What should Europe do as Russia gains influence in Africa's Sahel?

Euronews

17-04-2025

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'Vladimir Putin came to fight in Africa in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,' Cameroonian influencer Franklin Nyamsi tells his hundreds of thousands of followers in a video shared across multiple platforms.
'He participated in the fight against Western imperialism. I hope you know that.'
There is no evidence that the Russian president visited Africa in that period, let alone fought colonial powers. Born in 1950, Putin was also a child for most of that time.
Yet these facts have not stopped disinformation from spreading like wildfire, especially in former French colonies around the Sahel, where the Kremlin has been using increasingly insidious methods to play on anti-colonial sentiments in order to pursue its interests.
The director of Research at the US Defence Department's Africa Centre, Dr Joseph Siegle, argues Moscow's approach is multi-pronged, and media play an essential part.
Speaking to Euronews from Washington, Siegle explained that 'in environments where there isn't an established set of trusted media outlets you get an explosion of unregulated, unfiltered social media,' which he says is especially prevalent in the Sahel.
According to the UN, the region of the Sahel comprises 10 central and west African nations, with 400 million people who call it home. Of these 10, eight were colonised by France, and almost all only gained independence in the 1960s.
French is widely spoken across all of them, meaning francophone commentators and influencers' reach and messaging often easily crosses the borders between the region's countries that France imposed in previous centuries.
However, colonialism is no longer a hot topic, and Siegle contends that colonial legacies have largely faded from political life. 'I'd like to remind people that colonialism ended 60 years ago … It wasn't part of recent election discourse,' he said.
If anything, for many of the countries' regimes, Europe remained the preferred partner as they progressed on their sovereign paths, according to Seigle.
"When you had democratically leaning governments, albeit weak governments … there were good relations with Europe," he explained.
These relations were strong, especially with France itself, which maintained deep political and disproportionate trade ties with its former colonies in Africa, under a somewhat hazy policy known as 'Françafrique'.
It also stationed thousands of troops across multiple bases in the Sahel. This number multiplied in 2013 when France and other European countries sent reinforcements to combat a series of extremist insurgencies in the region.
Seigle holds that it was a largely positive relationship, which was only recently upended by a series of coups that installed pro-Moscow juntas across the region.
Things fall apart
However, it isn't that simple in the eyes of prominent Chadian human rights lawyer and activist Delphine Djiraibe, who believes the rise of Russia is inherently linked to deep-rooted anger felt towards France in the region and Paris' historical support for governments she believes were anything but democratic.
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Over a patchy phone call with Euronews from the capital N'Djamena — where Djiraibe said power and mobile network cuts were increasingly common — the advocate explained that 'colonisation may have changed form, but we have remained under the yoke of France until practically today.'
'We've felt it in a very bitter way.'
Djiraibe pointed out that Chad maintains a French legal code, as do most of the other francophone countries in the region —at least in some form — but these codes aren't respected within the region or by Paris.
'France is always presented as the country of human rights,' she lamented, 'but when extrajudicial executions are commonplace, when populations are subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment … France does not stand up."
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"Not only does it not stand up, but it supports the dictatorial powers that suppress the populations.'
French President Emmanuel Macron pays respects to the coffin of the late Chadian president Idriss Deby during the state funeral in N'Djamena, 23 April 2021
AP Photo/Christophe Petit Tesson
As an example, she cites French President Emmanuel Macron's speech at the funeral of former Chadian President Idris Déby in 2021, in which he referred to the late authoritarian leader as a 'brave friend' before praising Déby's son and political heir, Mahamat, for bringing 'stability'.
Yet, within a year, relations with Chad and across the region frosted over. France withdrew its 1,000-strong force from Mali in August 2022, and by the end of 2023 both Burkina Faso and Niger also forced out the French military presence.
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Then, in a dramatic diplomatic spat that broke out in late 2024, Macron claimed that the region had never 'thanked' France for deploying troops there. The younger Déby demanded that France withdraw from Chad as well — and Françafrique had the rug wholly pulled underneath it.
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At the same time, the Kremlin quickly emerged from the shadows of social media campaigns and was ushered through the gates of various presidential palaces as the new global power best friend in town.
From Russia with love?
In a video published last month, Swiss-Cameroonian internet personality Nathalie Yamb shared a clip of former French Ambassador to Mali Nicolas Normand claiming the region 'absolutely needs partnerships,' while warning that 'Russia isn't providing it with any help, except military aid to ... form a praetorian guard for the juntas.'
