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RFI interviewed Agatha Verdebout, a researcher at the Group for Information on War and Peace (GRIP) in Leuven, Belgium, about Russia’s leadership in arms sales to the African continent, despite Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine. . Canceling the sovereign debts of those countries has been one of the selling points.
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“Despite the Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine and the need for Moscow to supply war materiel on a massive scale to the Ukrainian front, Russian arms suppliers remain very well positioned in Africa,” he explained to R.F.I. from Louvain Agatha Verdebout, GRIP researcher.
This is one of the conclusions of a report carried out by the Belgian center “Research and Information Group on Peace and Security” between 2017 and 2021. The authors were able to establish that 44% of arms imports came from Russia, in compared to 17% for the United States, 10% for China and 6% for France.
Agatha Verdebout explains this trend because “Russia opened up abroad with Putin’s coming to power and his desire to restore Russia as a world power. For the Russian president, this meant reviving arms exports.”
In this context, the African market was presented as “quite open because it was not investigated or used as much by Europeans. In addition, Europeans are subject to stricter rules regarding respect for human rights in the countries where they sell weapons, etc. Russia has fewer restrictions in this regard,” says the GRIP researcher.
“One of the tactics used by Russia when it re-projected itself in the African arms market was to offer other benefits in exchange, that is, there were not only arms sales. There was also a revival of economic and cultural cooperation. Numerous cancellations were made of countries’ sovereign debts. Putin canceled sovereign debts dating back to Soviet times to encourage or incentivize countries on the African continent to buy Russian products instead of American or French ones, for example,” he points out.
As for Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine, according to Agatha Verdebout these have had a limited effect on Russian exports. She explains this because “the objective of the sanctions, in principle, is not to affect exports. The fact that this impacts arms exports is a kind of side effect. The objective of the sanctions is to impact the production of arms in Russia to prevent these weapons from being sent to the Ukrainian front. However, Russia has managed to keep some supply for its defense industry in the components it needs for this industry.”
The researcher highlights the “great adaptability of the Russians to sanctions; the ability of the Russian arms industry to reduce the technological needs of these weapons should not be underestimated. In other words, they have the ability to modify their weapons to dispense with components highly technological or highly complex”.
