Dead soldiers, caked in blood and dirt, litter the ground. Their body armor has been torn off, and their guns lie strewn on the road. In the background, jihadis can be heard yelling “God is great” over and over again.
The shaky mobile phone footage shows the aftermath of a roadside ambush in central Mali in November. Foreign Policy could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video, but according to reports, at least seven Russian soldiers were killed by Katiba Macina, an Islamist group allied with al Qaeda, during the incident.
These are images that the Kremlin does not want Africans to see. Moscow’s immense propaganda machine on the continent projects Russia as a great power standing up for the liberation of Africans and the sovereignty of their nations. To bolster its narrative, Russia can leverage memories of Soviet support for anti-colonial insurgencies that fought to dislodge Western influence.
The reality is less glossy. Moscow is little more than an opportunistic purveyor of regime protection in return for predatory mining deals that help fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. To this end, Russia supplies mercenaries who have shown themselves to be fantastically under-equipped and overstretched for the immense tasks that they find themselves mixed up in. And with Russia itself overextended—its forces so embroiled in Ukraine that they could no longer protect a valuable client regime in Syria—the Kremlin’s narrative as Africa’s up-and-coming power is starting to crumble.
In every country that Russia has seriously engaged with in Africa—Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan, and the Central African Republic—the situation has become radically worse for civilians, with deaths from violence rising significantly. After an eruption of activity over the past few years, Moscow’s hand is weakening as many governments begin to sense the inevitable limits of what President Vladimir Putin has to offer. Now, as Russian forces reportedly begin to evacuate their Syrian air base and military logistics hub in Latakia, Russia’s hand in Africa looks set to be weaker still.
Take Mali, the cornerstone of the Kremlin’s West Africa strategy. Moscow played a stunning hand when it initially intervened in Mali. It sponsored disinformation campaigns that helped whip up anti-elite, anti-French, and anti-United Nations sentiment to a fever pitch. In 2020, Moscow threw its weight behind a coup by a group of Malian military officers. When similar Russian-supported military coups followed in Burkina Faso in 2021 and Niger in 2023, they ended up displacing a sprawling Western-led counterterrorism campaign and overturning the entire French-guaranteed security architecture of the region.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, chief sent around 1,500 Russian mercenaries to Mali. These troops were allegedly involved in perpetrating some of the worst massacres on the continent in recent years, including at the village of Moura in 2022, where the United Nations estimated that 500 men, women, and children were executed by Wagner and Malian forces. A U.N. report published in summer 2023 also documented systematic rapes of Malian women by Russian soldiers.
In late 2023, Wagner helped Malian forces take the northern town of Kidal, one of the first places to fall to Salafist rebels in 2012. The Malian army had struggled to regain control ever since, but with the Russians in the game, rebel forces seemed to melt away under a hail of drone attacks.
Wagner was widely lauded in the Malian capital, Bamako, and other West African capitals. Many regional officials were impressed by Russia’s ability to achieve a seemingly intractable policy objective for its African partner. But in reality, Kidal was a Pyrrhic victory. Western intelligence officials told Foreign Policy in conversations on background that the Russians were increasingly overstretched as they fought in the north, east, and center of a country twice the size of France.
In July 2024, what now seems inevitable happened: Trapped in a sandstorm, Wagner mercenaries suffered a stunning defeat in northern of Mali, with an estimated 80 Russians killed by hardened Tuareg fighters. The air of invincibility Moscow had so assiduously cultivated was shattered.
The Malian junta now seems set on diversifying away from Russia. This is partly due to the confusion since Prigozhin’s failed insurrection in June 2023 and death two months later, as well as the transfer of his mercenaries to a new group called the Africa Corps. Another reason for the cooling relationship with Moscow’s troops is that junta chief and interim President Assimi Goita wants to weaken the power base of Malian Defense Minister Sadio Camara, Russia’s key interlocutor in the country.
Turkey—not France or any other Western country—seems to be the main beneficiary of the diversification push so far. In November, a video emerged that reportedly showed Turkish trainers in Bamako doing drills with Malian troops, most probably Goita’s presidential guard. Then, in December, the regime used a Turkish Bayraktar drone to kill several rebel leaders in the north of the country.
