Dmytro Kouleba, the chief of Ukrainian diplomacy, told AFP that Kiev will be waging a “long-term” battle to “revive” its ties with Africa and weaken Moscow’s hold on the continent, which he claimed was based on “coercion, corruption, and fear.”
After years of neglect, Kiev has started a seduction operation in Africa in an effort to win its support against the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in February 2022.
“Many years have been lost, but we are going to push forward a Ukrainian-African renaissance, to revive these relations ,” Kouleba said in an interview with AFP on Wednesday. “This continent needs systematic and long-term work ,” added the minister, who has already made three tours in Africa since last fall.
A group of African heads of state, led by the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, also travelled to Ukraine in June.
The minister asserted that “a slow erosion of Russian positions in Africa is underway” if “most African countries” continue to show their “neutrality” in the face of the conflict. He named Liberia, Kenya, Ghana, the Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea as some of Kiev’s new allies on the continent.
“We don’t want to be another Russia. Our strategy is not to replace Russia, but to liberate Africa from Russian rule,” he said.
Mr. Kouleba claims that Moscow only has “two powerful working tools in Africa: propaganda and (the paramilitary group) Wagner” and that it utilises “coercion, corruption, and fear” to maintain the allegiance of African nations.
Through security services given by Wagner, mainly in Mali and the Central African Republic, Russia has been actively pursuing rapprochement with Africa for a number of years, positioning itself as a stronghold against Western “imperialism” and “neocolonialism.”
Kouleba also slams Moscow’s concerns about Africa’s food security as “lies” after it pulled out of a crucial deal that saw 33 million tonnes exported in one year of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, despite the Russian invasion.
“Africans have seen that all these stories of (Vladimir) Putin about how he cares about African countries are lies,” Kouleba said.
Moscow’s termination of this agreement in July stoked concerns about a spike in cereal prices, which would disproportionately harm the world’s poorest nations. The Russian president then announced that six African nations would receive free grain. “The people who pay the most (for the exit from Moscow) are the African consumer of bread and the Ukrainian farmer,” claimed Kouleba.