Russia-Africa Summit: Putin courts 48 nations as influence contest heats up

Moscow’s hosting of the third Russia-Africa Summit this week, attended by delegations from 48 African nations, has served as a stage for competing claims about who holds influence over the continent’s foreign policy choices. Addressing the gathered leaders, Russian President Vladimir Putin framed a partnership with Russia as an alternative to traditional allies, whom he described as a “narrow bloc of states” that determine “the destinies of entire continents”. The rhetoric of escaping former colonial powers is well worn, but the question of whether African governments are simply swapping one patron for another, or exercising genuine strategic agency, is where the summit’s real significance lies.

Geopolitical analyst Priyal Singh, of risk advisory firm Signal Risk and a senior research consultant at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told RFI that the accountability question runs in both directions. Leaders arrive in Moscow with clear expectations of what their partnerships should deliver, and they are prepared to hold competing suitors to the test.

“African leaders are not naive,” Singh said. “For most African leaders, it’s very clear that Russia is very much a major world power that has a seat at the United Nations Security Council, just like China does, and they are not a developing nation.”

What African countries want, he argued, is investment and partnerships that will spur their own industrialisation, and they will take those from whoever makes the best offer, whether that comes from the United States, Europe, China, Russia, India or Brazil. Competing offers to help develop local industries and diversify critical mineral supply chains ultimately work in favour of African governments because they can play one offer against the other.

That framing matters for how the summit should be read. It comes as Moscow grapples with sanctions and isolation over its war in Ukraine, and as African governments turn to it for security assistance. Yet despite the fanfare, Singh is clear that Russia still lags far behind China in its influence on the continent. Chinese trade with African countries dwarfs Russia’s, at $348 billion recorded in 2025 compared with $27 billion.

The structural gap, Singh explained, is historical and institutional. China has deep pockets and an extensive network of commercial engagements with African states built over many years. Russia, by contrast, largely retreated from the continent after the fall of the Soviet Union to focus on its own immediate political, security and strategic interests closer to home. Other global powers stepped into that void and made considerable headway. Moscow’s pivot back to Africa began in earnest in the late 2000s among a handful of countries, but became far more acute and targeted in recent years, particularly after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Singh views the continent as a critical theatre for Moscow to re-establish its presence and deepen engagements as a concerted effort to circumvent Western isolation and sanctions. Materially, however, Russia remains very much playing catch-up, not only to China but also to powers such as India, whose commercial engagements across Africa are often far more substantial.

Institutionally, Russia’s approach differs sharply by region. In the Sahel it plays a far more overt security role, providing arms, military support and technical training, with state-backed private security providers highly pronounced. In Southern Africa it maintains longstanding liberation-era ties to ruling parties, and its engagements there are far less security-orientated and more commercially focused, though these too lag behind China’s.

Asked whether China and Russia are competing to carve up Africa, Singh was unequivocal. “Not at all,” he said, adding that the real competition is between Russia and Western actors, particularly the European Union, individual European member states and the United States. China is not a major competitor Russia seeks to displace.

Russia has struggled to extend its influence beyond its Sahel security foothold. Attempts to branch out, notably in nuclear energy and infrastructure through the state corporation Rosatom, have produced many commitments around energy development, but these remain largely framed as broad pledges that have not translated into firm agreements taking off on the ground. Singh describes a large implementation gap in what Russia can deliver outside its security focus.

On economics, Singh notes that Russia extracts greater dividends from relatively meagre diplomatic or economic investment through a targeted strategy across West, Central and East Africa and the Horn, operating by a playbook different from most Western actors and avoiding the massive infrastructural spending its larger peers undertake. Its appeal, he says, is chiefly to political elites in a select handful of countries, offering security cooperation in exchange for access to critical minerals and energy, an alternative avenue Western actors cannot easily match because they must abide by their own normative commitments. Singh characterised Russia’s security engagements in the Sahel, West and Central Africa as largely transactional, tit-for-tat deals trading influence and access to minerals, gold and energy for regime security and support, with little regard for human rights.

Meanwhile, the third summit marks a shift in the diplomatic landscape itself. At the first gathering in 2019, much of the Western world still believed diplomatic isolation of Moscow could work. By 2026, Singh said, that hope has clearly proven unfounded, not least because the second Trump administration in Washington has taken a very different approach to engaging Russia. As coverage of the summit noted, “African leaders are not naive, they will partner with whoever makes the best offer” (https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20261031-african-leaders-are-not-naive-they-will-partner-with-whoever-makes-the-best-offer), and with neither Washington nor much of the global South playing by the same playbook, Western European hopes of isolating Moscow no longer appear viable. Whether African governments can convert competing offers into lasting industrial gains, rather than another cycle of patronage, remains the open question hanging over the next summit.