UKRAINE’S NEW AND LONG-AWAITED counteroffensive against the Russian invasion has made this a bad time to be a peacemaker.

Much of the world’s press decried the attempt to start talks, led by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa (photo-montaged, left, with warring presidents). The journalistic poohpoohing centered as much on who led the attempt as on its alleged untimeliness. It was judged inappropriate, coming just as the victim-nation has now started so valiantly (and in some small degree successfully) to strike back against the Putin empire.

Many Western commentators also tried to belittle the peace move as they highlighted its African origins. It was apparently counterintuitive for peacemaking to come out of a continent better known (at least in the media) for its own wars, better suited to being itself the target of peace efforts from the allegedly mature “International Community.”

Not to be put off, a clutch of African presidents under Ramaphosa’s chairmanship flew well over ten thousand miles for discussions with both Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. Ramaphosa had already been criticized for never condemning Russia’s invasion in the first place (rather like India’s leader Narendra Modi, currently visiting Washington) and for an overall closeness over the years to the Soviet Union, which has continued since the Iron Curtain fell and state capitalism replaced communism.

The press felt it had to fault Ramaphosa for, in particular, his navy’s recent joint military exercises conducted off South Africa’s eastern coastline in collaboration with both Chinese and Russian fleets. The latter fleet was led by the high-tech, stealth warship Admiral Gorshkov, named for a Soviet naval hero.

History matters here, as so often. Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, has maintained cordial relations with Moscow ever since its founding in the early 1900s as the continent’s first anti-colonial liberation movement. For a long time, indeed, Soviet Russia was one of the ANC’s few friends internationally – all through the bleak years, for instance, when the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, with the backing of President Ronald Reagan, dismissed the ANC as “a typical terrorist movement.”

But whatever the potential for agreement perhaps offered by an apparent Putin-Ramaphosa axis … the South African leader suffered a fate that was worse, I dare say, than merely getting a bad press internationally. He got roundedly slapped aside by both his main interlocutors.

Ukraine’s Zelensky said:

“To allow any negotiations with Russia now, when the occupier is on our land, means freezing the war, freezing the pain and suffering”

And the following day Putin reacted especially hard to the Africans’ core proposal that Moscow acknowledge Ukraine’s sovereignty. He instead demanded afresh that Ukraine recognize Russia’s own sovereignty, over both the Crimean peninsula, seized in 2014, and also the lands occupied by his forces this past year. In other words, a position that’s a non-starter for negotiations.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” say the Christians’ beatitudes, but more realistically I will refer to Professor Padraig O’Malley, the occasionally self-admitted ‘peaceaholic’ who in 1997 persuaded the ANC to host the contending parties of Northern Ireland’s long war, in a so-called jungle Indaba (a ‘meeting of minds’ in both Zulu and Xhosa languages) at a Western Cape wildlife reserve. The gathering that O’Malley engineered turned out to be “a groundbreaking moment in the Irish peace process,” according to Martin McGuinness of the IRA and Sinn Fein. O’Malley himself once told me, as we talked in his University of Massachusetts office, “We would-be peacemakers must never give up, even when the warmakers punch us in the face.”

That prolonged, tough Irish peace process brings me again to Ramaphosa.

PASSING ENTIRELY UNMENTIONED amid the negative coverage of Africa’s Kyiv-Moscow mission was an apparently forgotten element of Ramaphosa’s personal history. Or possibly it was never even known to begin with among the bloviators of the world’s press.

Ramaphosa is no stranger to ambitious and arduous peacemaking, having helped to entrench a hard-won cessation of hostilities between some bitter enemies in the so called ‘developed world.’ I mean his role in securing the long-lasting Northern Irish Peace Agreement of Good Friday, 1998. It has survived twenty-five years, though it’s under renewed strain now by political shenanigans in Belfast.

A quarter-century ago, Ramaphosa formed a partnership with Martti Ahtisaari (right), formerly Finland’s president, to perform some vital on-the-ground work that extended into the nitty-gritty of bombs, guns, flame-throwers and grenade-launchers. The two men together enjoyed the confidence and trust of the warring sides (coming in Ramaphosa’s case largely from the Indaba experience) and they could thus take on responsibility for verifying and authenticating the decommissioning of each force’s weaponry. The idea was to put the arms decisively “beyond use,” a phrase used in the negotiations chaired by former US Senate Leader George Mitchell.

After some cloak-and-dagger hotel-room meetings in first Paris and then Dublin, the two verifiers underwent a series of car journeys along rural Irish roads, to inspect caches of arms in farmhouses, barns and in one case an isolated potato cellar. The cellar was accessed by what Ramaphosa remembers as “a very rickety wooden ladder.” Both men are, shall we say, amply proportioned individuals. At each hidden site, they enumerated every weapon and secured them all with an unbreakable plastic seal, to be opened only with a key which they kept in custody. Thus was the Good Friday Agreement finally ratified on all sides.

Ramaphosa’s more recent effort at peace, for Ukraine, may well have floundered, but away from the blare of press coverage, the peaceaholics of this world will doubtless be trying quietly to prepare some future ground for talks, however unpromising it might currently appear.