PREVIEW
Leaked memos reveal millions spent on pro-Russian online stories, but the documents’ claims to be directing policies in friendly states don’t check out
A cache of 75 secret Russian memos about the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive in Africa by the Wagner Group and its successor organisation, ‘The Company’, has exposed a vast disinformation campaign and ambitious plans to influence the military juntas in the Sahel, along with other African governments. Mostly written in 2024 and leaked in recent months, the documents reveal a continent-wide social media operation that spent significant sums persuading websites and journalists to spread disinformation about Russia’s war with Ukraine, French and United States policy in Africa, and a range of pro-Kremlin conspiracy theories.
But the anti-French ideological climate in western and central Africa, while still strong, has done little to benefit Moscow. The grandiose plans outlined in the leaked documents to draw African states into Russia’s orbit are foundering, Africa Confidential’s analysts say, as regional alliances shift and Washington recalibrates its approach.
Independent investigative journalists and NGOs – including Africa Confidential, Forbidden Stories, The Continent, All Eyes On Wagner and France 24 – have been examining the leaks since October. Their reporting has exposed websites publishing propaganda for cash and questioned why journalists, all of whom denied any wrongdoing, would have accepted Moscow’s money. Africa Confidential obtained access to the leaked documents from the Estonian investigative journalism outlet Delfi and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and has focused on the geopolitical claims they contain.
‘The Company’ asserts it initiated or shaped key policies of the Sahelian juntas – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – now united in the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES). Our analysis shows these claims are false or wildly exaggerated, even though the documents were intended only for internal use within ‘The Company’, which took over Wagner’s operations after the death of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash in August 2023.
Geopolitical claims
Wagner’s assets have been absorbed into ‘The Company’ or other entities, such as the ‘Africa Corps’, or ‘African Politology’, all controlled by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence arm which succeeded the KGB, or the Russian defence ministry. The documents claim that Russian operatives influenced – or even instigated – the creation of the AES, formed in 2023 when Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger were still members of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and the bloc was threatening to reverse the Nigérien military coup for breaching its anti-putsch rules.
They also claim that Russians inspired changes in Mali’s mining code and persuaded Niger’s junta to cancel a key uranium mining licence. Such assertions gained traction because the juntas, after seizing power, capitalised on anti-French sentiment to build domestic support while opening diplomatic channels to Moscow.
In reality, the AES was formed independently, analysts say, drawing on elements of the pre-existing G5 Sahel alliance as a response to Ecowas pressure and needed no help from Russia (AC Vol 63 No 8, Disjointed force).
Mining mischief
The documents also claim that specialists from ‘The Company’ drafted a new mining code on mineral extraction for Mali, which was adopted by the transitional government in 2023. ‘A broad information campaign was conducted in the media and social networks to discredit foreign companies that own mines and quarries,’ one document states. ‘Rallies and public marches were organized in support of the nationalisation of resource extraction enterprises. Existing contracts with Western, Turkish, Chinese and Australian companies have been revised,’ it went on.
Yet Mali has neither nationalised mining companies nor expelled them, nor has it favoured Russian companies. ‘The changes that have been introduced to the mining code since the second coup by Assimi Goïta have been incremental,’ said one analyst we consulted. ‘Even though the authorities played hardball to get as much money as they could, there was no expropriation.’ In early 2025, the junta imprisoned officials from Canada’s Barrick Gold, releasing them only after hundreds of millions of dollars were transferred to Bamako (Dispatches 14/1/25, Bullion for Bamako).
But this episode was not Russian-inspired, nor is the new mining code, we are told. The driving force behind Mali’s mining reforms is Mamou Touré, a respected Malian mining expert who trained with Randgold in South Africa and authored the major changes first drafted in 2022 and enacted a year later.
Touré’s consultancy, Iventus Mining, is credited with many of the tactics used in negotiations with mining corporations, as well as the structures for minority state ownership and the revised taxation regime. He is considered essential to the Goïta government and close to finance minister Alousséni Sanou.
‘Sanou and his friend [Touré] seized the mining agenda’ in 2022, according to French weekly Jeune Afrique, while the incumbent mines minister – later sacked – was embroiled in a political crisis over national electricity supply.
