Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine: What Does It Mean For Africa?

Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine: What Does It Mean For Africa?

By Yusuf Bangura

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks a decisive end to the post-Cold War security regime that governed the strained but stable relations between the West and Russia and guaranteed the independence of East European countries and former Soviet republics in the last three decades.

The invasion threatens the security of small nations and reinforces the illiberal turn in world politics by challenging the body of rights and democratic norms that gained ascendancy in the 1990s. African opinion and policy makers should understand what this portends for the continent.

Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism was messy—its economy contracted by about 40 per cent after a shock therapy of price liberalisation and privatisation; inflation skyrocketed, the ruble plummeted, and shortages of basic food items became the norm. While the employment data did not show any mass layoffs, about a quarter of the workforce was on unpaid or low-paid leave.

A third of the population fell into poverty and the social protections developed in the Soviet era proved insufficient for maintaining basic wellbeing. Boris Yeltsin, the first post-communist president, sought and Russia was granted membership of the IMF in 1992 and obtained a series of loans with tough conditionalities that did not improve the country’s economy (Gould-Davies and Woods, 1999; Crotty, J. 2020). Indeed, former Russian foreign minister and prime minister, Yegeny Primakov, believes that Russia’s losses under the IMF were twice as large as those suffered during World War Two (Arkangelskaya and Shubin, 2013).

Many Russians saw the IMF loan agreements as an attack on Russia’s sovereignty (Gould-Davies and Woods, 1999) and an attempt to turn Russia into a vassal state of the West.

Indeed, the loss of the Soviet republics, the deep economic recession and dependence on Western institutions for finance profoundly weakened Russia’s status as a global power and provoked a conservative and neo-nationalist turn in domestic politics. Russians yearned for a strong leader that would reverse the decline and restore the country’s position in the comity of nations.

After winning several fairly credible elections and stabilising the economy with the help of soaring oil and gas prices, Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB official, fit the bill of a new messiah. When Putin assumed power in 2000, Russia’s political system, though fragile, could still be described as an electoral democracy as relatively free and competitive elections were regularly held.

However, within a few years of his rule, Putin reigned in independent political organisations, controlled national television stations and other media, weakened the power of the oligarchs that had been empowered by fire sales of state assets, and concentrated power in the presidency (McFaul, 2021). Supreme political authority provided the basis for challenging Western hegemony and reclaiming former Soviet lands.

Ever since he came to power in 2000, Putin has been obsessed with recreating the boundaries of the Soviet Union as Russian territory. In 2005, he told the world that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and a “genuine tragedy” for the Russian people as “tens of millions” of Russians found themselves outside of Russian territory (BBC, 2005).

His strategic view of the world is a throwback to the Concert of Europe of the 19th century in which the great powers had vested interests and spheres of influence, intervened in the internal affairs of small states and acted collectively to maintain a balance of power or security in Europe. Such a system is antithetical to the current multilateral norms and arrangements that seek to curb unilateralist behaviour by states.

The refusal of the US and its Western allies to not only dismantle NATO but expand it to include former Soviet republics was a strategic blunder of enormous proportions, especially as Putin wanted Russia to join the alliance but was told he had to apply like any state seeking membership (Rankin, 2021).

Hubris or triumphalism clouded Western strategic policy making. Many bought the dubious and self-serving idea of ‘the end of history’–that markets and democracy will now determine how states are governed, and the US will be the only superpower and will do as it pleases in policing the world.

This posture fuelled Putin’s suspicion that the West still regarded Russia as an enemy and was not serious about world peace. In the logic of realpolitik and national security, the borders of states, especially those of great powers, should be free of antagonistic military forces. It is highly unlikely that Estonia and Latvia, which share a common border with Russia, would have been allowed to join NATO if Russia had regained its confidence and was governed by a resolute and calculating leader like Putin. Matters were not helped when NATO signalled that it would consider Ukraine’s membership of the alliance.

There are two key planks in Putin’s strategy to revive Russia’s power. The first is his challenge of liberal values and the rules-based multilateral system. It must be stressed that the attack on liberalism is not just a Russian problem. The US and its allies ignored UN rules and procedures in 2003 by invading Iraq under the false pretence of looking for weapons of mass destruction, and there have been countless other US interventions in foreign countries that clearly violated the rules-based international order, including the use of lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Arab countries.

In his United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (2020), David Vine observes that the US “has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since its independence”.

Liberal values have also eroded in the US where there was an attempt in January 2021 to prevent a transfer of power to the winner of the presidential election; and laws are being passed in Republican-controlled state legislatures to limit black participation in the electoral process and overturn election results.

Putin’s anti-liberalism is, however, visceral or an article of faith and serves as an instrument for resurrecting Russian power. In this regard, Russia has emerged as a leading actor in disinformation, cyberattacks, and tampering with the electoral processes of Western and other democracies. Russia’s hacking of Hilary Clinton’s and the Democratic National Committee’s emails and collusion with Wikipedia to influence the 2018 elections is instructive. It is clear from Putin’s pronouncements that he is unhappy with the post-Cold war security arrangements and the global rules-based liberal order, which he believes, shackle his quest for global power.

