The Washington Post (WaPo) published a piece over the weekend titled “In Africa, Eastern Europe battles Russian narrative on Ukraine”, which spins the story that Central & Eastern European (CEE) countries have a chance of convincing Africans to agree with the US-led West’s interpretation of the Ukrainian Conflict. The basis for this wishful thinking is that some of their representatives are courting Egyptian energy imports and claiming that Russia is a modern-day colonial power.

Africans see everything very differently, however, as proven by their leaders utterly humiliating Zelensky last week when only four out of 55 of them of them tuned in to listen to his virtual speech at the African Union. They snubbed him because they have enough self-respect not to pay him any attention after his ambassador to Turkey blackmailed the Global South by demanding weapons in exchange for resuming the export of wheat to developing countries.

Despite whatever WaPo claims, African countries don’t buy the false narrative that Russia is a modern-day colonial power. To the contrary, they regard Kiev’s US-led Western overlords as such and believe that Russia is actually a victim of neo-colonialism, not a perpetrator thereof. This isn’t speculation either but proven by the fact that not a single one of them sanctioned Russia despite some voting against it at the UN under Western pressure.

Nevertheless, WaPo still thinks that NATO’s CEE puppets complaining about their imperial- and Soviet-era experiences will somehow change African leaders’ minds. This implies that their target audience is easily manipulated by self-serving political narratives, which is actually racist to imagine. Nobody can take the Latvian Foreign Minister’s rants about Russia at face value even though WaPo cites him several times in their story as some kind of authoritative source on the issue.

It also deserves mentioning that Latvia glorifies those of its citizens who collaborated with Hitler and participated in the Holocaust, which makes it a neo-fascist state. This former Soviet Republic is also racist too since it denies citizenship to some members of its Russian minority who were born in that country. African leaders are presumably briefed by their experts about this political context, which further confirms that they’d have no reason to take anything that country says about Russia seriously.

As for NATO’s other CEE puppets, each of them has their own historical bones to pick with Russia, which reduces their credibility whenever criticizing it. Just because a country claims to have been “colonized” in the past doesn’t mean that it isn’t collaborating with neo-colonialists in the present. African leaders have enough common sense not to fall for the false narrative that those countries are all innocent victims of so-called “Russian colonialism” in the modern era whose sovereignty is only saved by NATO.  

Each African country in their own way has learned first-hand over the decades never to trust the US, which has always exploited them to differing extents through its neo-imperial policies that aim to subjugate their states as vassals. The fact of the matter is that African countries are more sovereign than CEE ones nowadays, the first of which bravely snubbed Zelensky and refused to sanction Russia while the second dutifully comply with whatever their American overlord demands.

That being the case, there’s no way that those NATO puppets are going to hoodwink Africans with their false claims of “Russian colonialism”, especially if the Latvian Foreign Minister is the face of this perception management operation like WaPo presents him as being. In fact, the more that they aggressively push this narrative onto Africans, the more confident their targets will become that they made the right choice in ascribing to Russia’s interpretation of events over the Ukrainian Conflict.