Summary
As Russia’s brutal war with Ukraine enters its fourth month, Edward Stourton asks who Russia's allies and friends are and looks at the nation's influence overseas.
While President Putin has made no secret of his belief that Ukraine should be part of a “greater Russia”, what is less apparent is how far Russia’s influence is spreading in other parts of the world.
These include sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. With the West having left a vacuum in parts of Africa, President Putin has been able to offer military help in unstable countries such as Mali and the Central African Republic.
This follows Russia's intervention in Syria's civil war on the side of Bashar Al-Assad's government, with implications for the wider geopolitics of the region.
And in Latin America, Russia is accused of using soft power tactics through its media channels to polarise society and spread anti-US and anti-Western propaganda.
Edward Stourton asks to what extent this shows that Russia is trying to rebuild the old Soviet-US spheres of influence of the Cold War.
Producer: Caroline Bayley Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Sound Engineer: James Beard Production Coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Helena Warwick
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis, the podcast that looks at the ideas behind the news. |
| 0:43.0 | In this episode, Edward Sterton investigates how far Russia's reach is extending across the world |
| 0:49.0 | and what it's trying to achieve. |
| 0:59.0 | Africa's wars can be just as deadly as the conflict in Ukraine, even if we don't see or hear quite as much about them. |
| 1:04.6 | It was a war that seemed to come out of nowhere. |
| 1:07.5 | First a rebellion, then a coup. |
| 1:10.7 | Then suddenly half of Mali was under the control of Islamist militants. |
| 1:15.0 | That was around a decade ago and the fighting in Mali is still going on. |
| 1:20.0 | There have been two more coups since then, this one a couple of years ago. |
| 1:24.8 | Marley's rebel soldiers taking Marley's leaders under arrest away from the presidential |
| 1:30.1 | palace in the capital Bamako. It's a complicated conflict which has involved |
| 1:35.8 | different ethnic groups, jihadis, the French, the EU and the UN. But if you care |
| 1:41.8 | about Ukraine you need to care about this story too, because there's |
| 1:46.6 | another ingredient in the mix, Russian mercenaries. |
| 1:50.3 | Next, Mali, where the government says it's investigating accusations that its military, along with Russian mercenaries, executed almost 300 civilians in the town of Mora during an operation that was supposed to be targeting |
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