Putin’s desperate fight for global influence is turning into a quiet disaster
What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.
• Furious Putin is trapped in a gilded cage. Only death will free him• Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why• The worst war the Soviets ever fought is now haunting Putin• Putin has turned Russia into a ‘crack cocaine’ economy – he’s trapped• Putin is in retreat across the globe. But he has one great hope left for victory
In August 2024, in Kano, northern Nigeria’s commercial hub, a handful of tailors were arrested. Their alleged crime was stitching together strips of red, white and blue material. Soon afterwards, hundreds of youths took to the streets waving these newly made Russian tricolours, chanting “we are hungry” and calling on Vladimir Putin to “rescue” them.
Small wonder the Nigerian authorities were nervous. In the past few years, Russian flags have become a prominent symbol of anti-French sentiment and shifting military alliances right across the Sahel region from Mali and Burkina Faso to Niger.
Vladimir Putin has been conducting his own neo-colonial race for Africa, while he fights on with his war in Ukraine. Yet in both arenas, his ambitions are increasingly frustrated by setbacks.
Like China, Russia sees a vacuum in Africa left by Europe or the United States and has sought to capitalise on it. But the two countries have very different approaches. Beijing builds ports and railways while Moscow supplies guns and mercenaries. While China’s strategy is rooted in long-term economic investment, Russia has sought influence through security partnerships, often exchanging military support for mineral wealth and diplomatic leverage.
A month after the Kano arrests, across the border in neighbouring Chad, journalists gathered in N’Djamena’s leafy Farcha district for the launch of a new “Russian House”. Guests were served canapés and listened to Tchaikovsky while organisers promoted cultural ties and scholarship opportunities. Russian Houses, operated by Rossotrudnichestvo, an arm of Russia’s foreign ministry, portray themselves as institutions akin to the British Council, the Alliance Française or the Goethe-Institut. But beyond language classes and art exhibitions, they play another role: projecting Moscow’s power abroad while aiding intelligence gathering and propaganda.
On the other side of the continent, in Kenya’s poverty-stricken Migori County, I spoke to a priest trained in the Greek Orthodox Church who had recently switched jurisdictions. Under the Moscow Patriarchate, he explained, he got money for his local Alexander Nevsky kindergarten. It might seem odd to name an infants’ school in southwestern Kenya after a medieval Russian prince, and for worshippers to be singing Gospodi Pomiluj, or “Lord have mercy”. But this was far from an isolated incident. Since 2021, the Russian Orthodox Church has established 350 parishes across more than 30 African countries.
Taken together, the flag-waving crowds, the cultural cocktail party and the parishioners chanting in Church Slavonic offer revealing snapshots of Russia’s scramble for Africa.
Yet claims of the Kremlin’s growing influence in Africa are starting to unravel. Russia was never able to rival China’s vast investments in infrastructure. Instead, it expanded its footprint through churches, cultural centres and mercenary networks — often tied to mineral exploitation and support for authoritarian regimes.
Today, the Wagner Group, once led by Putin’s former chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been largely replaced by the Africa Corps. That outfit – with a name which echoes the 1941 Nazi expeditionary force of Erwin Rommel – is now under Russian government control following Prigozhin’s failed mutiny and subsequent death in a plane crash. But the rebranded successor to Wagner was recently jeered in a humiliating retreat after several military bases fell to rebels in northern Mali.
Mali’s ruling junta turned to Moscow five years ago for help battling insurgents. By 2023, the Russians and the Malian army managed to seize Kidal, 1,000 miles northeast of the capital Bamako, ending nearly a decade of rebel rule. The Kremlin promised security and, in return, gained access to gold, diamonds and uranium.
Recent attacks by al Qaeda-linked fighters and Tuareg rebels have exposed the limits of that bargain. Footage of Russian paramilitaries being driven out of the mineral-rich town of Kidal by separatist Tuaregs, abandoning their Malian comrades alongside armoured personnel carriers, patrol vehicles and jeeps, has raised doubts about Moscow’s ability to sustain authoritarian allies across Africa. Both the Wagner mercenaries and their successors in the Africa Corps already had a reputation for brutality, accused of torture and summary killings. Now, their military prowess and intelligence gathering capabilities have also been called into question.
At the same time, Russia is aggressively recruiting African men to fight in Ukraine. Since it launched the full-scale invasion, Russia has suffered more than one million casualties, as around 1,000 troops a day are killed or seriously wounded. To keep the war machine running, Moscow needs 30,000 to 40,000 new recruits every month. Putin is too scared of a political backlash to order mass mobilisation. When partial mobilisation was announced six months into the war, more than a quarter of a million Russians swiftly fled the country.
Some Africans go willingly as mercenaries, attracted by monthly salaries of up to $3,000 (£2,230), lump-sum payments of $18,000 (£13,380) and even promises of Russian citizenship after six months of service. But others are sucked in by sophisticated trafficking networks masquerading as legitimate employment agencies. They answer adverts on social media offering jobs as cooks, security guards and cleaners in Russia, only to find themselves tricked into signing military contracts on arrival. After minimal training, they are sent to the front line. Many never make it back home.
A Swiss-based investigative group that tracks Russian mercenary recruitment found that by February this year, around 1,400 Africans from 35 countries had been enlisted, more than 300 of whom are confirmed dead, on average, within six months of arrival. According to Dmytro Raiskyi, a Ukrainian communications expert, African recruits are used as cannon fodder. “They are sent on suicide missions,” he told me. “Russian soldiers refer to them as ‘disposables,’ and in documented cases have forced them at gunpoint with anti-tank mines strapped to their chests to breach Ukrainian positions.”
It is not just Africa that is a source of concern for Ukraine when it comes to the Global South. Raiskyi’s group recently organised an exchange between Ukrainian and Indonesian journalists. Indonesia is a G20 member, an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) heavyweight and a new member of BRICS, and it refuses to join sanctions against Russia. Its economic and military ties with Russia are also growing.
Some of the Indonesian journalists invited to Ukraine focused on its indigenous Muslim community, the Crimean Tatars, whose homeland is now under occupation and looked at how the invading force has weaponised Islam. But to the organisers’ dismay, many of the reporters had little knowledge of or interest in key topics such as the deportation of Ukrainian children or the plight of civilian hostages, prisoners of war and veterans. When the Ukrainian journalists paid a return visit to Indonesia, they were struck by the abundance of fake, pro-Kremlin stories about the war in Ukraine, which went unchallenged.
Even if the Africa Corps is now losing ground, even if Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto rejected a Russian air base and even if more Africans are growing wary of sham Russian firms, complacency would be a mistake. Outlets like TASS, RT and Sputnik operate alongside paid influencers and journalists, AI-powered bot farms, payment networks, and accounts that hijack anti-neocolonial rhetoric to push pro-Russia narratives. At a time when Russia and China are pouring billions into media operations to expand their reach, there could not be a worse time to cut back the West’s trusted information sources.
China prides itself on having an alternative model of development to that of the West, which it believes is particularly attractive to some emerging economies. Russia doesn’t. It doesn’t even kid itself that it does. Putin’s desperate grip on the Global South is about raw materials and raw power. And when they fail, there is little else to fall back on.
