Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, is arriving in Uganda on the latest stop of his tour of Africa, aimed at rallying support on the continent for Russia as the war in Ukraine goes into its sixth month.
Many African leaders have refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have accused the US and Nato of starting or prolonging the conflict.
But hundreds of millions on the continent are facing rising food prices and, in some cases, a severe shortage because the blockade of Ukrainian ports by Russia’s Black Sea fleet is trapping tens of millions of tonnes of grain, dramatically exacerbating existing supply chain problems.
Lavrov is seeking to convince African leaders and, to a much lesser extent, ordinary people that Moscow cannot be blamed either for the conflict or the food crisis. Russia has blamed the blockade on Ukrainian mines.
But Moscow’s efforts to win friends and influence people across Africa go back well beyond recent events. The results of this campaign have been patchy, and Russia remains a marginal player by most conventional benchmarks, such as trade and investment.
Lavrov has hailed what he called “an independent path” taken by African countries in refusing to join western sanctions against Russia and the “undisguised attempts of the US and their European satellites to gain the upper hand and impose a unipolar world order”.
Moscow was encouraged when the UN general assembly voted on a resolution condemning Russia for its “aggression” and demanding a withdrawal from Ukraine, and 17 African nations abstained – almost half all abstentions – and one voted against. A majority of African countries backed the resolution which was passed by 141 to 5.
In several important strategic states, Moscow has made a significant impact, reinforcing anti-western narratives, supporting friendly political leaders and extracting valuable resources that have helped Russia resist the western sanctions imposed following the invasion of Ukraine.
One high-profile actor has been the Wagner Group – a private company linked to the Kremlin thathas supplied mercenaries to about half a dozen African governments. These have not always met with unmitigated success. A deployment to combat Islamic extremist insurgents in Mozambique was a fiasco. Nor did Wagner fighters in Libya distinguish themselves on the battlefield when supporting the Benghazi-based warlord Khalifa Haftar’s offensive against Tripoli in 2019.
But when Wagner Group fighters were deployed to Mali following a takeover by military officers last year, they scored a geopolitical success for Moscow. The new regime in Bamako has since forced a major French force fighting jihadist insurgents to leave, pivoting a key state in an important strategic region away from the west. A bomb close to the capital last week underlined how the Wagner fighters have made less progress militarily, however, and have been blamed for multiple human rights abuses.
In Sudan, where a military coup last year derailed a fragile transition to democratic rule, Russian companies linked to the Wagner Group by western analysts and officials have run goldmines since before the fall of the dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
The military regime in Khartoum also has a close relationship with Moscow and western officials have monitored an intensification in recent months of flights believed to be transporting precious metals to Russia from Sudan. Sudan has also concluded a big deal offering Russia a port on Africa’s eastern coast for 25 years.
Another key location is Central Africa Republic, where more than 1,000 Wagner mercenaries have mounted a series of bloody offensives against rebels on behalf of a weak central government in return for mining concessions. In recent months, according to witnesses, Russian military contractors have mounted violent and sometimes lethal raids on goldmines in the east of the country apparently aimed solely at looting quantities of gold.
Support from many African leaders and governments for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine – or at least reluctance to condemn it – has dismayed western officials.
A once close relationship between the US and UK and Uganda, the next stop on Lavrov’s tour, has soured over the crushing of political dissent and western pressure to recognise LGBT rights. Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986 and the recipient of huge sums of western aid, has accused the west of interfering in domestic affairs. Museveni’s influential son and aspirant successor, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has said on Twitter that “the majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine”.
Ethiopia, where Lavrov will travel after Kampala, might be a tougher sell for Lavrov, though the prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s relations with the west have also suffered in recent years following the war in the northern province of Tigray. In Addis Ababa the conversation is likely to be more about money and technology than military assistance.
A major Russia-Africa summit was held in Sochi in 2019. The event is set to be repeated later this year, possibly in the Ethiopian capital.
Russian ties across the continent have been strengthened through investment in mining, financial loans and the sale of agricultural equipment or nuclear technology. Rosatom, the Russian state corporation involved with military and civil use of nuclear energy, has sought to expand in Africa in recent years. Russia was the largest arms exporter to sub-Saharan Africa in 2016-20, supplying almost a third of total sub-Saharan arms imports, up from a quarter in 2011-15, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
One explanation for the support for Moscow is that many countries across the continent are still ruled by parties that were helped by the USSR during their struggles for liberation from colonial or white supremacist rule. Though few among their youthful populations experienced the bitter battles of the 1960s, 70s or 80s, leaders of ruling parties in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique remember how Soviet weapons, cash and advisers helped them win freedom.
Moscow has sought to highlight this history since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, repeatedly saying that Russia has “never colonised” any African country and is on the side of Africans against western neoimperialists.
Moscow has also pushed its agenda through covert social media networks , an effort major platforms have struggled to counter.
The Russian push for influence, coupled with the food crisis, is a dilemma for some African leaders. Egypt, one of the world’s top wheat importers, bought 80% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine last year and has been torn between ties to Moscow and its close relationship to the west.
Western officials say Moscow’s strategy is a gamble because the leaders and regimes that its outreach efforts have targeted are often corrupt, repressive and deeply unpopular.
One study found the 27 African countries that voted for the UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine were mostly democracies and all western allies, often actively involved in joint military operations. Most of those that abstained or, like Eritrea, voted against the resolution, were authoritarian or hybrid regimes.
