EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 26/07/2023

South China Morning Post – Shi Jiangtao / China replaces Qin Gang with Wang Yi, but big political questions linger after foreign minister change-up

• China has replaced its foreign minister Qin Gang with his predecessor Wang Yi in an unprecedented move that leaves more questions than answers to one of the most engrossing political dramas in recent years.
• Citing a decision by the nation’s top legislation body, state media said simply on Tuesday that Qin, who disappeared from the public view in June, was removed from his position.
• The reports did not elaborate or say what will happen to the former senior diplomat or his other responsibilities.
• Qin, who was promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping just seven months ago, is also a state councillor and a member of the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee.

Financial Times – Max Seddon, David Pilling, Joseph Cotterill and Andres Schipani / Russia hits out at west for pressing African leaders to miss St Petersburg summit

• The Kremlin has complained about western pressure to stop African leaders attending an important summit in Russia this week, with less than half as many making the trip as when the Kremlin previously staged the event. 
• Yuri Ushakov, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, said on Wednesday that 21 heads of state and government would attend the summit in St Petersburg — a drop from 43 at the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019. 
• The limited representation is a blow for Putin, who has used Russia’s strong ties with Africa and sensitivity to his war’s effect on global agricultural markets as a wedge to rally sympathy for his stance on Ukraine. 
• The list of notable absentees includes the leaders of several big African countries, including Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu and Kenya’s William Ruto, as well as Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to senior officials from those countries.

Politico – Nicolas Camut / Russia raises maximum military draft age to 30

• The lower house of the Russian parliament on Tuesday voted in favor of a bill increasing the maximum conscription age for military service from 27 to 30, in a renewed push by the Kremlin to recruit soldiers to fuel its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• This means that starting January 1, 2024, men aged 18-30 will be subjected to compulsory one-year military service, Russian state-owned newswire TASS reported.
• The bill still needs to be approved by the parliament’s upper house and signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to become law. In recent months, Putin has repeatedly sought to expand the military draft to feed Moscow’s army, which has seen conscripts being sent to the front lines in Ukraine.
• Last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, announced that his troops would not return to fight in Ukraine after relocating to Belarus following an aborted mutiny against Russia’s military leadership last month.

Financial Times – Andy Bounds and Ian Johnston / Brussels thrashes out plan to move Ukrainian grain through EU ports

• The EU could provide alternative routes for almost all of Ukraine’s grain exports following Russia’s decision to stop their passage through the Black Sea, the bloc’s agriculture commissioner said. 
• Janusz Wojciechowski said on Tuesday that the EU should expand its “solidarity lanes” — road, river and rail links first established in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — to enable more food from Ukraine and Moldova to transit to EU ports for onward shipment to Africa and Asia. 
• “We are ready to export by solidarity lanes almost everything Ukraine needs [to send] . . . about 4mn tonnes a month. We achieved this volume in November 2022,” he told a press conference in Brussels after a meeting of agriculture ministers. The EU solidarity lanes currently carry about 60 per cent of Ukraine’s grain exports, with the remaining 40 per cent going via the Black Sea.
• Russia’s decision earlier this month to withdraw from the UN-backed Black Sea Grain Initiative, which guaranteed safe passage for ships using the route, has sent prices rising. Wheat prices climbed to a five-month high on Tuesday, after Russia expanded its attacks to ports that ship grain by river to Romania and destroyed a grain silo in Odesa. 

Our opinion reads for today:

• Project Syndicate – Anne-Marie Slaughter and Fadi Chehadé / AI’s Pugwash moment
• Financial Times – Martin Wolf / Modi’s India is moving in an illiberal direction