CThis is one of the most spectacular geostrategic shifts of the past decade, and yet it is the one to which Westerners, preoccupied by Europe and Asia, have paid the least attention. In ten years, Russia has managed to establish itself, militarily and diplomatically, on the African continent, to the point of driving French and American forces out of part of the Sahel.
The three-part survey, published by The World from August 21, shows how this process, launched by Moscow in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, was thought out and organized by the Kremlin, which was able to take advantage of the Soviet legacy of the Cold War, French blindness and the American withdrawal following the fiasco of the Iraq War.
The Russian intervention in Ukraine was followed in 2015 by the sending of Russian troops and air force to Syria to save the Assad regime, which the United States had given up fighting. It was in Sudan in 2017, then in the Central African Republic, that Moscow began to implement its African strategy.
The effort continues from 2020 in the Sahel countries (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), shaken by a series of coups d'état, while Russia consolidates its hold on eastern Libya and enters Chad. This strategy is based on two essential instruments: influence campaigns that increase the postcolonial resentment of the elites and part of the African population against the West and, in the security domain, the mercenaries of the Wagner militia.
In twenty-four years of reign, Vladimir Putin has only visited the African continent three times – and always to South Africa – but he orchestrated Russia's return there, after a long absence due to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Strengthened by the links forged with the future African elites during the time of the USSR, which trained tens of thousands of sub-Saharan students, and playing on the solidarity of the former Soviet power with the liberation movements, the Russian president does not need to travel; the new African leaders regularly make the trip to Moscow or Sochi.
With open face
After the break-up between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, who disappeared in the “accident” of his plane on August 23, 2023, two months after having attempted a mutiny against the Kremlin, Moscow reorganized its military arm in Africa, replaced Wagner with a new organization, the Africa Corps, and assigned a deputy minister of defense to the exclusive management of security policy in Africa. Russia no longer subcontracts; it now acts openly.
At the same time, the French troops deployed in the Sahel since 2013, at the request of the Malian government of the time, were asked to leave by the new juntas in power; the American force installed in Niger, also driven out, pitifully retreated to Côte d'Ivoire.
Another lesson of Western blindness to the ambitions of Putin's Russia is that France has seriously underestimated the dynamics at work. African regimes under Moscow's influence believe they have regained their sovereignty. Devoid of any desire to aid economic development, Russia, for its part, maintains itself as Africa's leading arms supplier, reaps mining contracts there and establishes another front against the West.
Source: Lemonde
