Ukraine war looms large over Vladimir Putin’s summit with African leaders

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African leaders will travel to St Petersburg this week for a high-level summit hosted by Vladimir Putin, showing that even Russia’s resurgence on the continent cannot hide the consequences of its war in Ukraine.

The first Russia-Africa summit in 2019 was a statement of the Kremlin’s ambitions to expand its overseas influence, as dozens of African leaders showcased weapons and nuclear technology.

The successor gathering, which begins on Thursday, marks a year and a half of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine. Moscow’s forces have stepped up bombardment of Ukrainian ports since pulling out of a UN-led grain deal, prompting some African leaders to worry about possible food riots at home.

Korir Sing’oi, principal secretary for foreign affairs in Kenya, which has been rocked by a wave of protests over rising prices, called Putin’s decision last week to abandon the accord that has facilitated the export of 33 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain a “stab in the back”. , , Which disproportionately affects countries in the Horn of Africa already affected by drought.

Kenyan President William Ruto, who has not confirmed whether he will travel to Russia, said of such meetings and the recent US-Africa summit: “Some people who invite us to these meetings tell us ‘if you don’t come, there will be consequences’.”

“So we are all forced to go to a meeting because of blackmail that has no meaningful outcome,” he said in May without specifying the source of the veiled threat. “This is not right.”

Putin downplayed Russia’s exit from the Black Sea Agreement and insisted that “instead of helping really needy countries, the West used the grain agreement for political blackmail”.

He is likely to use the summit to push his plans to export Russian grain to Africa and cut Ukraine out of the global market. This would involve gas-rich Qatar paying Russia to send grain to Turkey, which would then distribute it to poorer countries. But there is skepticism about the idea, which was first revealed in the Financial Times, particularly whether Doha and Ankara would want to get involved.

Putin has tried to take advantage of African leaders’ desire to restore grain supplies and dislike of Western sanctions as a way of garnering sympathy in the global South for Russia’s stance on Ukraine.

Evgenia Sleptsova, senior emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics, said the participating African leaders “will likely try to pressure Russia to return to the grain agreement”, while Moscow “will want to use the opportunity to try to extract bigger concessions from the West before renewing its participation in the initiative”.

Russia has made some inroads in Africa, where it has sought to play up its old nuclear and military might. But its effort to sell Rosatom nuclear know-how to the continent, for example, has led to a single power-plant deal with Egypt. South Africa abandoned plans for a fleet of Russian nuclear plants years ago.

Traditional Russian ties with the continent have also been eclipsed in the public eye by Moscow’s use of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as the Praetorian Guard for some of Africa’s most volatile regimes, from Mali to the Central African Republic, in exchange for mineral extraction.

Despite last month’s uprising in which the remnants of Wagner’s forces were concentrated in Belarus, Prigozhin told a Russia-affiliated Cameroon-based television station last week – indicating one of the Kremlin’s more successful influence campaigns on the continent – ​​that “there will be no reduction in our programs in Africa”.

According to South African officials, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will use his presence at the summit to advance the peace plan that he and three other African presidents presented during visits to Kiev and Moscow last month. The plan calls for not only free trade in the Black Sea but also the importance of territorial sovereignty.

After Putin agreed to skip next month’s BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Ramaphosa will also travel with something else on his mind as the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes. South Africa would have been technically obliged to arrest Putin upon his arrival.

Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said the moves by African countries ahead of the summit showed that “the price of working with Russia is rising”.

The impact of the ICC indictment and US pressure on African countries to oppose trade with Moscow, he said, “have created a lot of costs for Russia and will strengthen Africans’ negotiating position”.

Yet this does not mean that many African countries will soon follow the West in treating Russia like outright pariahs. South Africa, which Western officials see as evasive over Russia’s invasion, is one of those that has insisted on keeping diplomatic channels open.

“African states do not exercise influence over Moscow, much less Kiev,” said Priyal Singh, senior researcher at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies. Also, the continent’s leaders “cannot afford to be seen sitting on the sidelines.” , , They need to be seen as active international actors.”