As he says this, a man appears in the bottom right corner of Yamb's video, making a Pinocchio nose action. Yamb then comes on screen to criticise the comments and to say she would 'bury the urban myth' about Russia.
However, Siegle says this is precisely what Moscow does, having literally filled out the presidential guard corps of multiple Sahelian de facto leaders with its own muscle.
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Flowers are laid at the statue of Russian mercenaries as a tribute to the late Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in Bangui, Central African Republic, 5 March 2024
AP Photo/Sam Mednick
Until recently, these military deployments were largely made up of Kremlin-backed private military companies (PMCs), under the umbrella of the notorious Wagner Group of mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Former Georgian Ambassador to the EU Natalie Sabanadze told Euronews that this gave Russia 'plausible deniability,' which was important when Moscow was still trying to court international diplomatic favour.
However, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, much of this pretence dissipated. Then, when Prigozhin led Wagner mercenaries in revolt a year later in Ukraine — and was subsequently killed in a plane crash, which many international observers blame on the Kremlin — Sabanadze says Russia removed what little arms-length autonomy PMCs had in the Sahel.
Although there was a public outpouring of grief in some Sahelian societies over Prigozhin's death, this never translated into a broader questioning of relations with Moscow.
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Moscow's popularity unchallenged
Yamb has been largely discredited as a Kremlin stooge who acted as an "independent observer" for Russia during sham elections in occupied parts of Ukraine in 2022.
Yet she and others, like Franklin Nyamsi — along with those backing them in the Kremlin — have effectively harnessed anti-European sentiments to push Moscow's agenda, which includes controlling lucrative natural resources in various mines worth billions.
Also, Seigle explains it fits into a wider narrative of 'Russia having many partners and allies and Europe and the West losing influence,' both of these factors have only been exacerbated by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent fallout.
Sabanadze told Euronews that, coming from a former USSR satellite state, 'One of my main jobs was to somehow convince Europeans that we knew how to deal with Russia.'
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Yet Sabanadze, who is now a senior fellow at Chatham House, a think tank focusing on Russia's global influence, recalls comments she received from some in Brussels, which she sees as emblematic of Europe's hubris regarding Russian threats.
Central African Republic opposition parties demonstrate in the streets of Bangui to protest the government and its use of Wagner mercenaries, 4 April 2025
Jean Fernand Koena/AP Photo
'They'd say, 'You guys are paranoid. You have your historical baggage. You just can't get over it.''
'Russia's anti-colonialist narrative towards the Global South in general, including Africa, has been pretty much unchallenged,' Sabanadze explained, allowing Moscow to not only oust French and EU forces there but actually entrench itself too.
'Russians are genuinely popular in many of these places. They're not seen as horrible mercenaries that come to exploit the resources, kill people and who have been engaged in horrible massacres,' Sabanadze said.
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Siegle and Djiraibe both doubt Moscow's loyalty in return.
'I think it's more transactional,' Seigle said. 'The Russian forces are not there to fight the jihadists, they're protecting the regime and various mining sites.'
Sabanadze agreed. 'They like their operations there to be cheap and to be particularly beneficial to them,' she added.
'We never address the root problem'
Yet, signs of discontent with the Russians are already on the horizon.
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In early April, anti-Russian protests broke out across the neighbouring Central African Republic, which Siegle labelled 'the poster child' of Moscow's influence in Africa due to the thousands of Russian Wagner troops there.
While Russian losses in its ongoing war in Ukraine and the downfall of its ally Bashar Al-Assad in Syria have paradoxically pushed Moscow to try and extend its global reach, they also provided vulnerabilities which could allow Europe to re-enter the fray.
However, both Siegle and Djiraibe warned against a short-term approach that would lead to simply courting the very regimes that turned to the Kremlin for help.
'Certainly, that has certain short-term appeal,' Siegle admits. "It's better to have the juntas than to have jihadists in power, but it doesn't address any of the underlying sources of instability in these countries.'
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Namely, a lack of financial stability and support for civil society groups.
'We never address the root problem,' Djiraibe concurs, calling for less intervention on all sides.
'There's no need to come and dominate. If we were left to manage itself, we would be capable of electing leaders and sanctioning them when necessary. The mechanism is there.'
As the interview drew to a close and the connection again faltered, Djiraibe reflected on her decades-long career and how her country and those around it had changed, or not.
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'For more than 50 years, weapons have spoken for us under the logic that 'if we have the weapons, we subdue the populations, we burst into the villages, we kill''.
Despite this, she remained hopeful. 'We're not going to continue to use the language of weapons indefinitely,' she exclaimed.
'We must take courage. We'll continue to fight, to support our populations and reach higher, because we cannot replace one coloniser with another.'