Burkina Faso’s Strategic Alliance With Russia Will Further Stabilize West Africa
Russia has been able to achieve what neither France nor the US could (or wanted to according to cynical interpretations), which is bolstering its partners’ military capabilities to the point where they can finally defend themselves from terrorist threats and even launch counteroffensives to win back their territory. This hard security aspect of cooperation is part of a support package that includes soft security support against information warfare-driven Hybrid War threats and reliable access to affordable commodities.
Interim Burkinabe President Ibrahim Traore said in an interview on Thursday that his country is now in a strategic alliance with Russia, adding that Moscow is one of its major military suppliers and that Ouagadougou is satisfied with the state of their relations. He denied previously unverified reports that Wagner is fighting alongside the national forces in their anti-terrorist mission, however, claiming that “Wagner's presence was invented to harm Burkina, so countries would not cooperate with us.”
Burkina Faso’s latest coup last September was met with applause by most of the population, which had become seriously concerned with the prior interim government’s inability to adequately tackle terrorist threats since it came to power after the earlier coup of January 2022. The appearance of Russian flags at spontaneous rallies in support of Traore’s seizure of power prompted the Mainstream Media to fearmonger that this country will follow in Mali’s footsteps by becoming Moscow’s next regional partner.
That neighboring state’s revolutionary authorities expelled French troops, subsequently banned its media and “NGOs”, and accelerated the comprehensive expansion of relations with Russia, especially in the security dimension. The West was enraged at this expression of sovereignty and immediately began smearing Mali, including most recently at the UN earlier this week after falsely claiming that the national military and Wagner supposedly killed hundreds of civilians in an attack last year.
Russia defended its “Democratic Security” efforts in West Africa and the Sahel at the UNSC in January in the face of related information warfare attacks, which are aimed at maligning its attempts to help regional countries restore the state’s writ over the entirety of their territory after France failed to do so. In fact, it’s largely due to Moscow’s success in assisting the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali in this respect that African countries consider cooperation with the Kremlin to be so appealing nowadays.
Russia has been able to achieve what neither France nor the US could (or wanted to according to cynical interpretations), which is bolstering its partners’ military capabilities to the point where they can finally defend themselves from terrorist threats and even launch counteroffensives to win back their territory. This hard security aspect of cooperation is part of a support package that includes soft security support against information warfare-driven Hybrid War threats and reliable access to affordable commodities.
Taken together, the cultivation of strategic ties with Moscow ensures that African countries can weather the myriad threats to their sovereignty brought about by the New Cold War and thus avoid becoming the next battlegrounds in this global competition over the future of the world order. In the Burkinabe context, this will further stabilize West Africa when paired with Russia’s complementary “Democratic Security” efforts in neighboring Mali, which is required to help the region defend itself from France.
Although Traore clarified in his interview that “The departure of the French army does not mean that France is not an ally”, his pragmatic stance of remaining open to mutually beneficial cooperation with that country doesn’t mean that Burkina Faso’s former colonizer sees things the same way. The zero-sum paradigm that influences its foreign policy formulation, which is identical to the US’ as a result of their shared hegemonic interests, is expected to see Paris eventually push back against its recent losses.
To that end, it’ll likely target Burkina Faso in a similar way as it’s presently targeting Mali, thus meaning that Burkina Faso should brace itself for a combination of information warfare- and terrorist-driven threats jointly organized by France and the US in the coming future. Be that as it may, the Burkinabe-Russian Strategic Partnership should be able to successfully defend against them just like the Malian-Russian one has done, which will secure the region’s multipolar gains and thus Africa’s as a whole.