L. Fituni, I. Abramova Resource Potential of Africa and Russia's ...

Another goal set is to assist the efforts aimed to settle the regional
conflicts and crisis situations in Africa, to promote dialogue with the
African Union and subregional organizations. Russia is interested in
the establishment of peace and security in Africa, in its stable socioeconomic
development, because that constitutes an essential component
of collective security system, offers new possibilities for the expansion
of Russia – Africa economic and political relations.
In the field of economic cooperation it is the collaboration in the
sphere of natural resources that enjoys a particularly dynamic revival.
There are two tracks of such collaboration. The first one stems from
the fact that Africa and Russia own over 60% of the world natural
recourses and their interaction in this field is natural and can be of
great benefit to both. The countries that God blessed with mineral
wealth should join forces to safeguard their sovereign right to control
this wealth especially in the face of attempts to declare it “an international
asset” under a false pretext of “reestablishing justice”. They
have to coordinate their efforts in the global markets to counter,
among other things, the speculative spasmodic leaps of prices.
This research is based mainly on international statistics and
open source data. We relied on internationally acknowledged
sources (such as UNCTAD, UNIDO, US Geological service, etc.)
for the statistical information. Much help came from the Russian
specialists and experts in the field of geology, prospecting and international
economic cooperation with the countries of Africa, who
work in relevant government agencies of the Russian Federation.
In analyzing the past Russian experience in economic cooperation
with Africa the authors relied on the original Soviet statistics on
foreign trade and international economic and technical cooperation
with African countries and the research undertaken in the Institute
for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (at that
time Academy of Sciences of the USSR) in which both authors
themselves took active part.
At that time the results of such studies took form of internal
working memoranda prepared at the Institute for the Soviet external
economic agencies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (usually at
that time prepared as confidential or secret papers) and open publi-
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