Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise new threats to NATO
BEIRUT — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine dominates world attention. But with less global scrutiny, Putin is also busy advancing Russia’s presence in the Middle East and Africa — an expansion that military and civilian leaders view as another, if less immediate, threat to security in the West.
Putin’s strategy in the Mideast and Africa has been simple, and successful: He seeks out security alliances with autocrats, coup leaders and others who have been spurned or neglected by the U.S. and Europe, either because of their bloody abuses or because of competing Western strategic interests.
• In Syria, Russia’s defense minister last month showed off nuclear-capable bombers and hypersonic missiles over the Mediterranean, part of a security partnership that now has the Kremlin threatening to send Syrian fighters to Ukraine.
• In Sudan, a leader of a junta that’s seized power in that East African country has a new economic alliance with the Kremlin, reviving Russia’s dreams of a naval base on the Red Sea.
• In Mali, the government is the latest of more than a dozen resource-rich African nations to forge security alliances with Kremlin-allied mercenaries, according to U.S. officials.
Especially in the last five or six years, “what you’ve seen is a Russia that is much more expeditionary and casting its military power further and wider afield,” said retired U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove.
“Russia is trying to show itself as a great power, as at the seat in world affairs, as driving international situations,” said Breedlove, the top NATO commander from 2013 through 2016, and now a distinguished chair at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington.
Long-term goals
But with Putin’s hands already full battling the fierce resistance from a much weaker Ukrainian military, experts view his expansionist goals in the Middle East and Africa as a potential longterm threat, not a present danger.
“It’s threatening NATO from below,” Kristina Kausch, a European security expert at the German Marshall Fund think-tank, said of the leverage Russia is gaining. “The Russians have felt encircled by NATO — and now they want to encircle NATO,” she said.
To achieve its strategic aims, Russia provides conventional military or Kremlin-allied mercenaries to protect the regimes of often outcast leaders. In return, these leaders pay back Russia in several ways: cash or natural resources, influence in their affairs, and staging grounds for Russian fighters.
These alliances help advance Putin’s ambitions of returning Russia’s influence to its old Cold War boundaries.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Russia would bring recruits from Syria to fight in Ukraine. The threat was seen primarily as an intimidation tactic, and U.S. officials say there’s been no sign of Syrian recruits in Ukraine. Some security experts say Russian mercenaries are using Mali as a staging ground for deployment to Ukraine, but U.S. officials have not confirmed these reports.
Regardless of how imminent the threat is, U.S. and European leaders are paying increasing attention to Putin’s moves in the Middle East and Africa — and Russia’s growing alliance with China — as it formulates plans to protect the West from future aggression.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in mid-February that the West could no longer ignore the competition for influence across Africa, where China spends billions on infrastructure projects to secure mineral rights, and Russia provides security through Kremlinallied mercenaries.
“We see and realize that if we withdraw from this competition as liberal democracies, then others are going to fill these gaps,” Baerbock said as Western diplomats huddled on the Ukraine crisis, in the last days before Russia’s invasion.
Perhaps the boldest example of Russia flexing its global reach was when it sent defense minister Sergei Shoigu last month to Damascus to oversee Russia’s largest military drills in the Mediterranean since the Cold War, just as Russia’s military made final preparations for its assault on Ukraine.
The drills, involving 15 warships and about 30 aircraft, appeared choreographed to showcase the Russian military’s capability to threaten the U.S. carrier strike group in the Mediterranean.
Working with despots
In Africa, too, Russia is open to working with leaders known for anti-democratic actions and abuses of human rights.
On the eve of Russia’s invasion with Ukraine, Kremlin officials met in Moscow with an officer of a military junta that seized power in Sudan.
Isolated by the West, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo warmly responded to Russia’s overture of a new economic-focused alliance. Upon returning home, Gen. Dagolo announced that Sudan would be open to allowing Russia to build its long hoped-for naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
A Red Sea port could help give Russia a greater role in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, increase Russian access in the Suez Canal and other high-traffic shipping lanes, and allow Russia to project force in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.
“They certainly could create enough havoc to cause problems,” said Breedlove, the former NATO commander.