UK foreign intelligence service MI6 has allegedly prepared a group of saboteurs to disrupt Russia’s growing economic cooperation with African states an unnamed military-diplomatic source [claimed]
The British spy agency created a “sabotage hit squad” consisting of around 100 Ukrainian “nationalist and neo-Nazi militants,” the anonymous official claimed
If true (and this could yet turn out to be false but it seems totally within the playbook) this could represent several things. A recognition that Ukraine is failing and perhaps a clever attempt to thin out the most hardened fighters otherwise most likely to engage in stabbed in the back terror against the west.
But it also importantly represents a serious escalation in Africa against new independence from colonial and western interests. Supporting Nazis in Africa is of course nothing new for western intelligence. The South African Apartheid regime was worked with closely for some time, various colonizing white supremacist movements and forces have since times of Europe’s first colonizing pushes been sent to Africa.
I always said the west would never let Africa go quietly, the next big wars will be in Africa as the west tries to put it back under its grip, tear it away from Chinese investment and anti-colonial struggle that puts it directly in China’s sphere. Ukraine’s humiliation and the coup in Niger have perhaps accelerated these plans but it was coming anyways.
Will Russia alone be able to do enough for them? Quite honestly with western pawns like ECOWAS the west stands a good chance of being able to subjugate a large amount of Africa, if they’re willing to openly use their own troops in the region to do so even more, but even without those they’ve organizing so many coups, allegedly supported so many terrorist/militant groups that things are going to be difficult. The lack of national unity in many areas as a result of tribal lines lingering and the forced unnatural country lines drawn by the colonizing powers in the 19th and 20th centuries is a foundation which further helps the western powers.
I fully expect fascist movements supported by the west, massacres, and more destabilizing militant groups to be pushed into the picture. If China has Africa they have resources, they have people, they have markets. If they can prevent them from that, they can successfully cut them off from the global economy, encircle, embargo (already started with “de-risking”), turn pressure up on and they think destroy in the same manner they believe they destroyed the Soviet Union. This does represent a real risk to China as Russian markets while nice are not near enough nor are their resources entirely adequate for all their high tech needs.
Wagner can only do so much against organized western actors, indeed Wagner’s successes seem over-hyped as much of them came with the backing and air and other support of the Russian military but we can hope as I don’t think Russia or China for that matter are interested in sending any of their actual armed forces into battle. The west too would like to avoid direct use of force to have plausible deniability and decrease loss of favoritism in image associated with their unpopular installed ruling puppets, militias, etc. The real hope will be in whether there is enough consciousness in Africa among Africans to push back against the west and for real independence, fair trade with China, investment, cooperation, etc.
I try to think of these things along intelligence lines - who knew what when? Russia attacked Ukraine in a way that was anticipated but not expected. That was followed up very quickly with multiple attempts by the US to open additional fronts. I do believe they also infiltrated Wagner and attempted to open a domestic front but were purged successfully.
This means to me that the West is a lot weaker on intelligence about Russia than most other places. It seems that same is true of China, what with China’s ability to purge spies. I think a lot of this counter-intelligence prowess descends from the KGB.
So then Wagner goes to Africa and it takes this long for MI6 to send a new contingent. This to me sounds like Russia opening a new front before the West knew it was coming. That means Russia isn’t just defending against intelligence but actively winning some intelligence gambits.
The conflict in Ukraine has an intelligence component, which is that if the US has blindspots about Russian capabilities and quantities, they needed a conflict to draw them out. Russia has been holding back to avoid showing too much. I think Russia may have significant capabilities ready to deploy to Africa. They’ve also been operating in Syria etc.
To me, you don’t just go on an adventure to Africa if you think you’re going to crushed by the West immediately, so I think that means Russia has intelligence that the West doesn’t have. I think that, like the US, Russia and China have likely been building resistance networks, distributing weapons and training, and establishing intelligence capabilities in anticipation of Africa becoming a theatre. The West may not actually be ready for this theatre, with the pivot to Asia taking precedence and moving 60% of forces to the Pacific. So it’s possible this is a strategic gambit by Russia based on positive intelligence assessments of the outcomes.
The alternative would be that Russia doesn’t have sufficient intelligence to understand the situation with Ukraine and would be very conservative with any other adventures. Sending Wagner to Africa doesn’t sound like a conservative move. It also doesn’t sound like a Hail Mary with any strategic viability.
In short, I am hopeful that this is actually evidence of openings in the West’s defenses and, while this will no doubt be bloody and vicious, I think there may be more groundwork prepared than we can see from our vantage.
