Mercenaries, missionaries, and mining As local leaders decry Western neocolonialism, Russia is carving out its own sphere of influence in Africa
Moscow’s foreign policy has zeroed in on Africa in recent years. The shift is partially due to commercial interests, including access to resources like gold, uranium, and bauxite. But it’s also political: having broken ties with the West, Russia is rapidly trying to build up a sphere of influence. Kremlin officials frequently accuse the West of neocolonialism, yet their approach in Africa is full of its own patterns of exploitation and control. Meduza explores how Russia has managed to ramp up its influence in Africa since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Edging out France
During a tour of Africa in March 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “The time of Françafrique is over.”
The term “Françafrique” refers to France’s traditional sphere of influence in its former African colonies, primarily in West Africa. These are countries where French remains the official language, the CFA franc currencies are still in circulation, and many families continue to send their children to study in France. These countries’ state institutions and borders were shaped by French colonial rule. Civil wars are a recurring feature of the region’s modern history, and France has a long track record of military intervention. French companies and politicians have also repeatedly been implicated in corruption scandals in the region. Activist François-Xavier Verschave once called Françafrique “the longest-running scandal in French history.”
Macron was not the first French president to promise an end to neocolonialism in Africa. His predecessor, François Hollande, also proclaimed the death of Françafrique — yet it was under Hollande that France launched Operation Serval in Mali, followed by Operation Barkhane, which extended across Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad. The official aim was to fight jihadist movements in West Africa — including local branches of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and affiliated groups.
Initially, the region’s governments — poor and politically fragile — welcomed French assistance and cooperated with Paris. But that dynamic has shifted dramatically in recent years.
At the first Russia–Africa summit in Sochi in 2019, Guinean President Alpha Condé privately asked Vladimir Putin to support his bid to remain in power beyond his constitutional term limit. Putin agreed. A 2020 referendum reset Condé’s term count, and he was subsequently re-elected.
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That same year, a military junta led by Assimi Goïta came to power in Mali through a coup. In 2022, two coups took place in Burkina Faso, ultimately leading to a junta headed by Ibrahim Traoré seizing control. In 2023, a coup occurred in Niger, led by a junta under Abdramane Chiani. In all of these cases, the new authorities announced almost immediately that they were expelling the French from their countries and would establish military and economic cooperation with Russia. At pro-junta rallies, demonstrators waved not only national flags, but Russian ones as well.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, operatives linked to Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin quickly arrived. Wagner forces provided security for the new regimes, while gold mines were nationalized and handed over to Russian companies. In Niger, the same pattern played out — but with uranium instead of gold.
Guinea proved more complex. Russia’s main foothold there was the aluminum giant Rusal, which had operated in the country since 2001. Guinea holds the world’s largest reserves of bauxite — the raw material used to make aluminum. Russia, meanwhile, has little bauxite of its own. Rusal’s Australian assets are unavailable due to sanctions, and Chinese supplies mostly go to the domestic market.
To help Condé stay in power, Rusal enlisted the services of Viktor Boyarkin — a former GRU officer, ex-aide to Russia’s military attaché in the U.S., one-time international arms dealer, and the ex-head of Rusal’s security division. Boyarkin had previously been linked to the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and to a failed coup attempt in Montenegro in 2018. The strategy appeared to pay off — until Condé was overthrown in a military coup in September 2021. Since then, Rusal has faced mounting challenges: Guinea’s new government has accused the company of tax violations, labor abuses, and more.
After Prigozhin’s attempted mutiny and subsequent death in the summer of 2023, Wagner’s operations in Africa were taken over by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. In Burkina Faso, Wagner forces were briefly replaced by fighters from the 81st Special Purpose Brigade — known as the “Bears” — a volunteer unit recruited through Redut, a GRU-affiliated mercenary group. Officially, they withdrew from Burkina Faso in August 2024.
The Russian Orthodox Church moves in
In late 2021, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church established the Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa, appointing Archbishop Leonid (Gorbachev) of Klin as its head. The move was another consequence of the broader schism in global Orthodoxy triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
For centuries, Africa had been considered canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria — one of the four ancient Orthodox patriarchates, alongside Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem. But in 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople recognized the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, effectively granting it independence from the Moscow Patriarchate. Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria was among the decision’s supporters.
The Moscow Patriarchate considers the Orthodox Church of Ukraine schismatic and labels Orthodox leaders who support it as either outright schismatics or at least “on the path to schism.” In response to Patriarch Theodoros’s recognition of its autocephaly, the Russian Church withdrew all of its African parishes from Alexandria’s jurisdiction and declared it would accept any clergy who wished to break away from the Alexandrian Church. Thus, the African Exarchate was born.
Archbishop Leonid — later promoted to Metropolitan — had previously served as the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative to the Alexandrian Patriarch from 2004 to 2013. He later worked in South America and the Caucasus. Novaya Gazeta reported that Leonid may have had ties to networks connected with Yevgeny Prigozhin: parishes under his exarchate often appeared in regions where Wagner forces were active, such as the Central African Republic, Congo, and Mali.
Leonid, known for his fiery, ultra-patriotic rhetoric, soon found himself at odds with Metropolitan Antony (Sevryuk), the newly appointed head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations. Church conservatives saw Antony as overly liberal and too accommodating to the West. Leonid lost the ensuing power struggle. On September 8 — just two weeks after Prigozhin’s death, though whether the timing was coincidental remains unclear — he was dismissed as rector of the Church of All Saints at Kulishki in Moscow. Soon afterward, the Church’s highest court opened a case against him over alleged violations during the handover of that parish. In the following months, he was stripped of all clerical roles and sent into retirement in Krasnodar, where he had grown up and begun his church career.
