia in September. The Ukrainian head of state also invited Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, to Kyiv.

Zelenskyy appealed to his audience at the Arab League summit in ways that were like his address at the Doha Forum in March 2022 when he talked about the plight of the Muslim minority in Russian-occupied Crimea.He again focused on the Ukrainian Muslims in Crimea, seeking to connect his nation’s struggle to wider Islamic sensitivities. The Crimean Peninsula is the ancestral homeland of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic group of Sunni Muslims.

By describing Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression as being about fighting “occupation” and “colonisers” in pursuit of “justice”, Zelenskyy used language that sits well with Arabs and audiences across the Global South more broadly.