Barrick Gold remains in Mali, and other Canadian mining companies are believed to have sold their Malian interests to Barrick. Russian mercenaries are thought to control some artisanal mining sites, while large Russian firms have been involved in building a gold smelter but there is no evidence of Kremlin-driven policy.
Kremlin vs jihad
One of Russia’s primary attractions as an African ally used to be that its security experience was unbeatable – or at least unconstrained by the human rights rules that limit the operational freedom of United Nations or European forces. But such claims fell rapidly away in Mali. ‘Russia has difficulty providing what Mali needs,’ a top analyst told Africa Confidential. ‘The jihadists in Mali are not small groups of peasants with a few guns, and fewer bullets, like those in Central African Republic that the Wagner Group came up against. They are well-organised and well-supplied and difficult for Mali’s weak army to fight.’
Wagner fighters and government soldiers were bloodily humiliated in a battle in northern Mali in August 2024, when dozens of Russian and Malian soldiers were killed in an ambush near the Algerian border. Since then, little has been heard of Russian security assistance to Mali until reports came in recently that Russians were escorting road transport on the vital routes from Dakar and Abidjan to Bamako (AC Vol 66 No 12, Jihadists hit harder as junta loses focus).
Russia’s reputation suffered further when the junta found a new friend in the US. US Bureau of Africa Affairs boss Nicholas Checker went to Bamako in February on an official visit and on 17 March the US lifted the sanctions it had imposed on senior military junta leaders General Sadio Camara (Russia’s most vocal partisan in the junta), Alou Boï Diarra and Adama Bagayoko over human rights abuses in the counter-insurgency war (AC Vol 67 No 5, Washington courts the juntas).
The agenda of the President Donald Trump’s White House is to cooperate with the juntas against jihadists and reduce Russian influence, leaving aside all talk of human rights and transitions to democracy. This does not conform to the plans in the leaked documents for the Kremlin to create an anti-US and anti-French front throughout Africa. Perhaps the strongest evidence of the failure of the Kremlin’s campaign to win friends in Africa and turn them against its own enemies in Europe and North America lies in the trial of two Russian operatives in Angola, which was exposed by the BBC on 24 March.*
Political consultant Igor Ratchin and his translator Lev Lakshtanov are charged with espionage, subversion, terrorism and acting for ‘African Politology’, another of the names used by ‘The Company’. The leaked documents list dozens of propaganda articles placed in Angolan media to support the Moscow version of the Ukraine war, ‘neo-colonialism’ by France, and plunder by the US. But that was in 2024 and now, analysts agree, President João Lourenço has fully pivoted to the west after being wooed by the Trump White House and US business. ‘As in Mali, once the US has decided to take an interest and engage with African leaders it has far, far deeper pockets than the Kremlin, and President Vladimir Putin simply cannot compete,’ said one analyst.
* Russia in Africa: Inside the alleged operation to influence Angolan politics – BBC News.
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CHAD: DÉBY’S MULTI-ALIGNMENT COUNTERS MOSCOW’S OVERTURES
The case of Chad illustrates the difficulty of treating the Sahelian juntas as a single bloc. Chad has proved not only resistant to Russian overtures, but has also remained outside the Alliance des États du Sahel. The decisive factors were not ideology or strategy, but clan politics. The leaked documents outline grand plans to yoke Chad to Russian interests, to remove French and United States influence, and to compel its cooperation with and dependence on Russia. They also hoped to draw it into the AES.
Throughout 2024, Russian operatives worked to support President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno ‘Kaka’ in the heavily rigged presidential election, the outcome of which was never in doubt (AC Vol 65 No 12, Foregone electoral conclusion cements Kaka's grip). Superficially, these plans from 2024 appeared to bear fruit: French troops were finally expelled in January 2025 after decades of close military cooperation with the Chadian armed forces. This seemed to align with the efforts of visiting Kremlin political operator Maxim Shugalei, who focused on portraying Kaka’s opponent, Succès Masra, as a US pawn on social media. So far, so normal for propaganda operations in support of Moscow-friendly states. Yet Shugalei was arrested in September 2024, and released only in November that year, signalling deeper tensions.
