Russia is trying to increase its influence in the poor countries of Africa in order to actually open a second front there to confront the West. This is reported by the Financial Times.
The best way for the Kremlin to advance was in the Sahel region (a politically unstable semi-desert strip under the Sahara). In several countries fighting jihadist insurgencies, coups have installed military governments hostile to France and openly sympathetic to Moscow.
One of the factors for the success of Russians in African countries is a bad attitude towards France and frequent coups d’état.
It is about weakening Europe and opening up a front where Europe and France are perceived as fragile,” said a senior adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron.
Samuel Ramani of the think tank Rusi believes that Moscow has focused on a strip of countries from Mali to Sudan, where it wants to create a belt of coups that will provide them with influence.
Small, CAR and Burkina Faso have all failed in their attempts to counter the challenge of terrorism. “Wagner” appeared as a new game in the city – said the French official.
In particular, the Russian presence in the CAR includes about 1,500 masked paramilitaries from the Wagner Group, gold and diamond mining operations, and a small distillery. In the CAR, the Russian Federation has set up a command center and a training base about 80 km from Bangui.
The US Treasury alleges that Wagner controls “numerous” gold and diamond mines in the CAR and even denies access to government officials trying to check its mining operations. A group of UN experts in 2021 concluded that 95% of the gold mined in the CAR was exported illegally.
In addition, in Burkina Faso, the generals seized power for the second time in eight months – then, on the streets of the capital, Ouagadougou, demonstrators waved Russian flags. In Sudan, another volatile country, Moscow maintains close ties with Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the second person in the administration to come to power in a 2019 coup. According to the US Department of the Treasury, Russian companies operating in Sudan are profiting from illegal gold exports, the volume of which has increased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has also secured military access to Port Sudan, a strategic bottleneck on the Red Sea.
Source: Racurs
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