CAIRO – Russian President Vladimir V. Putin likes to portray himself as the leader of the emerging global movement against domination by the United States and its allies. On Sunday, his top diplomat took that message directly to Africa, hoping to turn hunger and social strife across the continent to Russia’s advantage.
He is likely to find a receptive audience.
Even before leaving for a four-country tour, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov made it clear that he would use the trip to blame the West for grain shortages related to the war in Ukraine that is ongoing. raised fears of famine in African countries and painted Russia as a staunch ally of the continent.
Before the trip, Russia had agreed to an agreement that would allow Ukraine to continue exporting Essential cereals have been blocked off at Black Sea ports due to fighting, a sign of Putin’s apparent anxiety over public opinion around the developing world.
The global food crisis is expected to be a prominent figure in Mr. Lavrov’s travels to Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo. But while the grain shortage was caused by the Russian invasion, the foreign minister said Moscow was not the problem.
“We know that African colleagues disapprove of the undisguised efforts of the United States and its European satellites to gain dominance and impose a unipolar world order on the international community,” he said. wrote in an article published in newspapers in the four countries he will visit.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in February, governments in Africa and in the Middle East have found themselves stuck in the middle.
Pressed by the West to condemn the invasion, these governments also sought to maintain access to Russian grain and other exports and to maintain friendly relations with Russia, in some cases. dating from the Soviet era. Seeing no benefit in alienating either side, some have tried simply not to take sides in the conflict.
For his part, the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has refused to condemn Moscow as strongly as the United States would have liked. And on Sunday, after meeting with Mr. Lavrov, Egypt’s Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, had warm words for his counterpart.
Egypt-Russia relations “are historic, characterized by friendship and branched in many political, economic and cultural fields,” Shoukry said at a press conference,
“We look forward to even closer cooperation based on mutual respect and mutual interest,” he said.
Lavrov said that Russian agricultural exporters have committed to meet their obligations and that the ministries of Russia and Egypt have agreed to continue cooperation on this matter, according to media reports. through Russia and Egypt.
“We have reiterated that Russian grain exporters are complying with their commitments, adding that Russia and Egypt have had a ‘common understanding of the situation,'” he said at a joint press conference with Mr. Shoukry. causes of the cereal crisis”.
Better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Western nations have also waged a coordinated campaign in the region, trying to keep countries from getting too close to Russia. Before Mr. Lavrov’s visit on Sunday, Western diplomats in Cairo lobbied behind the scenes in Egypt 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 starting Sunday, with plans to travel to Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia for talks. The same day, the US Embassy in Cairo reminded reporters in a news release that President Biden had pledged $50 million in aid to Egypt to help offset the rapid increase in the price of wheat and other crops. other staple food due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the West tries to program the opposite, including editorials and social media posts, have not garnered more public support than in the Middle East. Russian wrong information and propaganda found soil in a region where many Arabs have long harbored anti-American and anti-Western sentiments stemming from the US invasion of Iraq and Western support for Israel.
For months, the United States, Great Britain and the European Union have tried to turn the argument in their favor by placing responsibility for the price of bread skyrocketed and other basic foods lie right at Putin’s feet, roundly condemning Russia’s blocking of the flow of Ukrainian grain to the world via the Black Sea.
On Friday, Russia agreed to an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey allow Ukraine to export grain. However, the next morning, Russian Missiles docked at the port of Odesa, raising questions about whether the deal could fall apart.
Samantha Power, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, said in a video posted Saturday from Kenya, where she is traveling, that the Odesa attack is “just the latest sign of Vladimir Putin’s cold indifference to the costs of the war in Ukraine, a man-made war for no reason.”
For its part, Ukraine says the deal is still underway. Oksana Markarova, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States, told CBS “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Ukraine will do everything possible to “feed the whole world.” Ms. Markarova said that the attacks on Odesa demonstrate that Russia is operating in bad faith. “Our farmers are even planting and harvesting under the fire,” she said.
Wheat was a major reason Egypt could not afford to alienate either side; In the past, about 80% of its supply came from Ukraine and Russia. Since the start of the war, the country’s economy has faced pressures of soaring inflation, evaporating foreign investment and shrinking grain supplies.
Nearly 30 percent of Tourists of Egypt came from Russia before the war, and Russia is building a $26 billion nuclear power plant in Egypt. However, Egypt is also one of the top recipients of US foreign aid.
So Mr. el-Sisi tried balance relationships with Russia and the West. In March, Mr. el-Sisi phoned Putin to reaffirm Egypt’s commitment to cooperation after it voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning the invasion. And last month, he gave a speech at the St.Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia.
Elsewhere on the African continent, public opinion appeared to oscillate between support for Ukraine and sympathy for Russia’s justification of its aggression.
Although some African leaders have openly supported Russia, they are not Africa’s countries 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 free Ukraine’s trapped grain – but he also repeated Moscow’s argument that Western sanctions have exacerbated the food crisis, explicitly call to lift restrictions on Russian wheat and fertilizer exports.
Although the sanctions did not cover those items, shipping companies, insurance companies, banks and other businesses were reluctant to do business with Russia for fear of breaking the rules or damage their reputation.
In his post ahead of his trip to Africa, Lavrov praised African leaders for resisting Western pressure to join sanctions against Russia. “Such an independent path deserves deep respect,” he wrote.
Mr. Putin has traded heavily on the subject of Russia while leading a worldwide uprising against Western hegemony. Again, he has repeatedly described the Americans and their European allies as a “golden billion”. They live well, he said, at the expense of the rest of the world.
That argument is likely to resonate with many Arabs and Africans, who resent the West’s long history of meddling in their affairs and extracting their resources.
“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?” Mr. Putin spoke on Wednesday at a forum in Moscow. “It mainly got to its place by plundering other peoples of Asia and Africa.”
But Mr. Putin’s message was garbled because Ukraine has not been able to export grain by sea since the war began. And Russian officials have not shied away from using risk of starvation in developing countries as a bargaining chip.
“I have heard many times from different people: ‘Hunger is our last hope,'” the editor of Russia’s state television network RT, Margarita Simonyan, told Mr. Putin at a conference in St.Petersburg last month. “This means that once hunger sets in, this will wake them up. This is the time when they will lift the sanctions and will be friends with us, because they will understand that there is no way around it.”
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 African continent: the network of elites learned in the Soviet Union, the “long-term loyalty” of the groups it supports in the fight against segregation race in South Africa and the fact that 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.”
Vivian Yee report from Cairo, Anton Troianovski from Hamburg, Germany and Abdi Latif Dahirfrom Nairobi, Kenya. Nada Rashwan Contribution reports from Cairo and Eduardo Medina from New York.
