Wow, didn't even occur to me that weapons from the conflict could be funneling to Africa, even after Wagner group announced that Africa was their next theater.

Makes me wonder, with the denial of service to the drone base in the region, how much of what is happening is China/Russia working to disrupt AFRICOM operations so that BRI and dedollarization can continue without intervention from the West?

I keep finding myself being pessimistic and inflating the power of the West and trying to figure out what's going on that's not being seen and what sort of "we are weak" propaganda is being pushed in a sort of "rope-a-dope" strategy, but I'm starting to get more and more convinced that the most important lasting legacy of the USSR is their counter-intelligence developments. If Russia, led by an expert spy hunter, in collaboration with China who has also demonstrated exceptional counter-intelligence prowess, have managed to collaborate on defeating US intelligence, then a lot of what's going on makes a lot more sense. The war in Ukraine becomes an intelligence trap, where the US is driven by the need to draw out Russian capabilities to assess them, where the Wagner coup is a purge of Western infiltration, where the Xinjiang conflict is being lost at the level of intelligence, etc.

If this is the case, then Niger might be coordinated anti-Western forces opening a new front in the conflict after the West failed to open multiple additional fronts in the months after the invasion of Ukraine. The success so far could be attributed to intelligence advantage, the proceedings could (and likely do) hinge on the counter-intelligence battlespace, and if it achieves strategic anti-Westen aims, we may see new fronts open before the year closes.

And let's not forget the BRICS summit will be here in 2 weeks!