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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the African Union during a closed-door address how the continent was taken hostage on account of Russia invading Ukraine. It is significant to note that many of the African countries have been supporting Russia and declined to endorse the U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion earlier this year
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the African Union during a closed-door address how the continent was taken hostage on account of Russia invading Ukraine. It is significant to note that many African countries have been supporting Russia and declined to endorse the U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion earlier this year.
He said that Russia’s actions were to blame for wheat and edible oils prices skyrocketing and escalating fuel prices across the African continent, affecting over 1.3 billion people living there. Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian exports was a war crime, Ukraine’s president lamented, quoting European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell. Russians were trying to use the sufferings of the people to put pressure on the democracies that have imposed sanctions on Russia. AU leaders recently met President Vladimir Putin in Russia and echoed Moscow’s assertion that Western sanctions were in part to blame for the food security crisis. They appealed to other countries to ensure grain and fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine were not blocked.
Millions of people in the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia and Somalia, are now struggling to find food or even humanitarian food aid amid a historic drought, Zelensky added. The AU’s official reaction to Zelensky’s speech was muted and neither supporting nor going against its interest. African Union Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat, one of those who met with Putin, tweeted that African nations “reiterated the AU position of the urgent need for dialogue to end the conflict.” Current AU chair and Senegalese President Macky Sall tweeted that Africa respects “the peaceful resolution of conflicts and the freedom of commerce.”
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Russia is the largest weapons exporter to sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, an EU’s top diplomat said he had written to all African foreign ministers to explain that the bloc’s sanctions on Russia were not responsible for the looming global food crisis. He pledged to work out ways for exports of food and fertilizers to reach their continent
