From the Black Sea to the Sahel (1)
There has been another hit by a Ukrainian sea-borne drone on a Russian ship near the port of Novorossirsk (i.e. following the first such attack which damaged a landing ship. The port, I failed to note yesterday, is close to the Kerch strait and the Kerch bridge. The Kerch bridge is still operating and traffic was stopped only briefly. The ship involved in this second instance, is a civilian tanker, although Ukraine claims that it was being used for military purposes, namely for the sending of oil to Syria where Russia is militarily supporting the Assad regime, at its request, against jihadism and other enemies of Syrian sovereignty (i.e. the USA and Turkey).
Some commentators speculate that the real target may have been the Kerch bridge and that the tanker got in the way. Either way, the consequences could be dire if, as it seems quite likely, the strike pushes insurance rates to an unsustainably high level, thus impacting trading routes across the entirety of the Black Sea. Another drone has been sighted in the Yalta resort area, but Russia has said there is no cause for concern.
In terms of damage, the impact of recent Ukrainian drones has been slight, but they have a psychological value to Ukraine and Ukraine may refine the methodology of such drones, just as Russia will certainly want to refine its defenses against them. There is also a speculative idea that drone attacks may lead Russia to redirect its forces and energy away from the battlefield. But Ukrainian drone attacks and their impacts are simply not of a scale, so far, where they can be said to have this kind of effect, even remotely. More likely, Russia’s air defense systems and its regular missile and drone strikes across Ukraine, appear to have had a significant deleterious impact on Ukrainian forces, including on Ukraine’s ability to effectively deploy Storm Shadow missiles about which, it seems, less has been heard in recent days.
Turning now to the matter of Niger, whose recent anti-western and pro-Russian coup presents a strange extension of the Ukraine conflict to the Global South. This is a country whose total population is over 27 million, but over a third of whom are living in extreme poverty. It is one of the poorest countries in the world. Agriculture accounts for 40% of its GDP, whereas uranium, which represents 70% of its exports, accounts for only 5% of GDP. As we saw yesterday, France has been purchasing Niger’s uranium at extremely low prices since the 1960s. In the past Niger has been regarded as pro-western. According to Freddie Ponton, interviewed this week on 21st Century News, Ibrahim Taore (the soldier behind the 2022 coup in Burkina Faso and now its leader) was quoted as noting, at the recent Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, the parodox of the simultaneous poverty of the Sahel countries and their great mineral and other wealth that has for so long been exploited by the imperial powers.
As for the coup of July 26 (involving arrests of oil, transportation and mining ministers and deposition of the president), led by a military junta, this is being treated as a national emergency by French President Macron who is alarmed by the threat to French supplies of uranium (Niger provides almost 30% of French uranium, less than I think I, and others, have been recently citing), for French civilian energy as well as for its nuclear weaponry, although there are sufficient stocks (200,000 tons) accumulated for the time being.
France has a permanent place on the UN Security Council because it is a nuclear power and gets to push the interests of the collective west on the rest of the world in that forum. Yet it is Niger that mainly provides it with the uranium that enables it to be a nuclear power in the first place. In fact, Niger exports more uranium to Europe than to Russia (the next most important source for Europe is Kazakhstan, and then Uzbekistan). Uranium, by the way, is one of the very few things that Russia produces that was not sanctioned following the Russian SMO in Ukraine.
Ponton asserts that the coup has the backing of the people of Niger who benefit not one whit from their country’s uranium riches. The situation is comparable with the British exploitation of Iranian oil at the time that Britrain conspired with the USA to overthrow the Mossadegh government in 1953 so as to rebuff modest Iranian attempts to get a slightly bigger share of the oil revenues.
The Niger coup was well planned. ECOWAS has addressed the crisis by issuing a statement that threatens military intervention against the coup government, and is requiring reinstatement of the former president if an invasion is to be prevented. Yet this is a Niger issue, one over which ECOWAS no authority. Similarly, the African Union has given the coup government an ultimatium of 15 days and is otherwise threatending to invade. The West African Central Bank is threatening has cancelled a $51 million bond issue for Niger in a supremely fast attempt to strangle liquid funds and the economy. The US is cutting $30 million in promised aid. The EU, which also provides a lot of assistance, will likely go the same way.
The US has over 1,000 troops in Niger, put there in 2007 during the Obama years. Are they really there to fight “terrorism",” of a kind that the west supported in Syria, or are they there to advance imperial interests?
The US presence in Africa has been disastrous, adding to the very instability that it claims to address, even as Africa’s population, natural resources and economic importance rapidly increase (with Africa, if it were to be considered the equivalent of a single nation, possibly becoming the world’s greatest economy in the 2060s, according to UN projections). All G7/G20 countries are drawn to involvement with it,since Africa promises them a fresh era of neo-colonialism.
Compare the west’s response to the coup in Niger in 2023 to the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014!
