A portrait of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and his Russian
counterpart Vladimir Putin during a welcoming ceremony for Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Khartoum on December 3, 2014. PHOTO |
AFP
Amid the most sustained wave of protests Sudan has seen for
decades, many external actors have hedged their bets with even some of
embattled President Hassan Omar al-Bashir’s historical allies, such as
Qatar, offering 0nly cautious statements in support of the regime.
The
Russians have taken a different tack. In an intriguing sub-plot, in the
months-long effort by a diffuse protest movement to oust the strongman
in Khartoum, Moscow has gone further than other players, giving fulsome
support to the regime and, allegedly sending mercenaries to advise
Bashir’s security forces on how to put down the protests.
While
Russia’s growing interests in Africa are often cast in economic terms —
an effort to help Moscow absorb Western sanctions by expanding its ties
to other regions — Russian intervention in Sudan underlines deeper
political interests.
It offers yet another illustration of Moscow’s distaste for the ousting of governments through street uprisings.
It
also underlines a further Russian message flowing from the Syrian
crisis, that Moscow is a stalwart ally that rarely abandons its friends,
no matter how appalling their human rights records may be.
Credible reports of Russian involvement in helping to tackle the protests first surfaced on New Year’s Eve.
In
Khartoum, a group of Caucasian men were photographed disembarking from a
Russian-made Ural-4320 vehicle, dressed in army fatigues, carrying
cameras, presumably to monitor and record the activities of protesters.
As the photos circulated on social media, The Times of London attributed these men to the Russian mercenary outfit, Wagner.
A string of online outlets reported that Wagner were actively involved in putting down the protests.
On
January 15, Vladimir Tomsky, spokesperson for the Russian embassy in
Khartoum, denied reports that “Russian experts” had been involved in
suppressing the protests.
The case of M Invest, Putin’s Chef and Wagner
The presence of Russian private military companies in Sudan has been on the rise in recent years.
According
to the website of the Russian Federal Security Service, 200 Russian
nationals entered Sudan at the end of 2017. According to the same data
set going back to 2013, the highest number of Russians entering Sudan in
any given quarter stood at 76. These figures indicate an almost
threefold increase in Russians travelling to the country in recent
years, although evidence that they could be military contractors is only
anecdotal.
The end of 2017 dovetails with a series of
contracts signed between Russian companies and the government of Sudan
for the extraction of natural resources.
In November
2017, Sudan’s Ministry of Minerals signed a gold prospecting contract
with a Russian company called M Invest. The signing was witnessed by
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
A policy memo
of January 2019 identifies a company of the same name, M Invest, which
was founded in St Petersburg for the “extraction of ore and other
non-ferrous metals.”
The report identifies M Invest’s
director, Andrei Mandel, a longtime associate and partner of Yevgeny
Prigozhin, thought to be the owner of Wagner, and who has also been
reported to be the owner of M Invest.
Mr Prigozhin is
considered a close confidant and fixer to President Vladimir Putin. His
proximity to the corridors of power came to light when he was put under
US sanctions for his alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential
election.
In Sudan, a number of reports detailed
Wagner’s possible role in training Sudanese security forces and securing
goldmines, likely those under M Invest’s concessions.
On
January 23, 2019, Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry’s
communications director, confirmed that “Russian private security
companies, unrelated to the state, are acting in Sudan.”
Web of security, economic and geo-strategic interests
Russian
foreign policy in Africa is often characterised as defence co-operation
in return for primary resource extraction — and there is evidence to
explain this as a motive for greater involvement.
On
November 23, 2017, around the same time that M Invest signed concessions
with the Sudanese Department of Minerals, Presidents Putin and Bashir
met in the Russian city of Sochi, where they discussed ways to increase
security co-operation.
Shortly afterwards, Sudan
became the first Arab nation to purchase Russia’s fourth generation
SU-24 fighter jets, as part of a deal for equipment upgrades and
training worth an estimated $1 billion. Mr Bashir also invited Russia to
build a naval base in Sudan to would offer critical geo-strategic
access to the Red Sea.
Russia has been left behind in
the recent scramble for great power influence in the Horn of Africa, as
the US, France and China have secured military bases on Djibouti’s Red
Sea coastline. After Djibouti rejected a Russian request to establish a
military base, Sudan’s coastline offer a viable alternative.
On
January 12, 2019, coinciding neatly with the protests, the Sudanese
parliament announced that a draft military agreement would pave the way
for a Russian military base in Sudan.
