It may not be on the news radar in the English-speaking world, but the turbulence sweeping parts of Africa is the biggest challenge to French influence on the continent in 60 years.
Civilian governments backed by Paris have been toppled in military coups and Russia has wasted little time in taking advantage. The Wagner group was infamous for doing Russia’s bidding across Africa, but now a new organisation loyal to Vladimir Putin is infiltrating the region’s coup belt.
ABC News Australia - Norman Hermant reports.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In late January a post on the Telegram social media site announced the deployment of 100 Russian soldiers to the West African country of Burkina Faso.
The organisation seems poised to assume most of the operations of the Wagner group, the Russian private military company that deployed mercenaries across Africa.
After Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed last year, just months after leading a failed mutiny in Russia, there were questions about the group’s operations in Africa.
But Ms Currie says the group never went away after Prigozhin and key Wagner leaders were killed in a plane crash that raised suspicion of Kremlin involvement.
Another video first shared on Russian social media depicts France as a giant rat and shows a home owner calling a Wagner mercenary to exterminate it.
Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have announced plans to withdraw from West Africa’s economic and political bloc, ECOWAS.
The original article contains 816 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Looks like our next step is clear. We send the CIA in to start fomenting the hate against Russia for oppressing the Africans.
Don’t think we’d necessarily need the CIA for that one, seems that the Russians have been doing the work for us.
We’ll see if the new group is as awful as Wagner was.
It’ll take some doing for Russia to reach the near-zero levels of credibility Europe has with Africans, but a prolonged military presence should help with that.
