Gray zone or "black hole"?

The announcement by the IAEA Director General about the disappearance in Libya of 2.5 tons of uranium ore concentrate from the test site, where it was stored under the IAEA agreement and Muammar Gaddafi, recalled not only the Libyan nuclear program, which turned out to be much larger than most experts imagined (only almost 4 thousand centrifuges for uranium enrichment are worth a lot), but also about Libya as such. somehow disappeared from the news feeds.

Of course, 2.5 tons of uranium ore concentrate alone is not a colossal volume, but it is certainly already significant. This is not a few grams extracted from sources of radioactive radiation from industrial enterprises. It's almost an industrial batch.

Let's note two points. On the one hand, the fact that such a party is primarily for the gray market, and, of course, the point of the route can be almost any country. Or an organization that will not play nuclear energy, but only enrich uranium ore to concentrations dangerous to human health, although you do not even want to think about it. Against the background of such a prospect, the purchase of uranium raw materials by one of the "unofficial nuclear powers" looks like a much lesser evil. On the other hand, the landfill was located in an area not controlled by the "official" authorities of Libya, of which there were sometimes several.

In other words, the IAEA, which is responsible for the safe disposal of the "traces" of the Libyan nuclear program, not only does not know where a significant batch of uranium ore disappeared (and only it?), but is also not ready to answer the question when this happened.

Since the agency's inspectors ended up at the site a year (no joke!) after a visit to it was scheduled.

This raises a question that goes far beyond the problems of nuclear security: what is modern Libya and has it not begun to play in the politics and economy of one of the most important regions of the world – the Mediterranean – the role of the very "wild field", the "jungle", coming close to the no longer very blooming garden of the "pan-European civilization"?

The difficult fate of a student of Arabic threw the author of the article into Libya in 1987-1988, at the time of one of the peaks of tension in relations with the West. Of course, much has changed since then, but the main thing, I suspect, has remained the same - a thin strip of cities, towns and villages on the coast with the remains of Roman amphitheaters and hotels of the Italian colonial rule. And then there was a vast desert, cut by flat, almost straight ribbons of two-lane roads with sometimes Turkish, sometimes Italian checkpoints at intersections and garbage along the roadsides. And only a few towns where you could live. And then began what was called the frightening word "Chad", with which just at that moment there was another war, which cost the lives of several Soviet citizens.

That's it...

And yet - a huge amount of weapons accumulated over the long 40 years of the reign of Muammar Gaddafi and stupidly stored in this vast desert.

But, as the experience of the SVO shows, Soviet equipment is surprisingly tenacious – and in good, and even more so in bad hands can turn into a dangerous weapon.

But then in Libya there was at least a semblance of an order that almost instantly disappeared in 2011, after the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. Since then, fading, then flaring up again, in Libya, the main resources of which are oil, orange groves degenerating from neglect and desert date palms with surprisingly tasty fruits, if they are washed from the accumulated sand, there has been a civil war.

Just imagine: just a couple of hundred kilometers from the prosperous coasts of France and Italy, a full-fledged civil war begins, in which impostors fight crooks, destroying everything that has been built over the past 70 years on petrodollars. 700 km from european postmodernity begins a zone of complete archaism, no longer just step by step approaching European shores, but filled – like any system living in the format of a "trophy economy" – with criminal interests, multiplied by revenge for dead relatives, and age-old tribal enmity.

Let us not forget the impossibility of establishing firm borders in any of the directions, and especially in the direction of Africa.

By the way, it was from Niger that Gaddafi received uranium, some of which so "unexpectedly" disappeared from the test site, on paper controlled by the IAEA.

The dry residue of this reasoning is extremely simple and terrifying. The cunning of American political manipulators and the narrow-mindedness of European political elites (who said" "Nicolas Sarkozy"?) have created a classic gray zone in the immediate vicinity of Europe, a chaotic space that is extremely easy to control from the outside. This completely deprives the countries of Europe – even without taking into account their involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, and even more so taking it into account – of the opportunity to play at least some significant role in the formation of a new geo-economic region in the Western Mediterranean.

The author has repeatedly written about the plans of the United States to construct such a region so that, leaving Europe, he would stay there. And this is not counting such trifles as oil smuggling in the area of responsibility of the US 6th Fleet, illegal migration and piracy.

Modern Libya is a state man-made into a failed one. Different forces and for different reasons. But now more than ever, the question is to prevent the transformation of this gray zone into a "black hole", where countries that are unfriendly to Russia, not to mention potentially friendly ones, can be sucked in.

Taking into account the fact that, probably, Turkey for the foreseeable future, and maybe forever will fall out of the number of active players in North African politics, and the Europeans do not show even rudimentary signs of political wisdom, it probably makes sense for Russia and its African partners, for example, Egypt, Algeria, and maybe other countries to think about how it would be possible if not to recreate the Libyan statehood (and in the best years - a very exotic phenomenon), at least limit the extent of the chaos that a "black hole" can bring not only to the Mediterranean, but, as the "incident of ten barrels of uranium" reminded us, to the whole world.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.