Columnists
Rockets into the sky: How Russia showed disrespect to African leaders
Wednesday June 21 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) attending a meeting with delegations of African leaders at the Constantine (Konstantinovsky) Palace in Strelna, outside Saint Petersburg on June 17, 2023. PHOTO | AFP | RIA NOVOSTI
It’s not a good idea to speak out against President Putin of Russia. Those who do in Russia, end up poisoned, imprisoned for life, committing suicide with their entire family, or falling out of hospital windows.
But what to do with African presidents who come calling for change from ‘he-who-must-not-be-challenged‘?
Last week, we got to see. First move, as the presidents of South Africa, Zambia, Senegal and Comoros, the prime minister of Egypt, and envoys from the DRC and Uganda, arrived in Kiev? Russia launched the biggest rocket attack on the city in weeks.
It’s unlikely the Russian leader worried about actually killing the presidents, as few of its rockets reach their mark in Kiev, these days, thanks to the city’s air defences. But what was the point of raining rockets into the sky for the African leaders? Truth be told, it is remarkably frightening being in a city that’s being shelled —might even induce some empathy for those living that way day and night.
Yet the South African leader of the delegation has been one of Russia’s strongest allies, even holding joint military exercises with Putin’s forces since their invasion of Ukraine, and outright refusing to condemn Russia’s shelling of civilians in UN motions.
And so to the second move. When the African leaders arrive in Moscow and address Putin, he cuts them short, interrupting their addresses, to shake around pieces of paper he says Ukraine won’t agree to.
But, a moment: who interrupts the address of a president, surely not even another president. Isn’t that an extraordinary act of disrespect from one national leader to seven others?
Shelled and interrupted, the delegation, nonetheless, called for the return of the thousands of Ukrainian children taken from Ukraine by the Russian military and now held in Russia: the same abduction of children that has triggered the International Criminal Court warrant for Putin’s arrest for war crimes.
Not interesting for Putin, who declared Russia was just protecting the children from a war zone (that it shells every night).
What better way to protect children from aggression than move them back into the aggressor’s castle: who would have a problem with that? “Kill us all, but do please take our children and make them safe in your homeland, dear warlord.”
Nice one, South Africa. You see how it works. You provide all that support. But never think you are equal, or fit to influence. No one is. Maybe President Putin will even initiate a nuclear war and kill us all in the nuclear winter that follows when the sunlight can no longer reach our planet. But that’s for him to decide. Your part: be silent, or be shelled.
The writer is a development communication specialist.
