[somenameforme]

France is still being kicked out of African states. In recent times it's been Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. [1] There haven't been any wars over this yet, but France (as well as the US) was very much intimating that there would be. That was meant to intimidate the government and/or populations, but instead it just resulted in widespread demonstrations (against France) and people enlisting in the military en masse. So France waved their other flag and went home. It wasn't just troops and bases either. France was also exploiting these countries and extracting their mineral wealth (like uranium in Niger) while offering well below market rate royalties. I assume these 'agreements' have changed, but I haven't been following the exact events there lately.

I'm sure there's plenty of others as well. The tentacles of colonialism are getting scarcer, but are still very much there.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/france-pull-troops-out-niger-f...

[int_19h]

In case of Mali and Niger, it seems that the locals have simply traded French boots on their necks for Russian ones, so I doubt that things will get any better for them wrt foreign exploitation of their resources.

[somenameforme]

I see no reason to think this is the case. Time had a reasonable article with some relevant back history here. [1] But beyond this I'd also add that I think colonialism has been an abject failure. It's been a story of small-short term gains for massive long-term losses, the MBA mindset of geopolitics. As soon as colonies start to become successful, they seek their independence. So you just end up with expensive adversarial relationships with anything resembling successful colonies, while getting bankrupted by your unsuccessful colonies. Basically - the story of the rise and fall of the British Empire. It's not something anybody is looking to recreate.

[1] - https://time.com/6301177/niger-african-support-russia/

[int_19h]

It's very simplified back history, though. Lest we forget, those "socialist governments" that Soviets provided support to were themselves very oppressive in many cases, and not particularly socialist in most. And while Russian presence there today does enjoy popular support overall, the families of people who get summarily executed by Wagner might not be so enthusiastic.

As far as gains and losses, you're correct when looking purely at the economic aspect of it, but that's not all there is to it. Indeed, my fear is that the West is finding it very hard to understand (and believe in) what Russia is doing precisely because it is so focused on economic cost-benefit analysis, and ignores the ideological aspects, which dominate the Russian political elites today.

[somenameforme]

The point I'm making is that there's simply no evidence to suggest that Russia is interested in colonialism. It's neither in their ideological nor economic best interest - by contrast a strong and independent Africa that has good relations with them, absolutely is! Also, the US has not been in the least bit caught off guard by anything Russia has done. Here [1] is a fun cable dating back to 2008, describing in detail how NATO looking to take in Ukraine would likely lead to war.

---

"NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene."

---

That's just one paragraph. The whole cable is an easy read, interesting, and full of evidence. But what makes that cable fun is not only how clearly it emphasizes we knew exactly what would happen, but also who wrote it. It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

[wumeow]

Ukraine has flirted with NATO since it split from the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t until the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war that it began seriously pursuing membership. Now Finland and Sweden have joined, and whatever’s left of Ukraine after the war will probably join too. If Russia doesn’t want countries to join NATO, it should stop giving them reasons to.

> It was written by William J Burns - the current head of the CIA

When Burns joined the CIA in March 2021, Russia was already building up troops for the invasion. I’m not sure what, if anything, you’re insinuating here.

[somenameforme]

The annexation of Crimea didn't happen until the situation predicted by Burns played out exactly as expected. And the catalyst there was us backing a coup that overthrew a [democratically elected] Russian leaning President, sending the largely ethnic Russian regions (including Crimea and Donbas) into outright rebellion, starting the exact civil war Burns had predicted. Conveniently for furthering US interests in Ukraine, this predictable consequence also resulted in the disenfranchisement of a very large chunk of the entire Russian leaning voterbase in Ukraine, the normalization of groups like Azov, and so on. It's easy to see how such things could be alluring with a myopic analysis of the situation.

The importance of it being written by Burns is that there are a lot of cables written, often shooting in many different directions. But in this case, the intelligence on what would happen with Ukraine not only remained consistent, but the individuals writing it were and remained extremely high level players within the government. So the idea the US was, in any way, surprised by what happened can be quite safely discarded as false.

[racional]

The point I'm making is that there's simply no evidence to suggest that Russia is interested in colonialism.

A very strange thing to say, given that war against Ukraine is an extremely blatant attempt at re-colonization (with a heaping dose of full-tilt racist ethnic cleansing to boot).

Putin's designs in Africa are clearly different, and "colonialism" probably isn't the right conceptual model to apply there. But this insinuation you're making that he's on some kind of "anti-colonial" mission there (or that that he's lending the people in those countries a helping hand in any other way) is equally bizarre, an fundamentally quite naive.

[somenameforme]

Russia's motivations were spelled out plainly in the diplomatic cables, both in their own words and then in our analysis of them. Obviously it has nothing to do with colonialism. Similar for this nonsense about the Ukraine war being an ethic cleansing. The UN has put the total civilian death toll in Ukraine at 10,675 [1] in the more than 2 years of fighting. That number is a minimum, but it's not going to be orders of magnitude higher. The Ukraine War has had one of the lowest civilian casualty ratios of any significant scale war.

Russia's motivations in Africa obviously aren't anti-colonial or whatever. It's the same stuff that's going on with South Africa, Brazil, China, and so on. They're simply pivoting towards the 85% of the world, the 'global south' - a pivot that began many years ago, but which the conflict has accelerated due to strained relations with the 15%. The stronger and more independent the global south, the more beneficial and productive the pivot.

[1] - https://ukraine.un.org/en/264355-report-human-rights-situati... (page 10, note 38)