Russia has also
made moves to explore the construction of an oil refinery in Sudan with
the capacity to produce 200,000 barrels per day. This is linked to the
increasingly operational oilfields of South Sudan and will benefit
directly from Red Sea port access.
In October 2018, a
South Sudanese delegation reportedly signed memoranda of understanding
in Moscow, from three of Russia’s largest oil companies; Zarubezhneft,
Gazprom Neft, and Rosneft.
Strategic access to the Red
Sea could also enable Russia to consolidate its growing sphere of
influence in the region, with Sudan acting as bridge for a security
architecture extending from Syria to the Central African Republic.
While
these theories of grand strategy regarding a military base on the Red
Sea are compelling, whether Russia could afford such an investment
remains to be seen. Regardless, these complex networks of extraction,
security co-operation and geo-strategic interest could explain why
Russia would want to maintain the status quo in Sudan or at least limit
the fallout of a popular uprising.
More broadly, the
deployment of Wagner personnel on the streets of Khartoum fits in with a
long-term Russian foreign policy goal — to promote a multi-polar
international order designed to restrain US and Chinese hegemony.
Moscow
blamed Western geopolitical meddling on protests in Russia from
2011-2013, the “colour revolutions” of the preceding decade in Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and popular uprisings across the Middle East,
termed the Arab Spring, which began in 2010.
Like
those movements, the protesters’ diverse coalition in Sudan similarly
represents a popular uprising and calls on broad support from civil
society, labour unions, academia, elements of the powerful Islamic
movement and youth groups.
Syria and Ukraine, regions
where Wagner have been active, faced similar existential questions about
the type of society or governance model that would take each respective
country forward and in both cases Wagner were not on the pro-democracy
side.
By limiting the success of a popular uprising, Moscow could mitigate the spread of such a movement beyond Sudan’s borders.
Protecting a friend, no matter what
Russia
also stands to lose a reliable friend in the international order.
President Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2009
for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Darfur
region, has found mutual ground with President Putin, over a shared
disdain for the ICC.
In November 2017, Ghareb Khidir,
spokesperson for Sudan’s Foreign ministry, welcomed Russia’s withdrawal
from the founding statute of the ICC.
Russia is also
one of Sudan’s principal cheerleaders at the UN Security Council where
it opposed proposals to expand the UN’s peacekeeping mission to Darfur.
The
nuances of this relationship can be seen in how, on December 17, 2018,
President Bashir landed in the Damascus for a meeting with President
Assad as the first Arab League leader to visit the country since the
beginning of the civil war in 2011.
This rapprochement,
after Sudan earlier backed an Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s
membership of the Arab League, appeared to have been brokered by Moscow.
In Damascus, Bashir disembarked from a Russian military Tu154M
aircraft.
Moscow and Khartoum enjoy strong bilateral
relations. Wagner’s alleged interventions could be designed to limit the
scope of the uprising, in the hope that Sudan remains a reliable
international partner. Ensuring Sudan does not transition into
full-scale democracy and that power is handed to a regime stalwart could
be one such reason for Wagner’s tracks on the streets of Khartoum.
Just
as it did with Assad, Moscow has yet again sent a message that it will
always stick with its allies, in an implicit critique of what it casts
as a more fickle US defence and foreign policy.
Dangerous counter-narrative
Popular
uprisings ousted Sudanese governments in 1964 and 1985. It is likely
that the current protests will facilitate some form of regime change and
at the minimum could prevent Bashir from running again in 2020.
As
the standoff between protesters and Bashir continues to build, who
blinks first is likely decide the fate of Sudan. But, at what cost to
Sudan’s population? Countrywide protests in September 2013 were
eventually suffocated under a crackdown by security forces which left
almost 200 civilians dead.
The conflict in Syria
suggests embattled strongmen, with Russian backing, can withstand
structural levels of turmoil as grave as state-collapse. The alleged
presence of Wagner in Sudan and its possible deployment in the streets
of Khartoum could illustrate Russia’s growing economic, security and
geostrategic interests in Sudan and the broader region.
A
successful popular uprising could also offer a dangerous
counter-narrative to authoritarian governance and thereby threaten
Moscow’s attempt to forge a multi-polar international order.
Moscow’s
intervention shows that while economic imperatives are not irrelevant
in its calculations, deeper motives are also at play as it expands its
footprint in Africa and elsewhere.
Will Johnston is a Nairobi-based researcher focusing on security in Sudan and South Sudan. Email: wjj24@cantab.net
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