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’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).