Russia gains ground as France retreats: why Africa is shifting and Ukraine is under fire

In May 2026, Emmanuel Macron chose Nairobi for one of the last major African gatherings of his presidency. Kenya is English-speaking, was never a French colony and sits far from the West African countries where France’s position has deteriorated most sharply.

The Africa Forward summit was presented by Paris as evidence of a renewed relationship based on investment, innovation and joint decision-making rather than the old French pré carré, or privileged sphere of influence.

Between 2022 and 2025, French forces withdrew from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and handed back permanent bases in Chad, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon. Djibouti is now the main exception .

It is easy to read that sequence as a simple exchange of powers: France leaves, Russia moves in. In the central Sahel, the Russian advance is real.

But France has not disappeared from Africa, and Russia has not replaced it as a complete economic or diplomatic partner. Paris is already rebuilding military cooperation in a different form, including discreet deployments in Benin, renewed discussions with Chad and a new defence relationship with Kenya.

The objective is no longer a chain of large permanent bases, but smaller arrangements built around requests from individual governments.

How France began to lose Africa

When France launched Operation Serval in Mali in 2013, its immediate military objective was clear: stop jihadist forces advancing towards the south of the country.

Serval was followed by Barkhane, a much larger regional counterterrorism operation that kept thousands of French troops across the Sahel for years.

France became not merely one foreign partner among others but the most visible external actor responsible for security.

That visibility eventually became a liability.

Jihadist violence continued to spread through Mali and into Burkina Faso and Niger. French forces could kill commanders and disrupt armed groups, but they could not repair weak institutions, local conflicts, corruption or the lack of state authority across enormous territories.

The military relationship also sat on top of older grievances. French interventions after independence, support for authoritarian governments, the CFA franc, restrictive visa policies and the dense political networks associated with Françafrique had already made the relationship unusually sensitive.

France had allowed its African policy to be excessively militarised, while its attempts to redefine the relationship came too late to prevent the security crisis from dominating it.

The coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger gave this frustration a political vehicle. Their new military leaders made sovereignty central to their legitimacy and presented the removal of French troops as evidence that the old hierarchy was ending. Turning away from Paris was therefore useful domestically as well as diplomatically.

Russian information campaigns amplified anti-French narratives, sometimes aggressively.

But Moscow did not invent the grievances on which they relied.

France’s own Senate acknowledged in 2025 that the deterioration of its image reflected a genuine loss of influence and a challenge to its status as a privileged interlocutor, even if some anti-French narratives were manipulated from outside.

What Russia is betting on

France’s economic position has weakened over time, particularly as China, Türkiye, Gulf states and others have expanded. But it remains substantial.

A 2025 French Senate report found France was still one of sub-Saharan Africa’s main suppliers and its second-largest foreign investor by accumulated direct investment. Thousands of French companies remain active across the continent.

In several Sahel states, Moscow has concentrated its offer around the institutions closest to political power: armed forces, military training, intelligence, weapons and regime security.

Russian instructors arrived in Niger after the military authorities broke with Western security partners.

In Mali, Wagner fighters operated alongside the army before being replaced by Africa Corps, now much more directly connected to Russia’s Defence Ministry.

Burkina Faso has also developed Russian military and security cooperation.

For military governments, this is a different kind of partnership from the European model.

Russia’s relationships in the region have generally been transactional, centred on security assistance and political survival, while making fewer public demands over democratic transition or governance.

That does not mean African leaders have simply exchanged dependence on France for obedience to Moscow. They have made choices they consider useful, often while simultaneously cultivating Türkiye, China, Gulf countries, the United States or European states.

A company investing in telecommunications or infrastructure may matter enormously to an economy.

A foreign actor training presidential guards, supplying weapons or working alongside the national intelligence service can matter more immediately to the survival of a government.

The transformation from Wagner to Africa Corps has made the relationship even more explicit. Wagner gave Moscow some plausible distance from operations committed by a nominally private organisation.