The new exarch became Konstantin (Ostrovskiy), Bishop (later Metropolitan) of Zaraysk, former rector of the Kolomna Theological Seminary and founder of the Moscow City Diocese’s missionary department. Though not necessarily more moderate, Konstantin is certainly more restrained and less publicly outspoken. His most high-profile moment as exarch came in April 2024, during a trip to Malawi, where he baptized nearly 1,000 people in just three days. The exarchate’s charity initiatives, primarily church construction, have focused mainly on Kenya, one of the continent’s more stable and prosperous countries.
Russia’s interest in Malawi, by contrast, is largely political. In 2023, Moscow donated 20,000 tons of fertilizer to the country and explicitly asked the government to support lifting international sanctions on Russia. Malawi is a poor, agrarian nation with few valuable natural resources — unlike Guinea or Burkina Faso — so Russia’s goals there center on cultivating pro-Russian sentiment and converting it into diplomatic support. The effort has seen modest success: while Malawi voted in favor of a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it abstained in 2025.
New frontiers for Russian state-controlled media
In February 2025, Sputnik — the Russian state media agency aimed at international audiences — opened a new office in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Dmitry Kiselyov, head of Sputnik’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya and one of Russia’s most prominent pundits, stressed that this was not just another foreign press bureau but a fully-fledged Ethiopian media outlet that would employ dozens of local journalists and report in Amharic, the country’s official language.
Kiselyov also announced plans for similar outlets in South Africa and Tanzania. In addition to English, French, and Amharic, these outlets would broadcast in Hausa and Swahili — the most widely spoken languages in West and East Africa, respectively.
RT (also owned by Rossiya Segodnya) is often compared to Qatar’s Al Jazeera — a channel built to Western media standards but offering a distinctly non-Western, and at times anti-Western, perspective. But there’s a fundamental difference: Al Jazeera is not just a mouthpiece for Qatar. It serves as a genuine, homegrown voice for the Arabic-speaking world, giving it real global influence and making it one of Qatar’s most powerful foreign policy tools. Its English-language service plays a secondary role to the Arabic one.
RT and Sputnik do play a similar role for Russian-speaking audiences abroad. But their primary function is to serve as updated versions of Cold War-era propaganda outlets — aimed not at informing domestic audiences, but at influencing foreign ones.
Ethiopia was a natural choice for Sputnik’s first editorial hub in sub-Saharan Africa. For much of the early 21st century, it was among the continent’s most stable countries. In 2018, it signed a peace agreement with Eritrea after years of conflict, and the following year, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time, he was a poster child for Western-aligned African leadership: democratically elected, progressive, pragmatic, and focused on development rather than denouncing neocolonialism.
Then came the Tigray War (2020–2022), which left up to 400,000 dead, displaced over three million people, and pushed 13 million into hunger, all sparked by a violent conflict over the autonomy of the Tigray region. With his relationship with the West rapidly deteriorating, Ali turned to Russia. In 2023, he attended the Russia–Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. The following year, Ethiopia joined BRICS, began receiving Russian assistance in building a navy (despite being landlocked, it had secured a naval base in Somaliland), started cooperating with Russia in the nuclear sector, and expanded bilateral trade.
For Rossiya Segodnya, Ethiopia is now friendly ground. Meanwhile, in countries where it lacks such privileged access, it often relies on local partners. One key ally is Afrique Média, a French-language TV network based in Cameroon that played a central role in stoking anti-French sentiment across West Africa.
The broader propaganda campaign against Françafrique — backed behind the scenes by Rossiya Segodnya and Prigozhin-linked bot farms — was timed to coincide with the arrival of Wagner Group forces in the region and a wave of military coups. The campaign was hardly subtle, but it was effective. From press conferences and interviews with new leaders to viral clips and memes, the message was consistent: the French are colonizers; the Russians are partners.
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This media machine shows no sign of slowing down. Among other things, it’s helping to build a full-blown cult of personality around the young president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré — not just at home, but across the continent. Traoré’s image is modeled on that of Thomas Sankara, who seized power in a 1983 military coup at age 33, renamed the country from its colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (“Land of Upright People”), and was assassinated in a 1987 coup. Traoré also casts himself in the mold of Che Guevara: a young, charismatic, defiant military leader in uniform standing up to imperialism.
Russia’s Africa pivot is already taking on the characteristics of a state-backed mega-project: seeing how important it is to Putin and his inner circle, a wide range of institutions are trying to figure out how to get involved. For example, the presidential administration’s domestic policy team is preparing to help Mali create a new electoral system, assist eastern Libya (led by military commander Khalifa Haftar) with writing a new constitution, and provide “political consulting services” to the authorities in Chad.
The head of this team, Kremlin First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko, has long sought to expand his department’s influence into foreign affairs — and he’s had some success. In 2022, Putin effectively made him the “viceroy of Donbas.” In 2025, he oversaw the presidential election in Abkhazia, managed relations with South Ossetia, and played a role in Moldova, where pro-Russian forces remain a key component of the opposition. Africa may now offer him a chance to scale up his influence even further.
Story by Tamid Aief