The second plank of Putin’s strategy is to claw back lost territories along Russia’s border. The vehicle for realising this strategy is the 25 million ethnic Russians residing in the new ex-Soviet countries. The creation of the Soviet Union in 1917 was accompanied by Russification of non-Russian republics through a process that involved deportation of large numbers of disloyal individuals from indigenous populations and encouraging Russians to migrate and fill gaps in labour markets and public administrations.

One of the most glaring examples of Russification was the displacement of the German population in Kaliningrad (which does not even share a border with Russia but is wedged between Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea) and massive migration of Russians into the region after Germany’s defeat in the second world war. Joseph Stalin occupied, demanded and was given the right to annex Konigsberg (the previous name of Kaliningrad) by the Allied Powers as compensation for the mass suffering Russians incurred from Nazi Germany.

Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, supported the expulsion (ethnic cleansing) of Germans from Konigsberg. In his words, “expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble” (Sukhankin, 2018, p. 41).

In 1945, there were only 5,000 Russians and more than 100,000 Germans in Konigsberg; by 1948 about 400,000 Soviets had moved into the region. There are now only 1,600 Germans or about 0.4% of the population; Russians currently account for 87% of the population (Wikipedia (a) ).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had the largest number of ethnic Russians (about 8,300,000 or 17.2% of the population)), followed by Kazakhstan (3,600,000 or 20.2% of the population), Belarus (785,000) and Uzbekistan (750,000). However, Latvia (487,250 or 25.2% of the population) and Estonia (322,700 or 24.2%) have higher percentages of ethnic Russians than all other countries (Wikipedia (b) ). Relations between ethnic Russians and host nations are often tense as the latter seek to undo historical injustices.

I observed in 2004 the deep animosity between Latvians and ethnic Russians when I organised an UNRISD conference in Riga, the capital, that discussed the findings of our research project on ‘Ethnic Inequalities and Governance of the Public Sector’. The current Latvian deputy prime minister and defence minister, Artis Pabriks, who was a researcher at the time, conducted the Latvian study.

Memories of the 60,000 or more Latvians deported to Siberia by Soviet leaders just after the second world war were still fresh among Latvians, who also disliked the fact that Russians constituted the majority population in their capital city. Russians on the other hand complained about language laws and tough citizenship rules that made it difficult for Russians to obtain citizenship under the new government.

Putin has used the agitation of ethnic Russians for equal treatment as a basis for invading the new territories. The forerunner to the invasion of Ukraine was Russia’s intervention in the conflict in 2008 in Abhkazia and South Ossetia in Georgia in which Russia supported and later recognised the two breakaway territories from Georgia. Despite the very small number of ethnic Russians in those territories, residents there now carry Russian passports.

The big prize is Ukraine, which Putin regards as a spiritual and cultural home for Russians and which, as we have seen, hosts the largest number of Russia’s diaspora. The pattern for annexation is clear: ethnic Russians complain about discrimination and declare independence in their localities, the Russian army is sent in to defend them, the Russian parliament recognises the breakaway territories, and Putin formalises the process by incorporating the territories into Russia. The popular uprising in 2014 against the Ukrainean president Viktor Yanukovych, who was critical of Ukraine’s application to join the EU, his removal from office and and subsequent exile to Moscow may have been a turning point for Putin.

The first invasion of Ukraine was in Crimea in 2014 where ethnic Russians account for 65% of the population. The failure of the Western powers to draw a line on Crimea emboldened Putin to mount a second invasion of the country. Again, as in the first invasion, ethnic Russians complain about maltreatment and seize Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region where they constitute a majority, the Russian military renders support, Russia’s parliament recognises their autonomy and Putin sends in the military for a full invasion, which, this time, may involve the annexation of the entire country.

Russia’s strategy for the countries bordering its southern border, which are less antagonistic, involves the creation of a regional alliance (the Collective Security Treaty Organisation) of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and turning these countries into puppet states.

This allowed Russia to send troops to oil-rich Kazakhstan in January 2022 to put down anti-government protests. The other non-Soviet country on Russia’s southern border, Mongolia, relies on Russia to counter Chinese threats to its territory.

The two plank strategy of disdain for the liberal rules-based world order and annexation of ex-Soviet republics is underpinned by a policy of reducing Russia’s economic dependence on the West in order to be able to withstand sanctions. The Economist (2022) reckons that Russia has reduced its debt to just 20% of GDP, built formidable reserves of USD620 billion and created a “fortress economy”. The extent to which such measures will insulate the Russian economy and appetite of its nomeklatura and oligarchs for Western goods and services from the current raft of Western sanctions remains to be seen.