There is a lot of pro-Russian sentiment in Niger and in the Sahel generally. Wagner is well entrenched in neighboring Mali, where its performance against jihadists appears somewhat more effective than that of the French. The impact of the negligence of French mining companies has created perilous environmental and health problems, including radum gas and its vast spread by the strong winds of the Sahara. Swedish and British companies are also implicated. Without an adequate engineering response, this problem threatens to endure for a thousand years, and provides a platform for continuing imperial domination and Niger’s colonial dependence.
Mali and Guinea have taken a strong stand against possible ECOWAS intervention, along with Burkina Faso. Algeria is also rumored to be likely to react negatively to such an intervention. These countries describe Niger’s problems as falling within the sovereign domain only of Niger. They have said that they will construe an intervention as a declaration of war.
The deposed president has invited France to intervene. France is considering air strikes, but the logistics are delicate, the French army is not as significant as it once was, and the people of France may be distinctly unenthusiastic about a return to direct colonial war. France and the USA may look to Nigeria as their proxy at the head of an ECOWAS force. This could have a destabilizing impact on Nigeria whose internal affairs are fragile at the very best of times and where any impulse to more intensive jihadist violence domestically is the very last thing that it needs but which an intervention in the Sahel could provoke. The big question to my mind is whether Russia will feel it is obliged to intervene and, if it does, what the consequences might be for its ability to sustain operations in Ukraine.
There is some speculation as to whether the US and France, who are both present in Niger (Russia is not, Wagner is not), may have organized the coup themselves in order to create another crisis in west-Russia relations which the collective west may consider it can win. This is the kind of game Britain played in Central Asia in the late nineteenth century when it thought it was fighting a sophisticated chess game against Russia (Russia doesn’t seem to have been aware of this). In this instance, the speculation is implausible, given the very real possibility of yet another costly debacle for the collective west.
Talking of debacles: back to Ukraine and the Ukrainian failing UCO. NBC says that Kiev and its supporters fear they are losing “control of the narrative”. I think they have lost a lot more than that, including 200,000+ lives. It is the message of real failure that terrifies the west so much more than a “narrative” of failure. Territorially, Ukraine has possibly gained a hundred kilometers during the UCO, mostly empty fields; Russia likely has gained rather more. Ukraine has not fully captured Staromaiorsk. Ukraine has suffered setbacks around Kleshchiivka (still under Russian/Chechnyan control), and elsewhere around Bakhmut, where Ukraine’s focus has been on the railways. Ukraine has failed to push any advantage it ever had in the Robotyne area. This despite its use of cluster munitions against Russian positions (cluster munitions are not especially effective against fortified positions). If Russia decides to deploy such weapons these will likely have a devasting impact on the kinds of light infantry assaults on which Ukraine mainly depends. Russia appears to have the overall advantage in the north (Lyman, Kreminna, Svatove, Kupyansk).
Some western media sources say that they expect - or are advocating for - a relaunch of the UCO in the fall or winter, as previously reported. Given Russian claims that 43,000 Ukrainian men have been killed since the beginning of the UCO, a significant upgrade from previous assessments, one wonders if there could possibly still be an appetite for mass suicide on this scale.
There have been recent disclosures concerning the peace agreement that was nearly reached in the negotiations of March 2022, before Boris Johnson effectively instructed Zelenskiy to abandon the path of peace in return for a western commitment to provide Ukraine with all the arms that they would need. At a meeting with African leaders, Putin said that Russia withdrew its army from Kyiv last year because it was "asked to do so to create conditions" for signing a peace treaty. In other words, Russia now says that the reason they withdrew their forces from around Kiev was because they were close to an agreement, and that Kiev had asked them to withdraw their troops.
Had Russia been taken in, again (!) as it now appears that it was over its presumption of western sincerity in the matter of the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements and for the two or more decades that NATO expanded eastwards following US assurances to Gorbachev that it wouldn’t? This history of constant western bad faith will make any kind of peace settlement extremely challenging, for quite some time.
Russia has allowed a softening of the ruble which is in part intended, says Mercouris in his broadcast today - and is also reported by Bloomberg - is intended to push up the ruble value of oil and gas revenues which are now recovering as a result of rising prices (boosted by cuts in Russian production). Revenues are now exceeding the budget plan. If there is big take-off in energy prices before the end of the year, the budget might come close to balance. Claims that a third of the Russian budget is being spent on military expenditure are probably exaggerated and in any case whatever is spent is only around 3% of GDP which is itself growing (above 2% is anticipated by Russia; the IMF recently forecase 1.5%). In terms of 2022 World Bank GDP/PPP metrics (which look at what money actually buys within countries), Russia is now the fifth largest economy of the world, a fraction below Japan and ahead of Germany. This makes the Russian economy the biggest ibn Europe. Russia and Germany have been neck and neck for some years.But Germany’s economy, like that of some other European economies, this year is stagnant and may even be contracting and deindustrializing, while Russia is showing strong expansion of its manufacturing and industrial sector where in some places it has recently experienced double digit expansion. The Russian economy is in any case much bigger than Germany’s on any single measure even if it has not been as efficient as Germany’s has been in the past. Russia can produce anything that anybody else can and can do more of them simultaneously, and it can do this because it has stronger resources. By contrast, the USA can keep growing, but only by increasing its deficit to ever more unsustainable levels.