African Initiative: Russia’s Post-Wagner Influence Goes Local

 

After the death of Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, Russia’s African presence evolved along two tracks. Afrikansky Korpus, brought under the Ministry of Defence, absorbed Gruppa Wagner’s military footprint. Less visible yet strategically significant is African Initiative (Afrikanskaya Initiativa), a Moscow-based agency launched in 2023 that embeds pro-Russian influence inside African civic life through NGOs, journalism schools, sport and health initiatives. Its advantage is credibility: narratives carried by locals are harder to dismiss as foreign.

Afrikansky Korpus inherited Wagner’s guns; African Initiative inherited its narratives.

Burkina Faso illustrates the method. During the severe 2023 dengue epidemic, a Russian medical delegation delivered screening kits and insecticides to Ouagadougou. At the same time, according to a joint assessment by the European External Action Service (EEAS), France’s foreign-interference watchdog VIGINUM and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), African Initiative amplified claims linking the outbreak to Western actors, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the Gates-funded Target Malaria programme. The narrative then surfaced in Burkina Faso’s domestic news ecosystem and later reappeared offline at a “Health and Sovereignty” conference in Ouagadougou. This pattern recalls the Soviet-era Operation INFEKTION of the mid-1980s, where the false claim that the United States had engineered the HIV/AIDS virus was weaponised to generate anti-Western suspicion, gaining credibility as it entered local media and civic spaces.

Mali shows the functioning of long-term influence operations, rather than simple episodic propaganda. In May 2024, African Initiative brought influential Malian bloggers to Moscow, including the administrator of Gandhi Malien, a local news channel with over one million followers. After the visit, pro-Russian content praising Moscow’s operations in Mariupol, Ukraine, was relayed to their audiences. Equally supported was Perspective Sahélienne, a Russo-Malian NGO whose journalism school in Bamako trains reporters, with its best graduates eligible for contracts with African Initiative. Maxime Audinet calls this “information laundering”: external influence recast as domestic expertise, now expanding beyond the Sahel into countries such as Nigeria.

Its significance lies in the terrain it targets. In a region where external partnerships are increasingly contested, influence built through schools, clinics and cultural networks can erode trust long before a crisis becomes visible. Detection tools outlined in NATO’s Southern Neighbourhood agenda may identify coordinated manipulation, but they struggle to counter narratives once they are socially embedded and locally voiced. In the Sahel, the strategic question is no longer only who fights, but who is believed.

Ellie Grace Montani

Ellie Grace has completed an MSc in International Security and Politics at ESPOL, Université Catholique de Lille. Her work focuses the evolving dynamics of influence operations in the New Digital Era, with a particular interest in security and foreign policy.