Ukraine

• Today is the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the one-year mark and demanding a withdrawal.
• The vote was far from unanimous: 141 countries supported it, seven - including Russia, naturally - opposed it, and 37 abstained.
• That said, SecState Blinken said he thinks some abstainers - like India and South Africa - are probably moving away from alignment with Russia, but "it's not flipping a light switch."

Russia

• Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said Russia's defense ministry agreed to give his fighters the ammunition they needed in Ukraine, following Prigozhin's loud public pleas for it.
• Separately, the FT reported that Prigozhin seemingly easily used gas bills in his mom's name to satisfy anti-money laundering requirements and get a UK law firm to take him on as a client in 2021 - while he was under UK, EU, and U.S. sanctions. That begs the question: what's the point of sanctions if they're so easy to evade?

China

• Pres. Putin implied that Chinese president Xi Jinping plans to visit Russia in a show of support for the "new frontiers" of their partnership.
• NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg echoed U.S. concerns that China may be planning to send weapons to Russia and urged China not to.
• China denied it was considering the idea of sending Russia weapons, but Der Spiegel - a German newspaper - reported that Russia is in talks to buy around 100 armable ZT-180 drones from Chinese manufacturer Xian Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology for delivery in April.
• Russia is thought to have bought weapons - including drones - from Iran and North Korea, but this could be its first arms purchase from China.

DRC

• A South China Morning Post article (pasted below) suggests some of DRC's motivation in calling out China's failure to invest as promised in Congolese infrastructure may be political: Pres. Tshisekedi is up for reelection in December, and if he can strongarm China into boosting its investments it will score him political points.
• Separately, the U.S. demanded that all armed groups in eastern DRC - including the M23, Allied Democratic Forces, and CODECO - immediately cease hostilities and unconditionally withdraw. If only it were so easy...
• This time the U.S. also explicitly called on Rwanda "to cease support for the M23 armed group and to withdraw its troops from the DRC." The U.S. had accused Rwanda of backing the M23 before, but this is the first time it also suggested Rwanda had illegally deployed troops to DRC.

Venezuela

• Trinidad and Tobago will begin formal negotiations with Venezuela over the Dragon gas field project next month, according to Trinidad's energy minister. The project was idled over ten years ago, but just received U.S. approval to resume in January.

Nigeria

• The first round of Nigeria's general election is today. There are four frontrunners in the presidential race to replace outgoing president Buhari; insecurity and the economy are key election issues.

Other News

• Pres. Biden nominated former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga to be the next World Bank president, in a symbolic shift towards greater concern for climate change: in contrast with outgoing World Bank president David Malpass - who was criticized for climate complacency - Banga made climate topics a key focus during his time at Mastercard.

Is Chinese-controlled copper and cobalt mining joint venture being turned into a political pawn in Congo? (SCMP)

Politics could be at play in the latest falling-out between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Chinese companies over a US$6 billion minerals-for-infrastructure deal signed more than a decade ago that Kinshasa says was poorly negotiated and favoured the Chinese side.

DRC President Felix Tshisekedi will be seeking re-election on December 20, and observers say the DRC government is stepping up pressure on Sicomines, a joint venture by the DRC and Chinese companies, to force the renegotiation of the deal signed in 2008 as part of a plan to use the infrastructure projects as a campaign tool.

The DRC's General Inspectorate of Finance released a report last week that said the DRC was yet to benefit from the deal.

State-owned Congolese commodity trading and mining company Gecamines formed the joint venture with a consortium of Chinese companies led by Sinohydro and China Railway Group to trade infrastructure such as roads and hospitals for copper and cobalt, with the Chinese side taking a 68 per cent stake in Sicomines.

The Chinese companies agreed to invest US$3 billion in DRC infrastructure, funded from the mine's revenue, and another US$3 billion to develop a copper and cobalt mine.

But the state auditor said the amount invested in infrastructure should be increased to US$20 billion - reflecting the value of the mineral resources that Gecamines contributed to the deal. The report said Gecamines had made available mineral deposits estimated to be worth more than US$90 billion.