In neighboring Burkina Faso, there are perhaps 200 Russians working mainly in disinformation operations, according to Le Monde. In Niger, there are probably only a few Russians based around Air Base 101 in the capital, Niamey. Overall, the Africa Corps seems to be struggling to recruit personnel to serve in Africa, and it probably has more men fighting in Ukraine than the Sahel. Western officials and other sources in the region who spoke with Foreign Policy indicate that the Russians are trying to plug gaps with local African mercenaries, albeit ineffectively.
In September, information emerged suggesting that Russia had deployed up to 200 military instructors, some of them supplied by Kremlin vassal Belarus, to help prop up the regime of aging dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea. What looks at first glance to be another Russian great-power play is, in reality, a sordid bargain basement deal, offering a survival package to a pallid, kleptocratic regime that has spent decades looting its people ragged. If Equatorial Guinea does face a serious upheaval, it is unlikely that a few hundred men from Minsk or Omsk would be able to hold the line.
Now, Russia’s already waning influence in Africa may face an even greater challenge: the knock-on effects of the collapse of the Assad regime, Russia’s client in the Middle East. The image of Moscow willingly abandoning—or simply being unable to protect—one of its oldest and closest allies will impact the thinking of those who flock to the Kremlin’s orbit for regime protection.
More immediately, Russia’s operations in Africa will be affected by the fate of its sprawling air force and logistics base in the Syrian city of Latakia. Given Moscow’s lack of consistent access to any seaport in sub-Saharan Africa, its operations are highly dependent on air bridges. Cargo planes have generally jumped first from Russia to Syria, then on to Libya, from which point they can scatter across the continent.
However, we must be cautious when speculating on the fate of Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base and the impact on Russia’s African logistics. Talks between the new Syrian government and Moscow are still ongoing. Flight tracking apps also show Russian government aircraft making the journey from Russia directly to Libya, apparently securing access through Turkish airspace. It is not clear if these flights carry heavy loads of armaments or just personnel.
Still, we cannot get away from the fact that Russia looks like a diminished force with fewer cards to play as it desperately tries to negotiate for its critical air base with the very rebels that the Russian Air Force spent years bombing in support of a murderous regime. The fact that Russia had a base near a mass grave thought to contain roughly 150,000 murdered people is hardly a good opening for negotiations.
Military power projection aside, the picture is hardly better for Moscow regarding economic engagement. Russia’s sanctioned war economy cannot hope to provide anywhere near the level of financial investment, humanitarian aid, or development support that the Western countries it is set on undermining can provide. Russia’s total trade with Africa hovered around $18.4 billion in 2022, less than the Netherlands’ trade with the continent.
Even when it comes to food security and delivery of grain, where Moscow could potentially have significant impact, the level of aid seems ridiculously small when compared to the humanitarian support provided by the European Union and others. European officials have told Foreign Policy in conversations on background that it has been surprisingly hard to track down information about whether promised Russian aid is ever actually delivered. It leaves one to wonder whether the Kremlin spends more money promoting occasional deliveries for propaganda purposes than on the deliveries themselves.
The fundamental strength of the Russian approach in Africa comes from communications. Moscow has invested serious personnel and resources in co-opting various African information systems, which are often far less developed and have far fewer safeguards than those in Asia, Europe, or North America.
Recent reporting on a whistleblower from the Central African Republic provides some insights into how this works in practice. Ephrem Yalike, a young journalist who took part in these disinformation campaigns, described how his Russian handlers used cash payments and brutal intimidation to generate positive media coverage of Russia and its mercenaries.
In a recent report for the European Council on Foreign Relations, I examined the extent of the rot. I looked at how pro-Kremlin media, Russian-paid local opinion leaders, and anonymous bots with pro-Russian messaging had achieved near dominance on X and YouTube when searching terms related to Niger or Chad. The story is much the same in Mali and Burkina Faso across mainstream social media outlets. And it’s likely that the situation is similar on popular messaging apps, where the data is harder to extract for analysis.
It is in the core strategic interests of Western states to push back against this trend in every way possible. This means coordination with African governments whose countries are being exposed to a torrent of hostile disinformation attacks aimed at destroying goodwill for democratic governance. It also means serious investment of resources and personnel in nonofficial communication channels that speak to people in their own language and expose what Russian mercenaries are doing, be it murder, rape, or the pillaging of African resources.
Russia’s influence on several African regimes is hanging by a thread. Holding it up is a mythology of Russian power driven by propaganda and the interest of a few regimes in securing their own rule. The Russians cast a long shadow in Africa. But they are not 10 feet tall.
The post Why Russia Is Not a Great Power in Africa appeared first on Foreign Policy.
