Get free Africa updates
We will send you a myFT Daily Digest e-mail to round up the latest Africa news every morning.
African leaders travel to St. Petersburg this week for a high-level summit hosted by Vladimir Putin that reveals how even Russia’s resurgence on the continent cannot mask the fallout from its war in Ukraine.
The first Russia-Africa summit of 2019 was a statement of the Kremlin’s ambitions to increase its influence overseas, as dozens of African leaders attended displays of weapons and nuclear technology.
The successor assembly, which begins on Thursday, comes a year and a half into the full extent of Russia war in Ukraine. Moscow’s forces have stepped up bombing of Ukraine’s ports after it pulled out of a U.N.-led grain deal, leaving some African leaders worried at home about possible food riots.
Korir Sing’Oei, the foreign affairs chief of Kenya, which has been rocked by waves of protests over soaring prices, called Putin’s decision last week to pull out of a deal that allowed for the export of 33 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be a “stab in the back”. . . which disproportionately affects countries in the Horn of Africa that have already been affected by drought”.
Kenyan President William Ruto, who has not confirmed whether he will go to Russia, said of meetings like this and the recent US-Africa summit: “Some people who invite us to these meetings are telling us that if you don’t come, there will be consequences.
“So we are all forced to go to a meeting that has no meaningful outcome because of blackmail,” he said in May, without specifying the source of the veiled threat. “This is not right.
Putin downplayed Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea deal, insisting that “instead of helping countries in real need, the West used the grain deal for political blackmail”.
He is likely to use the summit to push his plan to export Russian grain to Africa and cut off Ukraine from the global market. This would mean gas-rich Qatar paying Russia to transport grain to Turkey, which would then distribute it to poorer countries. But there was skepticism about the idea first revealed in the Financial Timesespecially whether Doha and Ankara would like to get involved.
Putin has sought to use African leaders’ desire to restore grain supplies and distaste for Western sanctions as a way to gain sympathy for Russia’s stance on Ukraine in the Global South.
Evghenia Sleptsova, chief emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics, said the African leaders who attend are “likely to try to pressure Russia to return to the grain deal”, while Moscow will seek to “seize the opportunity to try to get more concessions from the West before resuming its participation in the initiative”.
Russia has made some inroads into Africa, where he tried to play on his old nuclear and military strengths. But his efforts to sell nuclear know-how to Rosatom the continent, for example, led to a single power plant deal with Egypt. South Africa abandoned plans for a fleet of Russian nuclear power plants years ago.
Conventional Russian ties to the continent have also been overshadowed in the public eye by Moscow’s use of them Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group as a praetorian guard for some of Africa’s most unstable regimes, from Mali to the Central African Republic, in exchange for mineral extraction.
Despite last month’s mutiny that deposited the remnants of Wagner’s forces in Belarus, Prigozhin told a Russia-linked Cameroon-based television station last week – a sign of one of the Kremlin’s more successful influence operations on the continent – that “there will be no curtailment of our programs in Africa”.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa South African officials say he will use his attendance at the summit to advance the peace plan he and three other African presidents laid out during visits to Kiev and Moscow last month. The plan demanded not only free trade in the Black Sea, but also the importance of territorial sovereignty.
Ramaphosa will also be traveling with one less thing on his mind Putin agreed not to attend at next month’s Brics meeting in Johannesburg, given that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for him for war crimes. South Africa would technically be obliged to arrest Putin upon his arrival.
Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said the maneuvering of African countries ahead of the summit showed that “the price of cooperation with Russia is rising.”
The impact of the ICC indictment and US pressure on African countries to resist doing business with Moscow “will create a lot of costs for Russia and will strengthen the negotiating position of Africans,” he added.
However, this does not mean that many African countries will soon follow the west and treat Russia as a total pariah. South Africa, seen by Western officials as ambivalent about the Russian invasion, is one of those that has insisted on keeping diplomatic lines open.
“African states have no influence over Moscow, much less Kiev,” said Priyal Singh, a senior researcher at the South African Institute for Security Studies. At the same time, the continent’s leaders “cannot afford to be seen as sitting on the sidelines . . . they need to be seen as proactive international actors”.