It said Kinshasa had not been adequately compensated for the copper and cobalt reserves it contributed to the deal, which was signed when Joseph Kabila, Tshisekedi's predecessor, was president. The report said Chinese companies had exploited mineral resources worth US$10 billion but had only built infrastructure estimated to be worth US$822 million, and demanded that projects worth US$17 billion be added to Sicomines' infrastructure investment in the DRC.

The Chinese embassy in the DRC and Sicomines strongly contested the contents of the report, which the embassy said was "full of prejudice".

"We regret to note that the report, the content of which is full of prejudice, does not correspond to reality," an embassy spokesperson said.

The embassy said it was an "undeniable fact' that the Congolese side had benefited from the minerals-for-infrastructure deal, and it was ready to protect Chinese investments.

It said it would "firmly defend the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises and resolutely retaliate against any violation" of them.

Sicomines disputed the content of the report, the auditor's competence and the procedures it followed.

"The unjustified criticisms and measures implemented against Sicomines are detrimental to the proper functioning of this company," it said in a statement issued on February 17. "The security of private investments, national or foreign, is guaranteed in the DRC and the commitments made with regard to investors cannot be flouted."

Christian-Geraud Neema, a Congolese mining analyst and the francophone editor at The China Global South Project, said the timing of the report hinted at a political motive behind its publication.

He said the Sicomines deal was the only Chinese deal with an infrastructure component and there was still US$1.8 billion to be disbursed for that.

"Putting pressure now may lead to some infrastructure that may help President Tshisekedi's campaign," Neema said.

The Chinese companies' troubles began in June 2021, when Tshisekedi vowed to review deals that he said were skewed in favour of foreign mining companies and denied the Congolese people their fair share of benefits from the sale of their nation's minerals. However, China says it has built several projects in the Central African nation despite obstacles, including a lack of power to develop the mines.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Tshisekedi said the DRC had not benefited from the mining minerals-for-infrastructure deal with the Chinese companies.

"The Chinese, they've made a lot of money and made a lot of profit from this contract," Tshisekedi told Bloomberg News. "Now our need is simply to rebalance things in a way that it becomes win-win."

Neema said whether Tshisekedi would push through with the renegotiation of the Sicomines deal was hard to determine. He said that taking into account the conditions under which the deal was signed and implemented, "would there be enough grounds to go to an international arbitration court or any international court of justice to make their cases? Would the DRC government want that?"

He said that "in a country where corruption and bad governance have been the norm in the mining industry, it's not certain that any side would want to go public".

Greg Miller, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence in London, said the deals were agreed to by Kabila, "and if the current administration can win a big new deal it'll help the re-election effort".

But Miller said such renegotiations would not help the investment environment in the DRC, which produces more than 70 per cent of the world's cobalt, and that could be an issue as the electric vehicle battery market would need more copper and cobalt.

Neema said that in the context of geopolitical competition between China and the West, any setback for China in the DRC was good news for the West, but that did not mean it would benefit materially.

"Because they would have to enter a country known for its corruption," he said. "If Chinese companies are willing to play ball; Western companies not so much. And Chinese companies have so many other copper-cobalt deals in the DRC."

In a thinly veiled attack on China at the Indaba Mining Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, early this month, Jose Fernandez, the US undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, said "experience shows that economic development that only benefits a few is not sustainable".

"During Pope Francis' visit to the DRC, he denounced the 'economic colonialism' that results in the DRC and others not benefiting from their 'immense resources'," Fernandez said in a speech at the conference. "I know that since I'm a Catholic, you wouldn't expect me to contradict his Holiness, but believe me, the Pope has a point."

At the US-Africa Leaders Summit in December, the United States announced that it would help the DRC and Zambia develop their electric vehicle battery value chains. The resource-rich African nations signed a memorandum of understanding with the US to bring funding and expertise to their mining industries.

The US entry into the electric vehicle metals race in the DRC and Zambia puts Washington in direct competition with Beijing, which has vast mining investments in the two countries.

Sicomines is not the only Chinese-controlled joint venture facing scrutiny.

The DRC formed a commission in 2021 to determine and assess the mineral resources and proven and probable mining reserves at the Tenke Fungurume Mining copper and cobalt project, which is majority-owned by China Molybdenum, to help determine the true value of the government's 20 per cent stake in TFM through Gecamines.