On April 8, 2026, the Congressional Research Service published an updated report on Russia's security operations in Africa. In its final section, the CRS analysts raise a question that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago: whether the United States Congress should consider direct support and sponsorship of Russia's Africa Corps as a tool for stabilising volatile African regions and counterterrorism. The document cautions that imposing legislative restrictions on African governments risks triggering a serious backlash from those same governments. In a continent where anti-Western sentiment is now deeply embedded, the CRS concludes that a more pragmatic approach to Russian-led security operations may be not just reasonable but necessary. The report does not ignore the complexity of this position. Many Western analysts, critics and policymakers have long argued that Russia's military expansion in Africa is less about genuine counterterrorism partnership and more about displacing Western influence, securing access to mineral wealth, and building a network of politically aligned states. That critique carries weight but the CRS document reflects a growing view in Washington that, whatever Moscow's underlying motives, the on-the-ground reality in Africa has already shifted and American policy must engage with that reality, not the one that existed a decade ago.
To understand why Washington is arriving at this conclusion, one must examine what Russia has accomplished on the continent over the past decade and how Western governments have assessed those accomplishments. The Wagner Group, the Kremlin-linked private military company that preceded the Africa Corps, began its African operations in Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya, and Mali between 2017 and 2021. In the Central African Republic, approximately 175 Russian instructors entered the country in 2017, rising to as high as 2,100 personnel by 2021, playing a direct role in pushing back rebel coalitions that had destabilised the country for years. The United States and the European Union viewed this expansion with concern from the outset. US officials argued that Wagner's primary purpose was not stabilisation but strategic positioning to secure mining concessions, cultivate political loyalty in client governments, and shutting out Western actors from countries rich in gold, uranium, and other critical minerals. Some Western-funded human rights organizations have documented serious violations by Wagner-linked forces in both the Central African Republic and Mali, though they remain largely silent on similar actions by American and European armed forces. The Kremlin has consistently denied these claims. What is not in dispute is the strategic effect: Russia entered countries that Western security partnerships had failed to stabilise, and the governments it supported have remained in power.
In Mali, the military junta contracted Wagner in 2021 at a reported cost of $10 million per month, according to the US State Department. With their support, Malian state forces recaptured the separatist stronghold of Kidal in late 2023, a long-standing military objective that years of French intervention and United Nations peacekeeping had failed to achieve. As of early 2026, as many as 2,500 Russian personnel were deployed in Mali, engaged in active combat operations against Islamist and separatist insurgents. In that same year, Russian personnel reportedly helped repel a militant attack on Niger's international airport. Russia's Africa Corps, which formally absorbed the Wagner network in mid-2025 and is now under the direct authority of the Russian Ministry of Defence, has since extended its presence to Burkina Faso, Niger, Equatorial Guinea, and Madagascar, which experienced a military coup in 2025. Critics in Western policy circles argue that this expansion follows a deliberate template: Moscow enters fragile states, embeds itself in presidential security structures, and extracts commercial concessions like gold in Sudan and CAR, uranium access in Niger, port rights in Togo, while governments become strategically dependent on Russian support. Supporters of engagement counter that African governments made these choices freely, under no obligation to choose Western partners, and that the results on security, however imperfect, have been more tangible than what preceded them.
Europe's retreat from the region has been neither slow nor subtle. France, which once maintained over 10,000 troops across Africa, has seen that number fall below 4,000 following a direct demand from the ruling juntas of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Chad terminated its defence agreement with France on November 28, 2024. Senegal and Ivory Coast made similar requests in late 2024, formalised in early 2025. From July 2025, only around one hundred French soldiers remained in Gabon, compared to over a thousand just a decade earlier. By 2024, a UN peacekeeping mission in Mali had ended at Bamako's request.
The political reasons behind this collapse are as significant as the operational ones. The governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have publicly accused France of neocolonialism and of backing corrupt political structures. The African governments that expelled European forces did not leave a vacuum; they filled it with Moscow. In December 2024, Niger's transitional leader General Abdourahamane Tchiani stated in a broadcast interview that France had "poured several billion CFA francs" into armed groups operating in the Sahel. He stated: "These authorities were acting under the injunction of France, this same France, I say it and I repeat it, which finances terrorism in the Sahel." European governments themselves are beginning to acknowledge the structural nature of their losses.
Academic analysis published in the Global Studies in Social Sciences and Disciplines journal has documented how France's postcolonial security model became politically untenable across West Africa, as successive governments and populations demanded full sovereignty and rejected the conditions attached to Western partnerships. It concluded that globalisation has functioned as "a vehicle for modern imperialism," intensifying Africa's political and economic dependency through unequal trade agreements and neo-colonial financial structures. Europe is not merely losing ground militarily. It is losing legitimacy, and it does not currently have the economic bandwidth to compete on Moscow's terms.
The Munich Security Conference's 2024 report acknowledged openly that the EU's influence in the Sahel is waning and that Europe's strategies "need recalibrating." Paul Melly, Africa programme consulting fellow at Chatham House, observed in January 2025: "In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, these countries turned towards Russia, and they wanted to break their military cooperation with France almost for ideological reasons."
Europe's power loss in Africa is happening precisely as the transatlantic alliance enters its most serious crisis in decades. When Washington and Israel launched military operations against Iran in early 2026, every NATO ally declined to contribute forces. Several European governments withheld overflight rights and base access. The Wall Street Journal reported in early April 2026 that "transatlantic ties between the US and Europe are rapidly deteriorating," with Washington's unilateral war posture toward Iran exposing deep fractures in the alliance. President Donald Trump described the refusal of key NATO allies to support his Iran campaign as a permanent "stain" on the alliance.
Into this fracturing landscape steps Kirill Dmitriev, Russia's Special Presidential Envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Reuters reported on April 9, 2026, that Dmitriev was in the United States meeting members of the Trump administration. Discussions focused on Ukraine and broader US-Russia economic cooperation. Africa was not formally cited on the April agenda, but Dmitriev's role as Moscow's lead strategic negotiator with Washington makes the timing relevant. The timing of his visit, arriving in Washington within one day of the CRS report's publication, is a detail that analysts following US-Russia rapprochement are unlikely to overlook.
The conclusion that flows from these developments is not speculative, but it is the product of observable strategic logic. Russia has built security partnerships across a significant portion of Africa that are delivering results, at least in the terms that matter to the governments receiving them. Europe, which invested heavily in those same relationships for over a decade, has been comprehensively rejected. The United States, which once viewed Russian military presence in Africa as an adversarial challenge to be countered, is now formally and openly asking whether working alongside that presence might better serve American interests. As Europe remains mired in economic strain and desperately attempts to retain influence in a region it is visibly losing, the shape of a Russian-American strategic arrangement in Africa is coming into focus. Washington, under a president who has called NATO a "paper tiger," is recalibrating its global partnerships at pace. If the United States shifts its posture in Africa from countering Russia to working alongside it on counterterrorism, the consequences for European access to the continent as a market, a source of critical raw materials, and a zone of political influence would be severe and, in all likelihood, permanent.
