With arms shipments and military training, Russia deepens its influence across Africa

With the world focused on Middle East conflicts, Russia is quietly expanding its military and political presence in Africa, adding allies and boosting its influence in some of the continent’s most authoritarian states.

The latest Russian moves have exploited a vacuum left by U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration has abandoned Washington’s pressure tactics on the military juntas with whom the Kremlin has made inroads.

By broadening its African influence, Moscow aims to cultivate new partners who could be useful on the global stage as it fights to avoid international isolation and weaken the Western sanctions against it.

Russia has doubled down on its Africa strategy in recent weeks by sending weapons to Madagascar, training soldiers in the Republic of Congo, expanding a West African supply hub in Guinea and signing a co-operation deal with Togo, in addition to its regular support for military regimes in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Libya.

It has also expanded its political and diplomatic outreach, forging recent agreements in Ethiopia, South Sudan, Tanzania and South Africa. Under one particularly audacious deal, it will provide training to electoral officials in South Sudan, despite the fact Russia’s own elections are tightly controlled affairs in which opposition candidates are routinely banned.

A report this week by The Sentry, an independent investigative group, documented how Russia has expanded its use of an Atlantic Ocean port terminal in Guinea’s capital, Conakry. Large shipments of military vehicles and weapons are brought to the port in Russian cargo vessels. The supplies are then trucked to Mali in military convoys on a 1,000-kilometre overland route.

The weapons have included Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles, artillery pieces, motorboats, anti-aircraft systems, missiles, warplanes and other sophisticated hardware.

“This is not a shadow operation; it is a deliberate expansion of Russian power,” The Sentry said in a summary of its report. “Russia is quietly entrenching itself in Africa.”

Moscow gained its biggest foothold on the continent after a wave of military coups in West Africa from 2020 to 2023. The coup leaders in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso swiftly expelled Western forces and replaced them with Russian troops.

Russia today has about 1,500 soldiers deployed in Mali. They originally belonged to a Kremlin-linked military contractor, the Wagner Group, but in 2024 they were shifted into the Africa Corps, a new Russian agency under direct government control.

The Kremlin is now using the same model to widen its influence across Africa. In Guinea, for example, it is bolstering its links to the regime that seized power in a 2021 coup. This has allowed it to use the Conakry seaport as a key supply hub for its West Africa forces.

In Madagascar, after a military coup on the Indian Ocean island in October, the Russian government moved speedily to curry favour with the new regime, which soon agreed to send a delegation of senior officials to Moscow − its first overseas trip. To seal the deal, Russia has sent a series of weapons shipments to Madagascar over the past four months, including helicopters, armoured vehicles, assault rifles, pistols, ammunition and drones.

Moscow has also dispatched a team of military advisers to Madagascar to provide training for its armed forces. Video reports on the training have been broadcast by the Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today.

The sudden alliance between the two regimes has alarmed some Western diplomats, since Madagascar holds a strategic position on a key Indian Ocean shipping channel. Russia could also gain access to an abandoned French naval base in northern Madagascar, which has one of the deepest harbours in the region.

“The Kremlin is likely seeking to trade regime protection primarily for sea access with the Malagasy regime to bolster its power projection in the Indian Ocean,” researchers Yale Ford and Alexis Thomas wrote this month in an analysis for the U.S.-based Critical Threats Project.

The Trump administration has seemed unconcerned. In late February, it lifted sanctions on three senior Malian officials who had been penalized for their relationship with the Wagner Group. The move appeared to signal that Washington has dropped its objections to military links between Russia and Africa.

Leaked Russian documents, meanwhile, show that Moscow has intensified its propaganda campaign across the continent. The documents, obtained by African and European media outlets, show that Russia spent US$7.3-million in 2024 alone in secret payments to African journalists and social-media influencers in exchange for posts that denigrated France and promoted the Russian view of the Ukraine war.