Other obstacles prevented Chad from aligning with Russia or joining the AES after the death of Mahamat Kaka’s warrior-president father, Idriss Déby Itno, who was killed fighting insurgents in April 2021 (AC Vol 62 No 9, Regional leaders pay homage to Déby at funeral summit). The chairmanship of the G5 Sahel security alliance should have passed to Mali, led by junta leader Assimi Goïta. The G5 – comprising Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger – was a European-backed framework for coordinating counter-jihadist operations. Mahamat Kaka consulted French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom he still had good relations, and was reminded that putschists were not supposed to lead major regional organisations.
When Goïta phoned Mahamat Kaka in May 2021 to demand the G5 chairmanship, the two had a furious argument, we hear. ‘If I am a putschist, what does that make you!’ Goïta is said to have retorted, referring to Kaka’s father’s seizure of power in 1990. Goïta has distrusted Kaka ever since, we are told. But even greater suspicion came from Abdourahamane Tiani in Niger.
Tiani recently learned that Mahmoud Sallah, leader of the constitutionalist Front Patriotique pour la Libération, was in Chad. The FPL is waging an armed campaign and seeking the release of President Mohamed Bazoum from house arrest. Tiani, we hear, asked Mahamat Kaka to hand Sallah over to Niamey where he could be punished.
Mahamat Kaka said he could not act because Sallah is a blood relative of Ousmane Adam Dicki, head of the Force d’Intervention Rapide (FIR), a special paramilitary presidential guard personally loyal to the Chadian president and vital to his security. This made Sallah untouchable, even at the cost of a major breach with Niger.
These sensitivities alone were enough to keep Chad out of the AES, quite apart from the larger problem that Russia has little to offer Chad, our sources say. Unlike the Central African Republic, Mali or Niger, Chad already has a well-trained officer corps and army and has no need for the presidential bodyguards or mercenary units that the Kremlin typically offers African regimes. And since Russia has no money to spare – money Kaka desperately needs for patronage to shore up domestic support – there was little incentive for Chad to join the alliance.
While the US may be outbidding Russian influence in the Sahel, in Chad’s case it was the United Arab Emirates that made an offer Mahamat Kaka could not refuse. Chad has become the key conduit for the UAE’s supply of arms and medical assistance to the Rapid Support Forces of Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ‘Hemeti’ in Sudan’s civil war. It is also reported in Chadian diplomatic circles that Putin failed to establish any rapport with Mahamat Kaka when they met in Moscow in January 2024.
For Mahamat Kaka, Moscow cannot compete with the funds and backing of the UAE, just as Putin cannot match the US in courting Goïta if Washington sets aside its previous reluctance to engage with military governments that consciously abjure democracy. If the US continues this policy, its stronger hand could leave the Kremlin with fewer cards to play, and the grand plans outlined in the leaked documents – which were exaggerated to begin with – may well turn to dust.
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NIGER: MINING POLICIES UNDER SCRUTINY
The documents’ claims to have caused policy changes by the Niger junta, led by General Abdourahamane Tiani, don’t hold water. The documents assert that ‘The Company’ carried out a deception operation against the French uranium-mining company Orano, fabricating a claim that generated public pressure on Tiani’s junta to cancel Orano’s licence for a new uranium mine at Imouraren.
But mining analysts note that President Mohamed Bazoum, the leader Tiani overthrew in 2023, had already been considering cancelling the licence after reports suggested the significance of the uranium deposit at Imouraren had been exaggerated (Dispatches 25/6/24, Niamey junta cancels France’s Orano permit in uranium mine).
‘Niger is yet another kind of coup, completely different from those in Burkina Faso and Mali,’ says one analyst consulted by Africa Confidential. ‘In this case, Tiani and his colleagues felt threatened by Bazoum’s promise to allow the prosecution of corruption under the presidency of his predecessor Mahamadou Issoufou.’
Accordingly, they struck out of self-preservation, not from any idea, à la Mali, of taking more resolute action against the Islamist insurgency, which is just as grave in Niger.
Although Moscow is said to be riding high in Niamey for now, a shift in Washington’s view of the junta – most of whose members were pro-west before the coup – could well outplay Moscow.
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