Reflecting on the recent years of Russian-African diplomatic relations

Over the past few years, Russia’s interests on the African continent has been becoming more pronounced and evident. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation has been aiming to broaden its spheres of influence in Africa for quite a time. Nevertheless, Russian diplomacy’s attempts to break new ground do not appear to be an overwhelming success.

Even though the Soviet Union used to have a significant authority throughout Africa, in the 1990s Russia’s presence in Africa weakened due to the collapse of the USSR and the accompanying difficulties. The collapse of the USSR led to some of the embassies and consulates, trade missions and cultural centres being closed. It was in the mid-2000s when Russia has begun to restore ties with African states.

The recent years witness a summit and multiple negotiations devoted to the developing bilateral relationship between African states and the Russian Federation. One of the most remarkable events was the Russia-Africa Summit 2019. This huge international event was promising to change the reality of the African continent through multiple projects supported by the Russian Federation. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov, the current international policy of Russia is aimed to further build up diverse ties, searching for new areas of joint efforts in trade, economic, scientific, technical, humanitarian, and other areas. With the second Russia-Africa summit underway, the question arises: what results have brought these attempts to revive Russian-African economic relations?

Despite the presentable progress in the security sphere and natural resources development, other areas of cooperation still stay crude. It seems that Russian policy in Africa lacks consistent strategy and sometimes disregard possibilities for further the diversification of spheres of cooperation. For example, as counter-intuitive as it may seem Africa is rapidly urbanizing: the urban population doubled in 1995-2015 and accounted for more than 40% of all the inhabitants of the continent. Given a 3-4% growth rate per year, this figure will be 56% of Africa’s population (about 1.3 billion people) by 2050. This means that a strong post-industrial service sector intrinsic to the urban lifestyle is already growing in Africa, and will continue to grow rapidly. This brings a whole lot of opportunities for Russian-African cooperation that has not yet been explored by Russian diplomacy.

The general problem of Russian-African relations as seen by the international experts is a low level of implementation of the proposed projects. According to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs the contacts between various ministries and agencies, including those between foreign ministries, are making headway. However, these contacts do not convert to an adequate number of accomplished projects on the ground.  Stepping up the efforts in spheres other than military and natural resources development becomes a necessity for Russian diplomacy in the changing realities of the African continent.