(Own report) – Following the total failure in Mali, the EU is now preparing a military operation in neighboring Niger. The decision on the deployment, recently announced by EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell, could already be made during the EU Foreign Ministers meeting in two weeks. Unlike Mali, whose cooperation with Russia is steadily growing, and Burkina Faso, which is also orienting more toward Moscow, Niger’s government, until now, loyally cooperated with the West. It already hosts numerous western troops, including a US base for drones and a Bundeswehr airlift base. Borrell had described the planned deployment as a “partnership mission” – acknowledging “that we have to be working with the Nigerian army on an equal basis.” Just recently Borrell had compared Europe to a “garden” and the “rest of the world” to a “jungle,” that the EU had to prevent from invading. As the EU seeks to entrench itself in Niger, that country, for its part, is beginning to open up to Russian influence – as had Mali, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic before.