The Read
Beijing has displaced Moscow as the senior partner across the post-Soviet south, and the May 12 Tajikistan treaty makes that shift legally binding rather than reversible.
The Africa Corps failure in Mali is the first visible breakage of Russia's transactional security model, with cascade risk across Burkina Faso, Niger, and the wider Sahel.
A scaled-down Victory Day parade fits a pattern familiar from late-Soviet decline: regime symbols hollowing out faster than regime control.
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Africa Corps was forced out of Kidal after JNIM-FLA attacks killed Mali's defense minister, severing Moscow's key institutional tie to Bamako. A visibly reduced Victory Day in Moscow followed days later, with heavy hardware pared back amid drone-threat fears. China's $8 billion Tajikistan package then formalized Beijing's takeover of a country Moscow once treated as a security protectorate.
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