The West has united against Putin’s war. Not Africa.

When Linda John Selepe, a 68-year-old South African veteran, first saw images of Russian aircraft flying over Ukraine, he was immediately taken back to a time when he, too, had lived with Soviet-era bomber jets roaring overhead. 

In the 1980s, barely out of his teens, Mr. Selepe took up arms in the struggle to overthrow South Africa’s white-minority government, spending years in bare-bones bush camps. There, he received training, weapons, and financial support from Moscow, which supported dozens of independence movements in Africa as part of their Cold War rivalry with the West. 

“The only way we could survive – the only way we did survive – was the Russian aircraft coming to bomb” enemy positions, Mr. Selepe says of his years as a guerrilla fighter operating from neighboring Angola, his voice