The latest flashpoint is in Chad, where the US has warned of a Wagner plot to kill the president as Moscow courts sympathisers inside the ruling elite
In Africa, the more forceful US approach aims partly to shore up the crumbling position of France, which in recent years has ceded ground to Russia in former colonies such as Mali and Central African Republic. Now, the Russians are looking to topple more French dominoes in central and western Africa, and the US is responding.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, Niger. Photograph: Boureima Hama/AFP via Getty Images “Africa has suffered enough from the burden of history,” Macky Sall, chair of the African Union, told the UN General Assembly in September. “It does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War.”Russian ties to Africa stretch back to the Soviet era, when Moscow backed sympathetic governments and independence movements. The ties have endured in recent years as Russia became the continent’s largest arms supplier.
The war in Ukraine did not blunt Russia’s push into Africa. US officials say Wagner has maintained between 3,500 and 4,500 personnel on the continent, even as the group also throws troops and prison conscripts into the “meat grinder” of Ukraine’s longest, most brutal battles.Russian minister for foreign affairs Sergei Lavrov and his Malian counterpart Abdoulaye Diop arrive to hold a joint press conference following their meeting in Moscow in May 2022.
Experts caution against over-estimating the impact of Russia’s African forays. The countries where Moscow operates are among the world’s poorest, and on the ground, its efforts often appear scattershot, poorly resourced and motivated by a desire to poke the West in the eye. Ultimately, Russia is unlikely to deliver on the grand security promises it has made to African countries, said Michelle Gavin, an Africa expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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