Museveni heads to Russia for bilateral talks with Putin

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is this week scheduled to fly to Russia for the Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum.

The summit, now in its second edition, takes place Thursday and Friday. According to the Ugandan foreign ministry, Kampala will be seeking to amplify Africa’s voice on global affairs while pursuing its bilateral interests with Moscow.

Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Henry Okello-Oryem told the local newspaper Daily Monitor that Museveni’s agenda includes an expected private conversation with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

At the talk's centre stage will be security and technology transfer for across-the-board innovations, as well as agricultural modernisation.

Kampala also seeks to strengthen its relations with Moscow in the areas of oil, fertiliser access, and trade and investment, Okello-Oryem said.

The visit comes at a time Uganda is trying to put up a 60,000 barrels-per-day refinery plant in the western district of Hoima in readiness for oil production planned to begin in 2025.

Russia on the other hand boasts of centuries-old expertise in the extraction and export of oil and gas. It was, however,  not immediately clear if Museveni will woo Russian firms to bankroll the refinery in his planned meeting with Putin.

Currently, many Russian firms are under financial and economic sanctions by the West over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

But while the Western countries have castigated Russia for the February 2022 invasion, Uganda has said it will not bow to the West’s demand on other nations to isolate Russia because they have committed similar or worse transgressions to destroy sovereign states.

“Whenever they do their military adventures in the name of spreading democracy. They should answer the question of where all the trained soldiers [of the overturned governments] go. The West’s mistakes of wars must stop,” Okello-Oryem told the Daily Monitor.

The minister said Uganda holds the African Union's view of resolving the Ukrainian “through negotiations and through diplomatic means.”

During Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s visit to Uganda in July last year, Museveni said he saw no reason to criticise Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, extolling Russian-African friendship and praising Moscow as a partner in the struggle against colonialism going back a century.

"If Russia makes mistakes then we tell them," Museveni was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying, citing his participation in student demonstrations against the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Soviet Union in 1968.

"But when they have not made a mistake we cannot be against them," he said at the time.

Uganda was among the 17 African nations that abstained in a March 2022 vote on a United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion, which was supported by 141 countries out of 193.