Multiple thousands of soldiers and civilians dead, a brutal war of attrition, and months of back channel international diplomacy that is only remarkable for what it has not accomplished: If those do not sound like ingredients for a world war, Serbia’s foreign minister will be happy to persuade you otherwise. 

In an interview with the Serbian newspaper Politika, the country’s top diplomat, Ivica Dačić, called the Ukrainian conflict “another world war,” adding that while the armed actions are taking place in a specific area, “almost the whole world is on one side or the other.”

The idea of putting a “World War III” label on the war in Ukraine as Russia’s mostly botched invasion approaches its one-year mark may be an academic exercise, but facts on the ground both in and far beyond Ukraine increasingly point to a protracted, difficult, and violent global game of chess. 

As a measure of the latter, the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights reported on Monday that more than 7,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia invaded last February, and that “most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects.” Ukraine says the actual number is much higher, running into the tens of thousands of killed. 

On the battlefield itself, it is likely that both the Ukrainian military and invading Russian forces have lost at least 50,000 men, with losses on the Russian side probably closer to the 100,000 mark. Against this bloody backdrop, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that recent events show the Kremlin is ratcheting up its efforts to steer its invasion of Ukraine into “a major conventional war.”

Such efforts appear to be happening at a rapid pace. On Tuesday, the Russian press reported that the country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, visited Russian troops in Ukraine, though where that inspection took place specifically was not clear. On the same day, President Erdogan was on the phone with the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin, to offer assistance with a Russian-Ukrainian prisoner exchange, while Secretary Blinken’s deputy, Wendy Sherman, and the deputy national security advisor, Jonathon Finer, were at Kyiv for talks with President Zelensky following meetings in Germany and Poland. 

The British foreign secretary, James Cleverly, was headed to Washington for a two-day visit that will include talks with Mr. Blinken. Ahead of his departure, Mr. Cleverly stated that “the UK, US and Canada always have each other’s backs when it counts, protecting the rules-based order for nearly 80 years,” adding: “Today we stand united against Putin’s illegal war.”

Yet both Germany’s reluctance to ramp up its arms provisions to Ukraine — despite prodding from both Warsaw and London — and Mr. Dačić’s stance on what he perceives to be a global war undercut a unified response. “In the UN there are initiatives to create a group of friends of one or the other,” he said, adding that “we avoid taking part in such, as being in one of the groups defined in this way puts you in the position of the enemy for the representatives of the other group.”

Serbia, which is not a member of the European Union, has been accused of siding with Russia in the war and has not joined the EU and Britain in sanctioning the Kremlin. “We consider it wrong to violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine, but the issue of joining the sanctions against Russia will depend on our national and state interests,” Mr. Dačić told Politika. Last week a state department counselor, Derek Chollet, visited Serbia in part to nudge the country toward imposing sanctions against Moscow. 

That is currently not happening. Hungary is cool on sanctions too, but in Serbia there is also the bubbling cauldron of Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in 1999 and which Belgrade has accused of plotting “terrorism against Serbs” in areas populated by ethnic Serbs. NATO has a presence of 3,700 troops in Kosovo, where tensions have been flaring since December. Tellingly, Mr. Dačić said that “Western countries have shown no understanding of Serbia’s territorial integrity.”

A longtime crucible for instability in Europe, the Balkans are not so much on the sidelines of the war in Ukraine but backstage, a fact well known to Presidents Biden and Putin. But in the tangled geography of what may or may not be the third world war, the peninsula is just one region that while not visible from the confines of Kyiv still looms large. 

There is also of course India, which along with Communist China is unapologetically buying up Russian oil, undeterred by Western pressure to not do so. Then there is South Africa, which next month will host Russian and Chinese warships in what Naval Technology reported will be an eight-day exercise conducted off the coast of the KwaZulu-Natal in the Indian Ocean. According to other reports, Operation Mosi (which means “smoke”) will last for 10 days. In any case, why is it taking place at all?

That is a complicated question, but it is worth recalling that Russian support of the African National Congress in its decades-long struggle against apartheid is not forgotten at Pretoria — where the ANC still governs. Coincidentally or not, earlier this month a Russian merchant ship docked at South Africa’s largest naval base, and may have offloaded a shipment of weapons.

Much of Moscow’s military strategy with respect to its aims in Ukraine is predicated on maintaining naval superiority in the Black Sea. From Mr. Putin’s vantage point, no naval drill, however far-flung, will go to waste. As the Russian strongman finds himself with new cheerleaders at his side, in various guises and hemispheres, it can be expected that the pressure in key global capitals to isolate Moscow further will build.