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Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg.
Putin hosts Africa summit
Vladimir Putin welcomed a number of African leaders to his hometown of St. Petersburg on Thursday for the second “Russia-Africa” summit.
In the shadow of the Ukraine war, it’s a more modest affair than the first one in 2019. Forty-three African heads of state made the trip then, but this time the Kremlin only expected 17 to show. While most African states have avoided picking sides in the Ukraine war – an inscrutable, faraway ethnic conflict from their perspective – very few have openly supported Moscow.
Russia is trying to style itself as a better friend to Africa than the old colonial powers of the “West,” but the summit opened against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s decision last week to pull out of the Ukraine grain deal – which had allowed some 33 million tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported to markets across the Global South.
The collapse of the deal immediately caused global wheat prices to rise at least 12% on major exchanges, raising concerns about food security, particularly in East Africa. To assuage those fears, Putin promised Thursday to send up to 50,000 tons of free grain to six especially friendly African countries: Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Eritrea.
Overall, Russia has sought to be a bigger player in Africa recently. Although its trade with the continent is more than 20 times smaller than China’s or the EU’s, the Kremlin is the leading arms exporter to Africa, and it provides security services to a number of local governments in exchange for Russian access to lucrative mineral resources.
The flags of Ukraine and Russia surrounded by ears of grain and label with crossed-out inscription "Deal."
Hungry countries vs. Russia
Ukrainian and Western leaders aren’t the only ones criticizing Russia’s decision to suspend its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a deal brokered by the UN and Turkey that allows Ukraine to ship grain across the Black Sea to the rest of the world. On Tuesday, a senior official in Kenya’s foreign ministry tweeted that Russia’s decision to exit the Black Sea Grain Initiative is a “stab on the back” (sic) with rising global food prices, one that “disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought."
That’s not a good sign for a Russian government that’s worked hard in recent months to persuade developing countries that the Kremlin cares more about their well-being than Americans and Europeans do. Russia has insisted that Ukraine’s grain has gone mainly to rich countries, but Ukraine has provided Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen with 625,000 tons of emergency food supplies over the past year as part of the Black Sea agreement, according to the UN.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Russia’s Vladimir Putin wants to return to the deal, as Russia did after a brief suspension last November. More criticism from poorer countries might speed up that reversal.The Graphic Truth: Russia vs. US trade ties in Africa
On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the UN General Assembly last week held a vote calling on Russian troops to leave Ukrainian territory. Those who opposed the resolution included the usual suspects that have aligned themselves closely with the Kremlin like Syria and Belarus, as well as Eritrea and Mali, which have close links to the Russian military.
Perhaps more interesting, however, is a look at those countries that abstained in a bid to reinforce their neutrality. Crucially, most of last week’s abstentions came from African states, which can be seen as a reflection of Russia’s growing political and economic clout in the region. But a look at bilateral trade relations between these African nations with Russia and the US, separately, shows that in most cases, two-way trade in goods with the US is way more lucrative.
Indeed, this suggests that Russia’s political leverage across the continent is multifarious. It comes from Russia’s vast reserves of oil, wheat and fertilizer — as well as its position in the global weapons trade, accounting for around half of all arms exports to Africa. We take a look at two-way trade between African states that abstained from the recent UN vote with the US and Russia, respectively.