Implications for Africa

Russia’s mission to upend the liberal rules-based multilateral order suggests lack of confidence in its ability to use those rules to catch up with the West. Playing rogue is the weapon of great powers in decline. In this regard, Russia’s behaviour contrasts sharply with China’s, a rising economic and technological powerhouse, which seeks to use—not disrupt–the existing global arrangements to challenge Western hegemony and attain its goal of super power status. Russia is not even among the top 10 largest economies in the world; its GDP of USD1.4 trillion is dwarfed by those of the US (about USD 20 billion) and China (USD 14 billion).

Russia’s GDP equals that of Brazil’s but lags behind India’s and even the Republic of Korea, with a population of only 50 million. Despite a few pockets of excellence and an educated workforce, Russia is also outmatched in the technological field; it spends just 1 per cent of its GDP on research and development; its corporations conduct little or no research and the country as a whole trails China, the US, Japan, Korea, Germany and India in patent applications. Its technological strength is in near-space exploration, rocket engines and military hardware; however, research suggests that there have been hardly any spillovers from such sectors into the civil sphere (Sanghi and Yusuf, 2018).

While Russia is an economic dwarf, it ranks second to the US in the global firepower index or military capability (Martin Armstrong, 2022) and has the largest number of nuclear warheads in the world (6,257 to the US’s 5,500 and China’s 350—World Population Review, 2022).

This asymmetry between military power and economic and technological prowess may explain Putin’s infatuation with military might and willingness to use it to assert Russia’s status as a global power. The wide-ranging sanctions recently imposed on Russia suggest that the West is willing to stand up to Russia by isolating it from vital areas of global finance, trade, investment, technology, entertainment and travel. The scale of the sanctions is unprecedented. We may well be witnessing the return of the iron curtain, which may plunge Europe into protracted instability as Russia fights back to break free from isolation.

It is highly unlikely now that Ukraine will be admitted into NATO. However, the invasion has given NATO a new lease of life and produced an outcome that Putin wanted to prevent: NATO troops and potential instability on Russia’s western border. Neutral Western countries like Sweden, Finland, Ireland and even Switzerland may abandon their longstanding policy of neutrality and seek NATO membership for protection. Remarkably, the decision of Sweden and Switzerland to fully participate in the Western sanctions makes them vulnerable to Russian retaliation if they remain outside of the military alliance.

The doctrine of spheres of influence undermines the security of small nations

The invasion and unfolding geopolitical crisis have serious implications for Africa. Three stand out in bold relief. The first is the danger of reinstitutionalising the doctrine of spheres of influence in the governance of the world system. Putin regards the territories of the former Soviet republics as “historical Russian land”, which suggests that Russia has the right to take them back or intervene in them to get the leaders of those countries to submit to Russian demands. Putin’s address to the world on the day of the invasion is telling.

In that long and rambling speech, he asserted that “The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have noted is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape” (Address by the President of the Russian Federation, 24 February 2022). This statement suggests that Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan belong to, and will always be contested by, Russia.

Part of Putin’s problem of seeing ex-Soviet republics as Russian territory is that the Russian empire was the only empire in Europe that survived the First World War. The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German empires all collapsed in 1918 and a host of new nations were born. The Russian empire was simply transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. However, the fact that the ex-Soviet republics have only enjoyed three decades of independence doesn’t mean they should lose it against their will.

Big powers have historically carved out areas that they regard as spheres of influence. The Monroe doctrine, for instance, informed the foreign policy of the US for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Under this doctrine, the US viewed efforts by European powers to influence or control countries in the Americas as a threat to US security. In exchange, the US agreed to not interfere in the affairs of Europe and its colonies. When, in 1962, Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet leader, decided to station nuclear weapons on Cuban soil, just 90 miles off the coast of the US, John Kennedy saw it as an act of war and threatened to take them out by blockading Cuba. Khruschev caved and Kennedy agreed to not invade Cuba.

As imperial powers, the foreign policies of France, the UK and Portugal have also been driven by notions of spheres of influence. Britain struggled to maintain control of its ex-colonies after it agreed to give them independence; it created the Sterling Area and Commonwealth system to defend the waning international role of the pound sterling.

Under this system, it tried to compel the newly independent countries to maintain their reserves in the UK treasury, tie their currencies to sterling and pursue extremely conservative fiscal policies (spending only what they earn as foreign exchange) in exchange for the UK directing its investments, trade and aid flows towards them (Bangura, 1983). And through the Franc zone, France continues to exercise considerable control over the monetary policies of the Francophone African countries and regards those countries as part of its sphere of influence. It intervenes regularly in those countries to change or prop up regimes and has 3,500 troops currently in Mali under the guise of fighting Islamist militants.

Even during the Ebola crisis, Western assistance to the three West African countries affected by the virus (Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea) followed a spheres of influence logic, with the UK heavily involved in Sierra Leone, the US in Liberia and France in Guinea (Abdullah and Rashid, 2017).

The doctrine of spheres of influence has no place in the UN charter or international law. Indeed, the raison detre of the UN (and its antecedent, the League of Nations) was the outlaw of the quest for spheres of influence in world politics. The fundamental principles of the UN are the prohibition of force in settling disputes unless when sanctioned by the Security Council or for self defence; acceptance of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and equality of all member