It’s stalemate in Ukraine but Putin is defeating the West in Africa

In the early hours of Saturday morning, police in Paris shot dead a Sudanese man who had threatened them with a meat cleaver. The motive for his actions has yet to be revealed but the incident happened a day after Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni warned her government that Europe faces a new migrant crisis because of the brutal war in Sudan that has displaced millions of people. Among the 157,00 migrants who arrived in Italy in 2023, 6,000 came from Sudan but Meloni believes that number will increase significantly this year.

The repercussions of last summer’s coup d’etat in Niger are also starting to be felt in Europe. One consequence of that regime change, in which the Europhile president Mohamed Bazoum was toppled by the military, was the decriminalisation in December of people trafficking. This was a booming trade a decade ago. It was estimated that three-quarters of the 181,459 migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2016 passed through Niger.