The short-lived rebellion in Russia last weekend has raised uncertainty about the future of Moscow’s military influence in Africa, where the mercenary Wagner Group has been the forward arm of President Vladimir Putin’s strategic interests. For African leaders, however, the failed mutiny prompts a different question: Does the continent’s future rely more on guns or on the civic values of democracy?, ask the Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board.

The answer was unequivocal for more than 50 leaders from Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, who had gathered last week in Poland. Being merely pro-liberty is not enough, the group declared in a statement. “Defending democracy requires common purpose – of solidarity – among democrats inside and outside all countries.”

That consensus takes aim at a core tenet of Africa’s diplomacy – that the continent must resist choosing sides between great powers, such as the West and its global rivals. That explains how Kenya could announce its intentions for a trade deal with Russia in late May and then, three weeks later, sign another deal with the European Union. It explains why nearly half of all African governments refuse to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

By staying neutral, African leaders argue, they can promote equality between richer and poorer nations and help broker peace in foreign conflicts. Yet pursuing ties simultaneously with countries that uphold democratic values and with those that undermine them has instead resulted in costly entanglements, intense foreign competition over strategic natural resources, conflict, and financial dependency.

Wagner’s spread across a handful of faltering countries, mostly concentrated in the Sahel region, has undermined efforts by France and the United States to strengthen professional African militaries under civilian command. “Its effect,” the United States Institute of Peace noted recently, “is to strengthen rule by force rather than by democracy and law [and] to promote corruption over transparency.”

Mr. Putin has said that Wagner’s roughly 5,000 personnel will stay in Africa. Moscow’s interests in Africa, ranging from resource extraction to a military base on the Red Sea coast of Sudan, have not changed.

But Africa’s determination to remain nonaligned now faces a pivotal test. South Africa is due in August to host the leaders of the so-called BRICS countries – including Brazil, Russia, India, and China. In March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr. Putin. That puts South Africa, as a signatory to the ICC, under an obligation to arrest the Russian president if he attends the summit.

“I’m quite sure, we can’t say to President Putin, please come to South Africa, and then arrest him,” former South African President Thabo Mbeki told the South African Broadcasting Corp. in May. “At the same time, we can’t say come to South Africa, and not arrest him – because we’re defying our own law. … We can’t behave as a lawless government.”

On the point of opposing a war of aggression, neutrality does not apply.

The FT shows how it is dissatisfied with the results of the popular vote in the local elections in Germany. ‘A danger for democracy’!  – writes:

Annette Scharfenberg, one of thousands of people who voted for the right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a district election in eastern Germany, is angry. And she wants everyone in Berlin to know it.

Robert Sesselmann, a local lawyer, became the first AfD politician in Germany to become an elected Landrat — the equivalent of head of the county council — winning 53 per cent of the vote.

“It’s a milestone,” Alice Weidel, the AfD’s national leader, told the Financial Times. “[For the first time] we will have direct decision-making powers.”

That meant, she said, that the party would be able to decide whether Sonneberg, a county of about 56,000 people in the state of Thuringia, accepted refugees or not. “And of course we will put a stop to that, the whole nightmare.”

For others, though, the result was an unmitigated disaster. “It’s a warning signal,” Green leader Ricarda Lang said, adding that the AfD was a “danger for democracy”.

The AfD was formed in 2013 by a small group of Eurosceptic economists opposed to bailouts for southern eurozone countries. It gradually shifted its focus to immigration, adopting a stridently xenophobic and anti-Islamic tone, which won it legions of new fans, especially in former communist east Germany.

The party’s increasing radicalisation put off middle-of-the-road voters and its share of the vote slid in the last national elections in 2021. But in recent weeks, it has seen a surge in support amid widening public dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Some polls have placed the AfD as high as 20 per cent, ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats and only a few points behind the biggest party, the opposition Christian Democratic Union.

Other polls suggest it is on course to win three critical state elections in eastern Germany next year — in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg.

But discontent reached a new peak in Sonneberg — and in many other towns and cities in Germany — earlier this year when the government unveiled its plans to phase out gas- and oil-fired boilers and move instead to heat pumps powered by renewable energy.

The initiative triggered a dispute between Scholz’s coalition partners, the Greens and liberals, enhancing the perception that the government was hopelessly divided over everything from next year’s budget to how to tackle the climate crisis.

Scharfenberg said the boiler law was one of the main reasons she voted AfD on Sunday. “The cheek of it — it’s just unbelievable,” she said. “I don’t need a new boiler — mine works very well, thank you, and they can’t force me to replace it.”

Mike, a guard at Sonneberg’s main courthouse, complained about the huge nationwide refugee influx of recent months, which experts say is similar in scale to Germany’s migrant crisis of 2015-16. “How will they all be housed? There’s already not enough flats here,” he said.

He said he voted AfD in part because of its opposition to the government’s policy on Ukraine, including large-scale weapon supplies to Kyiv. “Germany profited for decades from cheap Russian gas, and now they’re the enemy?” he said.

Also the Alternative for Germany (AfD), represented in the German parliament, plans to nominate its candidate for the post of Federal Chancellor for the first time in the 2025 elections. This was announced on June 21 in a television interview by the co-chairman of this political association, 44-year-old Alis Weidel.

Should recall that the AfD was created not so long ago – in February 2013. The main principles are nationalism, right-wing populism, euroscepticism, anti-immigration. By 2023, it is represented in all Landtags of 16 federal states and has 79 seats in the Bundestag.

The AfD is extremely popular in the Eastern lands, on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. In Thuringia, Brandenburg, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, the party won over 20% in local elections. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, as in the listed lands, it is the second power in the Landtag. As of January 2021, 32 thousand German citizens were its permanent members.

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend, notes Seymour Hersh, the famous American investigative journalist and political writer.

The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group. The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken — the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine — appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were… thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making… It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority… It shows real cracks.”

Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be — why else would he appear on the show? — went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at — sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”

At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?

We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule. 

Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.

So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:

“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by anti-Russian extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible.

“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.

“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.

“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy.”

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive.

I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory.

I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country of ‘Russian occupation’.

The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.

Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts — Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia — that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin.

Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute — and obvious. On June 20 the ‘Washington Post’ published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump — but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.

The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive.

It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America — and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment, concludes Seymour Hersh.