“like the US, Russia and China have likely been building resistance networks, distributing weapons and training, and establishing intelligence capabilities”
I would like to believe that but my pessimism inclines me more toward the opposite view, namely that China and Russia are still being far too passive and inactive in this respect. Maybe they are slowly coming to the realization that they need to get more actively involved in the global resistance movement against Western imperialism, but so far I think they have either been lacking the resources/reach (in the case of Russia it was too weak after the USSR fell), or been too cautious or too principled in their belief in non-intervention (in the case of China).
The West still has a huge lead on the forces of the resistance in matters of spreading their influence and embedding their agents across the world. However Russia and China have an advantage that the US will never have which is that the strategy pursued by the US in the long term only generates more and more blowback, discontent and resentment, whereas Russia and China have chosen to emphasize the sovereignty of nations. This makes this conflict fundamentally asymmetric and maybe the fact that our side doesn’t use the same methods that the US does is in fact turning out to be a strength.
Yeah, I’m saying move beyond the SWOT analysis and assume all actors have 20 years of preparation or more plus they actionable and asymmetric intelligence. What explains the state of play and what are the implications of that explanation? If Russia is too weak, which I also fear, then they wouldn’t be in Africa, straight up. The enemy is too close at the gates, they have drones entering Russia and doing damage. There’s too many unknowns and they know that. If they were weak, they wouldn’t split their forces and focus unless they were throwing a Hail Mary to try to split the Western forces. But that Hail Mary makes no sense if they don’t have the force to back it up.
So the SWOT analysis isn’t useful here. Either Russia is better equipped with intel and rolling deep in materiel and partners, or it’s completely unraveling and Wagner is just abandoning the ship and going where the money is.
China also isn’t foolish. It’s not going to invest billions in getting the BRI going and completely ignore the military element. The military strategy is one of the foremost pieces of Chinese strategy since Mao and no one has really changed that. That China has extended so much into the global south economically indicates to me that it has extended significantly in force projection. This would seem to be confirned in its ability to broken peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That doesn’t happen on good will alone.
So I’m pessimistic too. I am pessimistic that the anti-imperialist calculations are off or that Western intelligence is several steps ahead. But the evidence is starting to undermine the latter, and the historical pieces seem to make sense. The KGB was notorious for being far better spy hunters than the West was at being spies. Putin is KGB and BDFL. China has demonstrated a similar prowess for spy hunting, and it’s not unlikely that they got a lot of that from the Soviets when relations were good and probably got more as relations with Putin grew.
If that’s the case, then USA is operating at an intelligence deficit. And if that’s true, then what do the actions of Russia and China tell us? That’s what I am trying to figure out.
If it turns out that the USA has the upper hand on intelligence, then everyone and everything is fucked.
I’m not talking about intelligence, i’m talking about the level of penetration of societies through CIA cutouts, NGOs, brainwashed “true believers” in liberalism (who exist because the propaganda machine of the West is enormous and global) and corrupt, bought off puppets. You just have to look at what is happening in countries like Thailand and how deeply the US has its claws in there despite its closeness to China, funding a massive pro-western, anti-China liberal media apparatus and controlling entire political parties. Wherever this happens, and it is the case in many, possibly even most countries in the global south, they have a very easy time engineering color revolutions, rigging elections and getting these countries to act as they want through a combination of threats, bribery and blackmail on both a personal and a national level.
I don’t see anywhere near the same level of penetration of Russian or Chinese media and NGOs, in fact it’s like they’re not even competing on that playing field at all.
Russia and China may well have better intelligence but they are not - at least not visibly - using it for actual on the ground operations of the sort i listed above.
I agree with this and you saved me writing this. I don’t know what the person you’re replying to is talking about because honestly Chinese global intelligence capabilities, penetration, as well as Russian is nowhere near what the west’s is. The west is far beyond and above their combined capabilities and it’s absurd to pretend otherwise. Some of this is down to tactics, the Chinese and maybe to some extent the Russians have more restraint, they’re not willing to do things the west will do. They also don’t have long-running cold-war era, anti-communist networks to build off of which themselves were often built off of centuries old colonial intelligence networks and efforts of propaganda, cultivating loyal splinter ethnic groups, etc.
The board could be said to be stacked against China and Russia. They’re safe in their countries but don’t have global reach and ability to activate pawns say that they can blackmail with Epstein type material or who are corrupt, greedy, and who they’ve been paying or can promise to allow to loot the country if they undertake a coup. They have good intelligence in their countries (though I have doubts about Russia and think they’re penetrated more deeply than we’d like given they are a corrupt capitalist country with contradictions versus China’s situation).