Russia’s war against Ukraine… Africa is the front and the rear

Africa is a continent whose surface is swampy with great heat, covered with forests, deserts, herds of domestic and wild animals, and since ancient times it has been inhabited by wars between its different social components. In the depths of his land are boundless riches. Peoples who started in the world of industry and building power flocked to him. The African continent was a storehouse of human power, and some of its people were enslaved to the Americas to be machines in agriculture, industry, and domestic service.

When Europe began to step towards the Great Industrial Revolution, it moved towards the continent of wealth – Africa – and appeared on the European continent rushing towards the industrial age. The tendency of conflict between its countries appeared. From the year 1880, the great European horse riding towards Africa began. The German politician Bismarck saw that the nations of Europe might soon enter into a broad conflict over the great cause of the continent. He called for a conference of European states in order to peacefully divide the land of promised wealth, in order to avoid a conflict between the European powers rushing towards the great mine. In 1884, the European Conference on Africa was held, which was held several times until 1885. It was known as the Berlin Conference, and the conference included fourteen European countries.

The European colonial advance on the African continent began. After the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, between the communist East and the capitalist West, the continent entered an era of control of a different kind. African countries became independent from European countries in the 1960s, but a hot and cold international war was raging over the continent’s land. The communist Soviet Union supported liberation movements from European colonialism and the apartheid regime in South Africa, but after the collapse of the Soviet regime, the scale changed, and Western colonialism returned to the continent with almost total dominance over the continent’s wealth, and even its political decision , and a Western presence was established with military bases in many countries.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the West, led by the United States, monopolized political and military dominance in the world. China, which is rising economically and militarily, has created a soft and semi-silent foreign policy, while Russia has conformed to what has become an international reality that it does not accept, but has no ability to change. After the young Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, assumed the leadership of Russia, he began to prepare his military and political power to establish a new international reality that would limit the global dominance of the West.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is the first political round, by force of arms, to create a multi-headed global horizontal leadership, instead of a single central vertical leadership of the West led by the United States of America.

The theater of Russian military operations on Ukrainian territory is the front line of a huge world war. Ukraine does not face the Russian army alone, the whole of Europe and America are at war with Ukraine with the power of NATO, which includes the latest types of weapons, and unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia.

Russian military and political landings behind the lines

Russia has opened up fronts in the Baltics with an effective political movement among political and popular forces, who reject the rush of their countries to support the Western campaign against Russia. Russia has expanded its relations with European parties that sympathize with it and have reservations about blind subservience to the United States, particularly in Italy, France, Germany and Hungary.

The African continent is the weakest and strongest link in the international equation. The international race towards it has not stopped since the eighteenth century, although the legs, steps, methods and means have changed. Russia has not lost sight of the continent, as well as Western Europe. Today, other rising powers have moved towards the land of wealth, led by China, which has become the first economic presence in Africa. In 1917 and the previous years, the volume of Chinese trade with Africa increased seventeen times. In the same year, the volume of American trade with Africa amounted to 39 billion dollars, while the volume of Chinese trade reached 148 billion dollars. China opened the doors of its universities to African students and encouraged Chinese youth to emigrate to Africa and marry African women. Turkey is aggressively expanding its economic and political presence on the continent. France is reducing its military, political and economic presence on the continent in a manner unprecedented since it granted independence to the countries it occupied.

Today, the African continent is living in a global conflict with multiple sides, forces and methods, and that’s where Russia put its military, security and political power behind the lines, as the army says, and wanted it to be another Dunkirk. Russia has a strong ancient heritage on the continent. It has no colonial history, supported liberation movements and allied itself with what it considered progressive forces in the Soviet era. It allied itself with Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia and with Siad Barre in Somalia, before he turned to the West, and had a political presence in Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and the Democratic Congo. It provided weapons and military experts, thousands of officers studied at its military institutes and colleges, and it admitted hundreds of African students to the Patrice Lumumba Institute in Moscow.

France was the leader of the Western military, political and economic presence in Africa. The massacres that Rwanda witnessed during the French military presence in it were a violent shock for the entire continent, and an angry question arose: does the European West consider Africans as second-class human beings who do not deserve to be sacrificed for them? Before that, the same question was asked during the apartheid era in South Africa.

The storm that shook the West’s presence in Africa was the war against terrorist groups in the Sahel-Sahara region of West Africa.

Both Mali and Burkina Faso witnessed military coups, and the new leaders opened their countries’ doors to Russia. Today, Russia is militarily present in 14 African countries and has armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed armed branch of Russia. Today it is the ruler of the Central African Republic, and it is also present in Mozambique. Russia has a military presence in the Port Sudan region.

Russia’s new strategy in Africa was laid out by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Addis Ababa during his recent trip to a number of African countries. Lavrov said: There will be increased cooperation in the field of energy, infrastructure and information technology. Ethiopian army capabilities. In his speech, he attacked the policy of the United States of America and its allies, and said that he had informed his African friends about the events in Ukraine. It was agreed to establish a multipolar world.

African popular political sentiment interacts with and sympathizes with Russian political discourse in Ukraine for Ukraine’s sake.

The Horn of Africa is the sharp, explosive tip of a vast continent, where international powers gather with military bases piling up in the tiny nation of Djibouti, the armed head of the Horn. It is one of the smallest countries by area, but it is the largest barracks in the world. It has French, American, Japanese and Chinese military bases and a European base representing the joint forces of the European Union. Other countries are seeking to establish military bases in Ras al-Qarn, which is full of weapons.

Russia understands the strategic value of the Horn of Africa in its global struggle with the West, which supports Ukraine, and its presence in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan will be its striking ropes wrapped around the Horn of the vast continent.

Quoted from “Asharq Al-Awsat”