Russia - Africa Relations
After a short post-Prigozhin lull and lacking the arms trade as an instrument, Ivan U. Klyszcz writes that Russia is pushing into the African continent in full. According to some estimates, Russia’s military footprint in Africa is growing, from an approximate 2-3 thousand Wagner fighters in the early 2020s, to now up to 6 thousand ex-Wagner and Africa Corps personnel, with new deployments in the Sahel. In addition, Moscow has opened two new embassies in the last few months (Burkina Faso and Equatorial Guinea, though with a new presence in Tripoli as well) and a host of ‘Russia House’ educational and propaganda outfits in several countries. In 2023, Russia-Africa trade grew to 21 billion USD and surpassed all Russian trade with the American continent.
The failure of Russia’s long travails of Western integration in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union exploded into the proxy war against the United States and NATO in Ukraine, and an historic shift in Moscow’s policies, Africa, in this regard, at the July 2023 Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, was seeningly on the Russian side of the divide. Having abandoned the Soviet Union’s rich legacy in Africa in the early 1990s, Moscow faced strong competition there. Compared to China’s Africa trade ($280 billion), or America’s ($60 billion), Russia’s is a puny $18 billion.
Russian policymakers increasingly see Africa – along with Asia and Latin America – as part of the rising wave that will help replace the current Western-dominated world order with a more diversified construct built around a number of civilizations. Since the early 1960s, Moscow’s Lumumba University had been a flagship for training African professionals in Russia. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, the school lost much of its luster. But this is now changing and the number of stipends for Africans to study in Russia is being tripled, and many Russian universities are encouraged to seek cooperation partners in Africa.
In late November 2024 the Russian delegation of Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Major General of the Main Directorate of the General Staff Andrei Averyanov visited various African countries. On November 26, Yevkurov and Averyanov visited Benghazi, Libya, where they met with the commanders of the 106th Operational Brigade and the Tarik Ben Ziyad Special Forces Brigade of the LNA.
The first stop of the visit, already as part of the delegation with Alexander Novak, was the capital of Mali, Bamako, where on November 28, a meeting was held with Interim President Assimi Goita and Prime Minister Abdoulaye Maiga. According to sources of the publication "African Initiative", Mali and Russia are ready to conclude agreements within the framework of which Russia will train the Malian military in the experience of the SVO, including the use of UAVs .
Next, a visit to Burkina Faso and a meeting with the country's Defense Minister Kassoum Coulibaly, where the parties discussed opportunities to ensure security in the country and the region, expanding the African Corps and training local troops. During the talks, the issue of opening the office of the Russian military attaché was also discussed .
The next stop on the route was Niger, where during talks with President Abdurrahmane Tchiani and Defense Minister Salifu Modi, issues of increasing military-technical cooperation, expanding the presence of the African Corps in the country and introducing best practices, including the use of UAVs , into the training of the Nigerian military were discussed. The day before the visit, on November 28, a batch of weapons and ammunition was delivered to Niger by An-124 VTA VKS aircraft. The final point was a visit to Togo, where the parties discussed the development of military-technical cooperation and the country's needs for security.
RT was seeking to expand its operations in Africa, with plans to broadcast in a number of local languages, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan revealed 09 November 2024. Simonyan made the remarks on Saturday during a session of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The inaugural ministerial conference of the forum is currently underway in the Sirius Federal Territory outside the Black Sea city of Sochi. The expansion of the outlet on the continent is in part fueled by the continuing Western assault against RT, Simonyan stated. The broadcasting bans imposed on RT due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict allowed it to redirect funding and focus its efforts elsewhere.
”We have reoriented the work of our French TV channel: It was shut down in Paris, in France – we moved it to Moscow, and now it works, of course, for French-speaking Africa,” Simonyan said, noting that the French-language channel has already reached an audience of around 215 million viewers on the continent. RT is seeking to expand its operations in Africa further, she stated, including broadcasts in a number of African languages. “We will expand our broadcasting, in the sense that we will directly broadcast in African languages... We currently have four English-language bureaus, and a large network of correspondents has been created,” she said.
RT Academy, an international education project of the RT global TV news network, was launched in Africa in September and has already proven to be extremely popular, with more than 1,000 journalists from the continent enrolling, Simonyan revealed. The largest number of reporters taking part in the project come from Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Tanzania, according to the editor-in-chief. The expansion of RT Academy in Africa has been met with some pushback in the West, Simonyan said. “We’ve launched the RT Academy in Africa, causing incredible indignation in the Western press and Western politics... They are calling these people who enrolled in our academy and trying to persuade them not to go there.”
After the 2023 death of the top of the private military company (PMC) “Wagner”, the Russian Ministry of Defense began to establish direct control over the “Wagnerites” in Africa. Natural wealth, enterprises, political influence over a number of African countries, as well as thousands of mercenaries on the continent are gradually coming under the direct command of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
According to analysts, practically nothing has changed in the structure and work of the Russian mercenary group in Africa: most commanders have retained their posts, and the militants continue to provide services to local regimes. In return, they share income from the extraction of natural resources. And the Kremlin propaganda calls all this security.
“In the near future, we expect that most of the contracts, one way or another given to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s companies, will be divided between affiliated companies with close people of Russian President Vladimir Putin. With the same Gennady Timchenko. There are already agreements, including in Syria,” noted Ilya Davlyatchin, a journalist with the opposition Telegram channel “We Can Explain.”
