Foreign Minister Lavrov, Africa and Trillions of Dollars

All that is perfectly understandable, since it’s Mr. Kirill Dmitriev, a Special Presidential Representative, who seems to be the star of the Russian diplomacy today, holding round after round of talks with his American counterparts about ending the Ukrainian conflict. It’s him whom the public in Russia and abroad is watching intently. After all, the whole situation about America’s efforts to calm down aggressive Europeans striving to prolong the war is so unusual, that public attention is plainly and simply doomed to be glued to that never ending diplomatic thriller.

While Sergei Lavrov, who incidentally is very much in the saddle, is simply busy with the rest of Russia’s foreign policy. And it’s exactly “the rest” that should be in the limelight. Especially if you look at Prime Minister Modi’s foreign policy activity, like his recent trip to the Middle East and other places: similarities are simply striking. It’s not the Western front of foreign relations that is likely to bring us surprises, these days.

I have to admit, to my shame, that I followed the West-watching herd and have almost missed Lavrov’s attendance of the recent Second Ministerial Conference of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum in Cairo. I’d have missed it altogether, if not for some very unexpected headlines in the Russian media, picking real jewels from one of the two Lavrov’s speeches out there.

How about the minister’s passage: “Regrettably, various forms of neocolonialism continue to persist today. We stand ready to work in close partnership with African countries to eliminate them, including through the development of legal frameworks to assess and compensate for the harms inflicted during the colonial period. Following the First Russia–Africa Ministerial Conference, we agreed to explore the establishment of a permanent coordination mechanism to address this issue”.

Can you imagine that permanent mechanism actually starting doing things like filing suits in various international agencies, asks a columnist of the Komsomolskaya Pravda. Man, we are talking about trillions of dollars being debated, he says, and now imagine other nations, maybe somewhere in Asia, using that new legal machinery instead of just making loud speeches on the matter. And that is not to mention that the nearest estimate of Africa’s economic potential is, in dollars, about three trillions. Africa rhymes with trillions again!

Now, there is a question of what exactly Russia is doing in Africa. There is a couple of surprises for those who think Russia is only a “security provider” for friendly nations there, sending them advisers, weapons and special technologies, while China concentrates its efforts on building infrastructure for future trade and development.

But here we have quite a list of the present-day Russian activities on that continent, with more quotations from Lavrov: “We actively participate in building and upgrading energy infrastructure and energy production facilities. Our projects cover the entire cycle from design and construction to maintenance and long-term operation. One successful example is the construction the El Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant in Egypt, the largest nuclear power plant in Africa.

We are discussing peaceful atom cooperation with other African colleagues. Russia’s Rosatom state corporation has signed 13 agreements to this effect. Some 400 students from 23 African countries are studying nuclear technology in Russia. Our country also has the required competence for turnkey low-capacity nuclear power plant projects”.

And, also: “We stand ready to offer our partners cutting-edge solutions in mechanical engineering, electric power, geological exploration, pharmaceuticals, and high-tech sectors including digital technologies and space exploration. (…) Over the past five years, the number of African students in Russia has doubled, now exceeding 32,000, while our state scholarship quota for Africa has almost tripled. The most sought-after fields are agriculture, engineering, electric power, oil and gas, construction, medicine, and education”.

So, all in all, something is happening between Russia and Africa, and Lavrov goes on mentioning new embassies opened this year in Niger, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan, with The Gambia, Liberia, Togo, and the Comoros Islands to follow, not to mention that by the end of 2026, Russian trade missions will be present in 15 African countries.

Finally, there is another sign of the evolving African boom in Moscow’s activities. There is another department established at the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Department for Partnership with Africa, that will be in charge of multilateral and subregional contacts. Tatiana Dovgalenko, the lady that heads it, is quite popular with the Russian media. She says: such a lot of things have to be done so fast, to catch up with a flurry of Russo-African plans.

Let’s see what we have here. How many times did I mention, in the year 2025, a veritable hi-tech boom in the Russian laboratories after the split with the West in 2022, that year being the start of a new phase of Western war against Russia? Surely that technical enthusiasm cannot be confined only to domestic consumption. And so Russia is cutting down its ties with the West, while trade with the rest of the world is going up. In case of Africa we are talking about a 13 per cent trade growth in 2025, and commodities are taking less and less of a share in that trade.

Tatiana Dovgalenko did not fail to mention Russia’s commercial and political retreat from Africa in the early 1990-s, with her boss openly admitting, in Cairo, that it was a mistake to be corrected now. That “strategic mistake”, says Lavrov, has served a good lesson for the present generation of leaders and, indeed, for all the nation.

Here I love proudly remembering one of my younger days columns for official The Russian Gazette in the early 1990-s, boldly challenging Boris Yeltsin, the top leader of Russia at the time: “Give Us India Back, Mr. President”. In fact, to be fair, he kind of responded to my call and made some moves, during his visit to Delhi, to slightly correct the stupid and excessive pro-Western tilt of that era.

So, coming back to the issue of a disappearance of the Foreign Minister, we can easily see what it means. Lavrov is in the mainstream of foreign policy. Russian diplomacy and Russian business are not just “pivoting East”, since we are talking not only about Asia, but about the whole big world, that also comprises Latin America, the Middle East and other areas. These are the regions that, purely accidentally, are known today to be the most promising areas of the globe and the most lucrative partners for the world of tomorrow.