At about 11 a.m. on Thursday, a Russian jet-powered drone hit a platform at Dnipro railway station as a train prepared to leave for Zaporizhzhia, killing 15 people. Within hours, strikes had killed two 15-year-old girls in Chernihiv and at least three people in Kremenchuk. That evening, safely ensconced in the Kremlin, for now at least, President Vladimir Putin wrapped up the third Russia-Africa Summit, held under the motto "For Peace, Security and Development." Irony is dead too, it seems; killed by a droning Russian.
Sitting beside African Union chair Evariste Ndayishimiye, Putin talked up grain, scholarships, medicines, and Russian-built nuclear reactors. This was, perhaps, Putin the "humanitarian" as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff lavished him recently. But the questions quickly turned to Europe, and the real news: his call with the leaders of Finland and Norway; talk of war by 2030; and a warning that the Baltic could go the way of the Strait of Hormuz.
The real news, and the real Putin. Here was a more familiar Kremlin character: the reluctant humanitarian warlord, forever offering bread, forever dragged into fights by other people. Putin doesn’t want war with Europe, but Russia is ready, and already fighting one.
He backs the law of the sea, but will respond to any challenge. He has never pursued colonial policies, but calls Ukrainian land Russian. In this latest edition of Dissected, Newsweek takes its scalpel to Putin’s press conference.
"We will continue to increase the number of African students studying in Russia…These are, so to speak, the people we can rely on in those countries." Russia has found other ways to exploit young Africans. A Kenyan intelligence report presented to lawmakers in February said more than 1,000 Kenyans had been recruited to fight for Russia. Moscow has since agreed to stop, Kenya’s foreign minister says.
Ukraine estimates that 1,780 mercenaries from 36 African countries are fighting for Russia. And in 2024, The found about 200 young African women, recruited for what was billed as a work-study program, assembling Iranian-designed attack drones in Tatarstan. "As for the notion that African countries might remain, or become, an object of rivalry between major states—well, that question is addressed to the wrong quarter." True, just not as intended.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
