Russia and China in Africa: Interests, In uence, and Instruments of Power
Other Russian uses of the information instrument include the establishment of Pushkin Institutes in Africa and providing free education for thousands of Africans per year. Pushkin Institutes promote Russian language and culture abroad, and Moscow now operates them in 22 of the 54 African countries, up from only three before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its o er of free education has likewise risen sharply in the past several years: some 35,000 Africans now study in Russia free of charge. For the current academic year, applicants for these positions rose from 20,000 to 40,000, with Sudan, Guinea, Ghana and Chad seeing the sharpest increases. [35] Moscow’s military presence in Africa is unconventional and sometimes unacknowledged, but still substantial. Russia maintains no military bases in Africa—although it has been in on-again, o -again talks with Sudan on the topic for years—and the Russian military is not a major player on the continent. Still, Moscow uses the military instrument extensively in Africa through its Africa Corps contingent, which is not formally a part of the Russian military but reliably does the Kremlin’s bidding. In fact, squaring the deniability/control circle was a main reason for the creation of the Africa Corps. For years, Kremlin leaders were comfortable granting the Wagner Group extensive autonomy for two reasons. First, it allowed the Russian government to deny involvement in the Group’s more heinous activities by claiming it was a private entity. Second, Putin and those around him were con dent that Putin’s close personal relationship to the Group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, would keep it under control. These illusions vanished in June 2023, when Prigozhin, angry over what he saw as an intentional lack of support from the Ministry of Defense for Wagner operations in Ukraine, led a march on Moscow. Although Prigozhin’s ghters stopped before reaching the Russian capital, they captured the cities of Rostov and Voronezh, shot down at least seven Russian military aircraft, and killed as many as 29 Russian soldiers. This move sealed Prigozhin’s fate—he died two months later in a plane crash almost certainly orchestrated by the Kremlin—and made it clear to Putin that he needed to rein in his mercenary force, lest it become as dangerous to him as it had long been to Russia’s enemies and ordinary people wherever it operated. The solution was the creation of the Russian Africa Corps. While not formally integrated into the Russian military—thus preserving at least a thin veneer of deniability—the Corps is certainly on a shorter leash than the Wagner Group. [36] Using the same model as Wagner, Africa Corps provides coup-proo ng, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism assistance, military training, and disinformation operations to juntas and authoritarian regimes across the region, including Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Equatorial Guinea. It pioneered many of these techniques in one of the Wagner Group’s rst major African interventions in Libya, where it arrived in 2019. Based on the Libya model, the Africa Corps now engages in “limited, exible, and nominally deniable interventions” meant to “establish in uence on the cheap and secure lucrative revenue streams, such as from gold mining.” Interestingly, the Africa Corps works both sides of the coup issue. As noted, it o ers coup-proo ng to friendly regimes, but it has also supported popular movements to overthrow regimes it considers unfriendly (i.e., those that are pro-Western) and replaces them with military juntas. These “popularly supported coups” are a new phenomenon that Russia did not create but is happily taking advantage of. [37] [38]
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