Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov is expected to meet President Yoweri Museveni ahead of the second Russia-Africa summit scheduled to take place in Addis Ababa between the months of October and November. The two leaders are expected to hold bilateral talks at State House in Entebbe.
Lavrov will visit Ethiopia, Uganda and the Republic of Congo. This is the first time that Lavrov is meeting heads of African states since he became Russian Foreign Minister in 2004.
There has been a cordial working relationship between the two countries. Recently, the government of Uganda contracted a Russian firm, Joint Stock Company Global Security, to install tracking devices in motor vehicles and motorcycles in the country.
The proposal was first introduced by President Museveni in his ten-point security measure in the wake of gun violence in the country that saw several Ugandans killed in 2018. Some of the people that lost their lives included former Arua Municipality MP, Ibrahim Abiriga in 2018 and Police spokesperson, Andrew Felix Kaweesi.
The Russian diplomat visited Egypt yesterday where he met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and his Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. The trip is also aimed at easing Russia’s diplomatic isolation amid the escalating war in Ukraine.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014. The invasion caused Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, with more than 9.5 million Ukrainians fleeing the country and a third of the population displaced. The invasion also caused global food shortages.
“I’m grateful for the interest the Arab League is paying to the situation in and around Ukraine. We appreciated the balanced, fair, responsible position taken by the Member States and by the League as such. In April we received the Contact group of the Arab League. It was a useful discussion which allowed sides to ask questions and to give answers. We are very open to continue this dialogue with our friends in the Arab League and in other parts of the world, as it were, we have nothing to hide.” he said in Egypt
He blamed the war on countries’ decisions to expand NATO closer to Russian borders in spite of the promises given to the Soviet leadership before the Soviet Union disappeared and, of course, pulling countries of the former Soviet Union, including first of all, Ukraine into NATO.
