Recent reports that France and Ukraine are carrying out “covert” operations, especially in Mali, to weaken the AES and destabilize the Sahel region are therefore not surprising.

The Beirut-based Arab TV channel Al Mayadeen reported that, in the face of growing cooperation between Russia and African countries, Ukrainian and French special forces were supporting separatist groups and others linked to Al-Qaeda in the Sahel, in attacks on civilians and military bases of AES members.

According to the Lebanese media, Ukraine has acknowledged that it has provided terrorist groups with training and information, weapons and drone parts. For their part, Malian separatists have admitted that they receive aid from the French, Americans and Ukrainians.

The Lebanese channel summarized: “All this boils down to the Ukrainian state sponsoring terrorist attacks on the territory of a country [Mali] that has declared its sovereignty against the colonial dictate of the West.” It went on to say that the AES’s efforts to boost sovereign development represent a “decline in power” for the West and “cut off an important source of uranium, gold and oil.” Western countries are using Ukraine, as they do with Israel, to destabilize regions that threaten the “world imperialist system.”

In Senegal too, which once had governments submissive to neo-colonial France, the maneuvers of Paris have been unmasked.

Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who is campaigning for the legislative elections on Nov. 17 as the head of his Pastef party, denounced the publication of a book by a French historian on Casamance, a region where separatist ideas persist.

Sonko said that if the author wants to write about the subject [self-determination], she should write about Corsica, which is demanding independence from France, or New Caledonia, which is also demanding independence, but not about Senegal, warning of “a destabilization project” on a subject (the “supposed autonomy” of Casamance, an area of Senegal south of Gambia) that “concerns the Senegalese.”