President Vladimir V. Putin identifies himself as the leader of a global movement that has emerged against domination by the United States and its allies. On Sunday, his top diplomat took that message directly to Africa, hoping to turn famine and social conflict across the continent to Russia’s advantage.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov has made it clear that he will use the trip to try to blame the West for food shortages in African countries and considers Russia a staunch ally of the continent.
“We know that our African colleagues do not endorse the undisguised efforts of the United States and its European satellites to gain dominance and impose a unipolar world order on the community,” Lavrov said. international. wrote in an article published in newspapers in the four countries he will visit: Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo.
Governments in Africa and the Middle East have been entangled in relations between Russia and the West since the start of the Ukraine war, facing Western pressure to express disapproval of the invasion while finding ways to maintain access to Russian grain and other exports.
Western allies made a concerted effort to prevent them from getting too close to Russia, applying diplomatic pressure to persuade several Arab countries, including Egypt, to vote in favor of the UN resolution. condemned the invasion of Ukraine in March. (While the Republic of the Congo voted for it, Uganda abstained and Ethiopia did not participate.)
Before Mr. Lavrov’s visit, Western diplomats in Cairo lobbied behind Egypt’s back not to give the Russian minister an overly warm welcome.
The US special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Mike Hammer, will also visit the region on Sunday, traveling to Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia for talks.
But Western efforts to counter the program, including editorials and social media posts, have failed to garner more public support than in the Middle East. Russian disinformation and propaganda have found fertile ground in a region where many Arabs have long harbored anti-American and anti-Western sentiments stemming from the US invasion of Iraq and the Western support for Israel.
For months, the United States, Britain and the European Union have condemned Russia for blocking the flow of Ukrainian grain to the world via the Black Sea, placing responsibility for the global food shortage at Putin’s feet. .
On Friday, Russia agreed to an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey allow Ukraine to export grain, underscoring Putin’s apparent concern for public opinion in the developing world. However, the next morning, Russian missiles hit the port of Odesaraises questions about Moscow’s intentions to abide by the agreement.
In a Sunday interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, said her country would “do everything to make and complete the part of the deal.” ours” and “feed the world”.
However, she said that the airstrikes in Odesa showed that Russia was operating in bad faith.,
“Our farmers are even planting and harvesting under the fire,” Ms. Markarova said.
Public opinion in African countries appeared to oscillate between support for Ukraine and sympathy for Russia’s justification of its aggression.
While some African leaders openly support Russia, no African country has joined the US and European sanctions against Moscow.
That balancing act became apparent last month when the head of the African Union, President Macky Sall of Senegal, Meet Mr. Putin. Mr. Sall begged Putin to release Ukrainian grain but he also repeated Moscow’s argument that Western sanctions have made the food crisis worse. clear called for the lifting of restrictions on Russian wheat and fertilizer exports.
Although the sanctions did not actually apply to those items, shipping companies, insurance companies, banks and other businesses were reluctant to do business with Russia for fear of violating the law. break the rules or damage their reputation.
In his article, Lavrov praised African leaders for resisting Western pressure to join sanctions against Russia. “Such an independent path deserves deep respect,” he wrote.
For Mr. Putin, the idea that Russia is leading a worldwide uprising against Western hegemony has become central to his message to global public opinion amid the war. He has repeatedly described the population of the United States and its allies as a “golden trillion” living well at the expense of all others.
“Why should this golden billion, which is only a part of the global population, dominate others and enforce codes of conduct based on the illusion of exceptionalism?” he said Wednesday at a forum in Moscow. “It mainly got to its place by plundering other peoples in Asia and Africa.”
But Mr. Putin’s message has been complicated by the fact that Ukraine has not been able to export grain by sea since the beginning of the war and Russian officials have not shied away from using it. risk of starvation in developing countries as a bargaining chip.
Murithi Mutiga, Africa program director of the International Crisis Group, said Russia has some advantages as it seeks to win hearts and minds on the continent: the elite network learned in the Soviet Union, the “long-term loyalty” of the groups it supports in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and in fact it supplies weapons to many African governments.
“Moscow will be disappointed if they expect more support from African governments,” Mr. Mutiga said. “The overarching instinct among the authorities on the continent is to not align and stay away from confrontation between Russia and the West.”
