A minute of silence for the painful position South Africa as tied itself into: a noble champion of Palestinian human rights, but strangely an endorser of Vladimir Putin’s bloody pummelling of Ukraine. When Russia’s carpet bombing of Ukraine got underway in February, South Africa remained silent as the entire African Union bravely went on the offensive, rebuking Putin for behaving like a “colonial bully”. On Russia, South Africa’s foreign policy has been shambolic. It has veered from silence to confusion to reverence to, now, half-hearted pleas for a ceasefire. When the Russian Army rained miss…