San Francisco Frontiers - Russia's Lavrov takes anti-western tour to Chad

The veteran diplomat offered to strengthen economic, trade and above all military cooperation with Guinea, Congo and Burkina Faso, his first stops.

The Kremlin has seen relations with the West plummet since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and has doubled down on efforts to boost its influence in Africa, replacing western powers, above all France.

Lavrov landed in N'Djamena on Wednesday afternoon leading a large delegation.

Chad is one of the last missing pieces in the puzzle Moscow is trying to put together in the Sahel region, not long since France's sphere of influence.

France has seen its troops pushed out of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso by their military regimes since 2022.

Mercenaries from Russia's Wagner group have arrived, all presented as military instructors.

Paris still deploys about 1,000 soldiers in Chad, and says it intends to stay there, if in reduced numbers.

Social media is rife with rumours of armed Russians working alongside Chadian soldiers, notably in the south.

But officially for now, N'Djamena is the last hold-out against the Russian influx.

Lavrov was scheduled to meet Chad's General Mahamat Idriss Deby who has just been elected president after three years at the head of a military junta.

Deby paid a visit to Moscow in January raising questions about his plans to broaden his international allies.

"For six months we've seen a veritable warming of relations between Russian and Chad," African studies expert Vsevolod Sviridov told AFP in Moscow.

Paris has remained solidly behind Deby even though other western capitals have voiced concern at the contested election and the violent crackdown on all opposition.

In Burkina Faso on Wednesday, Lavrov said the number of Russian military instructors there "will increase".

"At the same time, we are training in Russia representatives of the armed forces and security forces of Burkina Faso," he said in the capital Ouagadougou.

Jihadist rebels affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group have waged a grinding insurgency since 2015 in Burkina Faso that has killed thousands and displaced two million people.

- 'Destroy terrorist pockets' -

"I have no doubt that thanks to this cooperation, the pockets of terrorists which remain in Burkina Faso will be destroyed," the Russian minister said.

In Guinea on Monday, Lavrov congratulated the country for being "in the avant-guard of the decolonisation process".

On Tuesday, in Congo, Lavrov took aim at the West's support of Ukraine and its supposed "objectives" elsewhere, such as Libya.

And in Guinea on Monday, he congratulated the country for being "in the avant-guard of the decolonisation process".

Last July, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited African leaders to a summit in Saint Petersburg where he said they agreed to promote a multipolar world order and to fight neo-colonialism.

Putin hailed the "commitment of all our states to the formation of a just and democratic multipolar world order".

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B.Turner--SFF