In speech after speech, world leaders dwelled on the topic consuming this year’s U.N. General Assembly meeting: Russia’s war in Ukraine. A few, like Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, prodded the world not to forget everything else. He, too, was quick to bring up the biggest military confrontation in Europe since World War II. But he wasn’t there to discuss the conflict itself, nor its disruption of food, fuel and fertilizer markets. “The ongoing war in Ukraine is making it more difficult,” Buhari lamented, “to tackle the perennial issues that feature each year in the deliberations of this assembly.” He went on to name a few: inequality, nuclear disarmament, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the more than 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who have been living in limbo for years in Bangladesh. In an environment where words are parsed, confrontations are calibrated and worry is acute that the war and its wider effects could worsen, no one dismissed the importance of the conflict. But comments such as Buhari’s quietly spoke to a certain unease, sometimes bordering on frustration, about the international community’s absorption in Ukraine. Those murmurs are audible enough that the United States’ U.N. ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made a point of previewing Washington’s plans to address climate change, food insecurity, health and other issues during the diplomatic community’s premier annual gathering. “Other countries have expressed a concern that as we focus on Ukraine, we are not paying attention to what is happening in other crises around the world,” she said, vowing that it wasn’t so. Still, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken complained at a Security Council meeting days later that Russia’s invasion is distracting the U.N. from working on other important matters. In many years at the assembly, there’s a hot spot or news development that takes up a lot of diplomatic oxygen. As former U.N. official Jan Egeland puts it, “the world manages to focus on one crisis at a time.” “But I cannot, in these many years as a humanitarian worker or a diplomat, remember any time when the focus was so strongly on one conflict only while the world was falling apart elsewhere,” Egeland, now secretary-general of an international aid group called the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a phone interview. Certainly, no one was surprised by the attention devoted to a conflict with Cold War echoes, oblique nuclear threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin, shelling that has endangered the continent’s largest atomic power plant, and far-reaching economic effects. The urgency only intensified during the weeklong meeting as Russia mobilized some of its military reserves. President Andrzej Duda of Poland — on Ukraine’s doorstep — stressed in his speech that “we mustn’t show any ‘war fatigue’” regarding the conflict. But he also noted that a recent trip to Africa left him pondering how the West has treated other conflicts. “Were we equally resolute during the tragedies of Syria, Libya, Yemen?” he asked himself, and the assembly. And didn’t the West return to “business as usual” after wars in Congo and the Horn of Africa? “While condemning the invasion of Ukraine,” Duda added, “do we give equal weight to fighting mercenaries who seek to destabilize the Sahel and threaten many other states in Africa?” He isn’t the only one asking. Over seven months of war, there have […]

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