African leaders, seeking to help bring the war to an end, agreed on Monday for a mediation mission in mid-June to Russia and Ukraine, the South African presidency announced on Tuesday. Last month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa indicated that his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, had given their agreement to receive this peace mission composed of six African leaders. The latter met virtually on Monday and “agreed to propose elements” to Russia and Ukraine “for a ceasefire and lasting peace in the region”, said a press release from the office of the southern president. -African. “The (African) Heads of State have confirmed their availability to go to Ukraine and Russia in mid-June,” he added without giving a specific date. The foreign ministers of the six countries in question will “finalize the elements of a roadmap towards peace”, the statement said. The French businessman close to the presidency of Congo-Brazzaville, Jean-Yves Ollivier, at the head of the Brazzaville Foundation, is the architect of this surprise initiative of mediation between Moscow and Kiev.
Monday’s meeting “confirmed that we are now at a stage where we are going to go to Kyiv and Moscow,” Cyril Ramaphosa said later in a joint press conference with his Portuguese counterpart, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. “Our mission is a mission of peace, and we want to call it a path to peace,” the South African president added, noting that African leaders would “seek engagement from both sides, which they too should seek. (…) to end this conflict by peaceful means”.
The Russian and Ukrainian leaders “must explain to us their views on the war as well as their minimum requirements to end the conflict”, he also argued. “We will be able to give our own perspective as Africans on how we perceive the impact of this war on Africa in terms of food prices, grain and fuel prices, as well as on Europe and the rest of the world because it has become a rather globalized type of conflict”, also declared the South African head of state. It should be noted that the African continent is suffering more than any other part of the world from the fallout from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, from soaring energy prices to the disruption of its vital grain and fertilizer supplies to sanctions aimed at to isolate one of its major trading partners.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who thanked President Ramaphosa for his role in the initiative, for his part stressed the importance of listening to “both sides and telling them what is the African vision of a war that does not is not just a European war, it is a globalized war”.
The members of the mission, identified last month by the South African president, are, in addition to the latter, the leaders of Congo-Brazzaville, Egypt, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia. Comoros Head of State Azali Assoumani attended Monday’s meeting in his capacity as the current chair of the African Union.
A heavyweight of diplomacy in Africa, Pretoria is at the heart of the struggle for influence between the United States and Russia on the continent. African countries have denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 less unanimously than the major Western powers. Senegal and South Africa notably abstained last year at the UN during the vote of a resolution condemning Moscow. Eritrea voted against, while Kenya and Rwanda sided with the West. Close to the Kremlin since the era of the struggle against apartheid and an influential power on the continent, South Africa has refused to condemn Russia since the start of the conflict, claiming to remain “neutral” and want to favor dialogue. A position that has irritated the international scene.
In any case, the timetable for the African peacekeeping mission should accelerate in the coming days, before the holding of the Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg, scheduled for July 26-29.
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