Russia is to blame for coups in the African Sahel, according to a new analysis by the Pentagon’s top Africa researcher, which ignores the U.S. role in training leaders of these mutinies — and two decades of failed U.S. counterterrorism policies in the region.

The article, which calls for “standing up to Africa’s juntas,” fails to mention that at least 15 military officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror.

“An alarming string of military coups across the Sahel in recent years has greatly marginalized Western engagement in this important and highly volatile region,” wrote Jeffrey Smith, the founding director of the pro-democracy nonprofit organization Vanguard Africa, and Joseph Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, in a recent article published in the Journal of Democracy as well as the Africa Center.

Focusing specifically on the mutinies in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, they note, “Russia has had an active and not-so-subtle hand in coups in each of these three countries, which were preceded by at least a year of intensive disinformation aimed at destabilizing the democratically elected (and Western-leaning) governments in place.”

A series of........

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