NEW YORK TIMES
Russia will deploy telecommunications and remote-sensing satellites over three West African countries led by military juntas that had already cut ties with American and European allies and turned toward the Kremlin for military support to contain Islamist insurgents.
Officials from the three countries — Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso — and Russia’s space agency announced that they had signed a partnership in Mali’s capital on Monday in a bid to strengthen security, manage natural disasters and improve internet access.
The partnership says that Russia’s space agency would help the three countries create a telecommunications system across their vast territories. It would also deploy satellites designed to monitor the countries’ border areas, where Islamist insurgents affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State move freely and regularly attack military troops and civilians.
The government officials provided little details about the arrangement — for instance, how much, if anything, it would cost the West African governments.
The partnership is the latest sign of Russia’s expanding influence in a region where military-led governments have turned their backs on the United States and European countries after a decade of military cooperation against extremist groups.
Russia has provided military instructors and helicopters, weapons and mercenaries from the Wagner group to the embattled troops, but so far they have failed to reclaim control of large swathes of their territories from Islamist insurgents.
In Mali, Al Qaeda affiliates killed at least 50 members of its armed forces in the capital, Bamako, last week, while Wagner mercenaries were stationed just miles away. In Burkina Faso, Western officials estimate that Islamist insurgents roam freely across two-thirds of the country. In Niger, deaths of civilians and soldiers have surged since mutinous soldiers seized power in a coup in July last year.
Still officials from the three countries have claimed that only they could restore order, and have ignored calls to organize elections. They have also claimed, with little evidence, that they have made more progress than the civilian governments they ousted in beating back the insurgents.
They have also broken away from a regional bloc that their countries had belonged to for decades, the Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS. Instead, last year they formed their own security alliance, known by its acronym A.E.S.
“With Russia, we have a more sincere, more reactive relationship that is better adapted to the current challenges of the A.E.S.,” Niger’s communications minister, Sidi Mohamed Raliou, said at a news conference in Bamako on Monday after the meeting between government officials from the three countries and representatives from the Russian satellite company, Glavkosmos.
Ilya Tarasenko, the director general of Glavkosmos, a subsidiary of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, said at Monday’s news conference that the partnership is “extremely important” to improve security at the countries’ borders.
Mr. Raliou said the satellites would also help the countries manage the effects of climate change, which has had a devastating impact on West Africa and elsewhere on the continent. In recent weeks, more than 1,000 people have died in the region as a result of flooding, and four million others have been affected.
Extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have turned a swath of West Africa into the world’s epicenter of terrorism, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, blockading dozens of towns and villages and cutting access to key roads that are a lifeline to the economies of the three landlocked countries.
But as attacks continue, West African officials have acknowledged that it might take years for the Russian satellites to be operational. During a trip to Moscow in March, Malian economy minister Alousséni Sanou said that the satellites would need at least four years to be built and launched, and dozens of Malian experts would have to be trained to operate them.
Mr. Sanou had said in March that Russian remote-sensing satellites would also help map Mali’s mining resources. The West African country has large gold reserves that the Kremlin-backed Wagner paramilitary group has been eying, according to Western government officials and analysts.
Officials did not provide a timeline for the satellites’ launch as they signed the partnership on Monday. A copy of the memorandum signed by the West African and Russian governments and seen by The New York Times includes “the training of national personnel in space activities” and states that the partnership would be for an initial phase of five years.