Out of Africa

A more serious post as Europe gently sleeps: While everyone seems to be losing their shit over Russia and the Ukraine there's a lot less attention being paid to the Russian mercenary teams (like Wagner) who are propping up or deposing various shaky regimes in Africa. These guys are big time players in Sudan, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso and god knows where else. In time their expanding sphere of influence will enable them to control large areas of land, resources and millions of people. Just as a reminder, warlords like these can easily turn settled people into refugees who will quickly be headed north and across the Med. 

The Kremlin knows that refugee movements are an easy lever to pull on to upset Western/European leaders, effectively an itch you can't quite scratch. Ultimately it's a tragic situation where innocent people are exploited over and over again, always in the course of creating disruption and the dangerous mischief that our naive and self righteous European politicians can't handle. Putin's having a good laugh at all of this - the Wagner Group are firmly in his pocket and so is much of Africa. Anyway back to the Ukraine ...