African Summit in Russia and Now a Coup in Niger
We really can't imagine how much damage Putin can do before someone stops him
You know who I am talking about. It’s the kid who comes to the backyard party who is just a little out of sync with everyone else. He arrives sober but after his first beer, the changes become obvious. His laugh gets noticeably louder. He starts getting too familiar with people he doesn’t know. The dreaded beer muscles are being flexed.
I won’t lie. I was that kid back when I was at my first keg party. Many of us have been that kid and all it usually takes is one time of getting stupid drunk, wrecking someone’s kitchen, backyard, or bathroom and then you either learn or you will be blackballed from future parties. My nickname in my hometown of Freehold, New Jersey is Brewer. That means I learned my lesson and by my 15th birthday, I knew how to behave at the keg parties.
The drunk
Putin, and Russia, just haven’t figured it out. It’s been a long string of bad drunks for the country, waking up and looking back, “What the hell were we thinking, a ‘communist revolution?’” For the past thirty years, though, even though we kind of sensed something was amiss, Russia was remaining civil albeit a little loud and at times obnoxious.
In 2014, though, Russia got drunk at the Olympics it organized in Sochi. When you look back at the audacity of Putin and his secret services, switching out contaminated urine of its athletes through a hole in the wall and replacing it with drug-free urine, we should have warned them that drinking beer straight out of the keg was not acceptable. We didn’t though because we were too polite.
We watched as the beer mixed with the emotions and hurt feelings. We watched as the young man guzzled cup after cup and then his antics led to the downing of the KLM airliner over Ukraine. We were not pleased and even warned him to keep it down but he kept right on disrespecting us and right on blaming us for his feelings of inferiority and isolation.
Drunk, boisterous, cocky, and slightly out of control, a drunken Russia invaded Ukraine overwhelmed with confidence that victory balls would be clogging social calendars by early June. Some of the officers who went off to the front took with them their dress uniforms so confident were they that they’d be at celebrations in Kyiv. Many of those officers are now fertilizing the soil of Ukraine.
The hangover
The hangover has been a nasty one. Groggy, hands shaking, and in need of a tumbler of vodka, Russia has stumbled through the past 18 months of this war getting slaughtered at a rate not seen since World War I. It has also been murdering Ukrainians in the way that only a person insensitive to moral pain and human misery because of a brutal hangover could.
But the harshest aspects of the hangover are receding and Putin and his cancerous ways are regaining force. He is spreading his disease to other parts of the world. Would I be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that Putin has decided to cast much of Africa into a food crisis to create widespread instability? Would it be farfetched to imagine that the Africa Summit took place because Putin wants to destabilize the continent?
Niger has fallen and locals are marching through the streets with Russian flags draped around their bodies. Sure, many Nigeriens are anti-French because of France’s long colonial history in the country. They regard France and the West as oppressors. They view Russia as not so much a better choice but not France. Putin has played on this sentiment and now Niger is in the midst of a coup. Innocent people are dying. The hungover kid strikes again.
“I’m pro-Russian and I don’t like France,” he said. “Since childhood, I’ve been opposed to France.
“They’ve exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France.”
The businessman said thousands had taken part in Monday’s protest in Zinder in support of the military takeover (Niger Coup).
Maybe Russia has realized that it won’t use nukes simply because it will alienate everyone with the slightest bit of sympathy for them; and, because the Kremlin also realized that Biden is not Trump. NATO led by the U.S. will turn the Russian army in Ukraine once and for all into a mass grave should Medvedev’s ramblings-of-a-lunatic become reality.
And yet, as the rest of us at the party get our beer on, the odd, rodent-looking kid from Leningrad, no longer in the throes of a nasty hangover and actually growing more sober by the hour, has decided that dancing naked with the lampshade on his head is stupid. There is so much more havoc that he can bring down on the party without anyone really being able to pin it on him: fomenting civil war in Moldova, fomenting coups and civil war across the African continent; destabilizing Poland by putting troops on the border in Belarus; undertaking naval exercises in the Baltic Sea; chasing down U.S. drones in Syria. Fun, fun, fun, if you are an anti-social freak.
All of these acts are pesky and potentially dangerous ones but not the kind that will get the boy, nearly sober, tossed from the backyard kegger. They will be just enough havoc to make every else regret ever having the party to begin with.
This is what Russia excels at, making others regret ever inviting them.