Africa Corps is is tied much more directly to the Russian state. That gives the Kremlin greater control, but it also makes it harder to separate Moscow from what happens on the ground.

Russian strategy in Africa

Mali was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the new security partnership.

The junta expelled its old Western partners, brought in Russian forces and promised a more sovereign approach to defeating jihadist and separatist groups. Russian-backed forces did help Bamako retake Kidal in 2023, an important symbolic victory.

In April 2026, jihadist and Tuareg forces launched coordinated attacks across the country, including against Bamako and strategic sites in the north and centre.

Further attacks followed during the summer. In September, sources cited by Reuters said more than 100 Malian soldiers had been killed in a single assault in Dioura, while another attack targeted the airport at Sévaré, where Russian personnel were also present.

Africa Corps has not solved the problem that eventually consumed France’s presence in Mali: military operations can weaken armed groups without creating a functioning political and security order.

The circumstances are different. France operated as part of a much larger international architecture involving European forces, the United Nations and regional partners.

The Malian junta deliberately dismantled much of that framework and replaced it with a far narrower Russian partnership. Before the coup, roughly 20,000 international and regional personnel were deployed in Mali; the current Russian contingent is estimated at between 1,000 and 2,500.

There are also serious allegations of abuses by both Malian forces and their Russian partners. Human Rights Watch accused Africa Corps of carrying out an indiscriminate airstrike that killed civilians in June, while other monitoring organisations have linked violence against civilians to the worsening insurgency.

For Moscow, this creates a problem France knows well.

The more a foreign power presents itself as the partner capable of delivering security, the harder it becomes to treat continuing insecurity as somebody else’s failure. Russia’s advantage in the Sahel is therefore real but not irreversible.

It is also highly uneven across Africa.

Russia’s African strategy since 2022 has been shaped increasingly by the consequences of its war against Ukraine.

Russia has sought more diplomatic partners, economic relationships and security footholds while trying to reduce the effect of Western isolation.

Russia presents itself as an opponent of Western domination and frequently draws on the Soviet Union’s support for anti-colonial movements. Its invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory sit awkwardly with that image.

But pointing out the contradiction does not automatically neutralise it. Where European governments are remembered through colonial rule, military interventions or unequal political relationships, arguments about Western double standards can still resonate.

The connection with the war is no longer only diplomatic. Ukraine said in February that more than 1,700 citizens of African countries were serving in Russia’s armed forces, many recruited through deceptive schemes.

New opportunities for Ukraine in Africa 

Ukraine’s diplomatic presence on the continent was thin when the full-scale invasion began. That has changed quickly.

Eight new Ukrainian embassies have opened in Africa in recent years, bringing the total number of diplomatic missions to 18, with further expansion planned.

Kyiv has also begun defining its African policy around trade, agriculture, technology, education, defence cooperation and food security rather than treating relations primarily as a search for votes at the United Nations.

That change reflects the same reality France has been forced to confront: African governments don’t not want to be treated primarily through somebody else’s geopolitical priorities.

France has finally begun adapting to that environment as well. The Nairobi summit in May was deliberately built around economic investment, private capital, technology and a partnership co-hosted by an African government rather than another France-led summit in Paris. The fact that Macron chose Kenya also reflected a broader attempt to build relationships beyond France’s former colonial sphere.

That shift is relevant to Ukraine because French and Ukrainian interests overlap without being identical. Both countries have reasons to limit Russia’s ability to turn military partnerships into wider diplomatic influence. But Ukraine does not carry France’s colonial history, and France cannot erase it simply by changing the language of its partnerships.

The collapse of the old French model therefore did more than create an opening for Russia. It demonstrated the limits of a relationship in which an outside power becomes too closely associated with the security and political choices of another state.

Mali suggests it may now be learning the other half of it. As Russia becomes more closely tied to governments and security forces, continued instability is becoming harder to separate from the Russian presence itself.

Charlotte Guillou-Clerc,

Journalist (France)