According to experts, most of the operations of the Wagner PMC under the control of the Ministry of Defense will continue. After all, Africa for Russia is a field for playing strategy, where Moscow, Beijing and Western countries are fighting for control. Here the Kremlin seeks to secure not only financial benefits, but also increased political influence.
“Russian geography in Africa is very broad. Having put its roots there, Russia actually captured quite a lot of oil fields, including in Syria. Well, there are a lot of diamond deposits. That is why Putin and Timchenko, and the entire Russian leadership are placing such a big bet on Africa. Well, under the conditions of sanctions, when Russia’s supplies of various components, for example, for aircraft and weapons, have greatly decreased, Africa is such a new front,” Davlyatchin added.
At the same time, the change in control led to a disruption in the logistics of the “Wagnerites” in Africa, the Institute for the Study of War writes in its report. Because of this, the rebel coalition Coordination of Azawad Movements was able to recapture the city of Burem in Mali from the Wagner group.
After colonial empires in Africa collapsed, Moscow did all it could to encourage “African comrades” to embrace socialism – but the romance didn’t last long. The USSR's focus on Africa was too intertwined with ideology to withstand the collapse of the socialist system. In the 1990s, when the USSR ceased to exist and Russia had too many problems of its own, the level of Moscow’s leverage in the continent fell drastically.
The collapse of the Soviet Union broke most of Russia's ties with Third World states. The Soviet ideological mission of fostering socialism also ceased. Russia was unable to continue economic subsidies to client regimes. Relations with Africa received a relatively low priority, and in 1992 Russia closed nine embassies and four consulates on that continent. Relations with some African states already had worsened in late 1991 when Yeltsin ordered the end of all foreign aid and demanded immediate repayment of outstanding debts. Most African states responded that their debts with the former Soviet Union should be forgiven or reduced because they had been largely military outlays resulting from a moribund superpower rivalry.
The first Russia-Africa summit was held in Sochi on October 23-24, 2019 under the co-chairmanship of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. The summit was attended by representatives of all 54 countries of the continent, and 43 of them were represented at the top level. The second Russia-Africa summit would take place in 2022. The summit should facilitate the further development of Russia’s relations with African states.
The African Union (AU) places great importance on its ties with Russia, which may play a key role in ensuring stability in Africa and facilitate the industrial development of the continent, Head of AU Strategic Partnerships Levi Uche Madueke said in an interview with TASS on 05 May 2021. "The issue of peace and security is <…> where Russia can play a key role. Issues relating to supporting Africa in industrialization, Russia can play a key role there. We have issues of infrastructure, issues of energy. We believe that Russia has a know-how to play a key role in this area," he stated, adding that Russia can also cooperate with Africa on issues of cyber-security. "The important thing is to identify very few areas, so that we will be able to work with Russia to deliver concrete results without engaging in too many things and not being able to deliver any," he pointed out. He noted that Africa has traditionally good ties with Russia, and the goal right now is to formalize them. Madueke hoped that the second Russia-Africa summit will facilitate this process.
The January 1993 draft foreign policy concept made no mention of Russian support for former Soviet client states in Africa or elsewhere. Instead, the concept emphasized the use of diplomatic leverage to induce payment of debts by those states. Beginning in mid-1994, a shift began toward increased economic ties with more economically developed African states such as South Africa and Nigeria.
The Central African Republic is an emerging venue for Russia’s evolving strategy in Africa. The CAR doesn’t boast Ethiopia’s booming economy or Angola’s deep oil reserves. It lacks a developed mining industry like Zambia or a strategic location like Djibouti. But the landlocked country of fewer than 5 million people, most of whom survive on subsistence farming, has something else of interest to Moscow: conflict.
Since 2013, the CAR has grappled with a protracted civil war. Russia has found opportunities to project power far beyond its borders and rekindle strategic partnerships in Africa that have been dormant since the end of the Cold War. Russia has stepped up its presence in the CAR in the past few years. But its strategies there, which rely on the use of private contractors and mercenary groups, have been employed since the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and, later, in Ukraine and Syria.
Mercenaries are an instrument which allows plausible deniability but also hard-power projection, which has multiple uses in contested areas. Moscow officially bans mercenaries and security companies, but ex-military or intelligence officers often organize them, providing close ties to the Kremlin. Their work, which Kiril Avramov, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Intelligence Studies Project. called “armed adventurism,” helped Russia rebound from isolation and advance its political objectives.
One company, Wagner Group, has come under increasing scrutiny. In the summer of 2018, three journalists investigating Wagner’s operations in the CAR were ambushed and killed. Footage captured by the journalists suggests Wagner may have been assisting both the government and rebels.
For Russia, private military contractors complement a broader strategy focused on strengthening state sovereignty. The Kremlin is trying to export counterrevolution. Rather than destabilize regimes, Russia looks for countries already besieged, from the CAR to Syria. These governments welcome help, and that provides Russia with multiple opportunities, from weapons deals to training programs.
And while Russia may not want the countries with which it aligns to plummet into chaos, quick resolutions to the battles it inserts itself into aren’t desirable, either. Drawn-out conflict means more time to sell arms, secure energy contracts and counterbalance China.
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