Although N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, and Moscow, Russia, are thousands of kilometers apart, certain connections can be sensed. Here’s one: on April 4, a Chadian military commander sent the Ministry of Defense a letter regarding the request to the United States to suspend activities at the Adji Kosseï base. It was the umpteenth blow in the Sahel to the reviled Western military presence. Among the few media outlets that accessed the letter was African Initiative (afrinz.ru). Analysis of the registry of this website leads to a company, Initsiativa-23, and an address, on the Presnenskaya pier in Moscow. At the head of the company is the name of Artem Kurev Sergevich. Kurev, an apparent businessman in the world of communications, has been identified by an Estonian court as a member of the Russian FSB (former KGB), in an investigation against Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka for her ties to the Kremlin. The thread that connects that letter from the Chadian soldier to agent Kurev, far from being coincidental, is already part of the soft arsenal used by Russia to influence Africa through propaganda and disinformation.
African Initiative, created according to records in September 2023, swells a network of media, spokespersons, events and arguments designed to torpedo support for the West and facilitate public opinion open to the Russian landing. It is part of the third layer of a successful campaign completed, on the one hand, by new political and economic agreements – especially regarding natural resources – between the Kremlin and African governments, and, on the other, by the arrival of mercenaries and weapons. Russians (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger…). This deployment was done first through the Wagner group and now, after the death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, under the Africa Corps, dependent on the Russian Ministry of Defense and its deputy minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov.
The analysis center Africa Center for Strategic Studies, based in Washington, identified 189 disinformation campaigns on the African continent in March, almost four times more than what was recorded two years earlier. Russia – followed by China, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – is the main architect, with 40% of the information poisoning operations (80 in 22 countries), with special interest, precisely, in West Africa. “Russia has flooded the Sahel with disinformation since 2018 with 19 campaigns targeting Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger,” the analysis said. “All three countries,” the study continued, “have experienced military coups that Russian networks have helped prepare and promote.”
Continuation of the war in Ukraine
Kevin Limonier, professor of Russian geopolitics and cyberspace and co-founder of the Cassini analysis center, based in Paris, says on the phone that Moscow conceives these operations in Africa as a “continuation of what is happening in Ukraine.” “The actors and narratives are similar,” he points out, “they are part of a strategy of battle against the West, of leadership in the global south, through a postcolonial narrative.” And all of this, this researcher continues, in a perfect storm scenario: an already existing “local resentment”, especially against France in the former colonies, plus an explosion of access to the internet and social networks. That is to say, there were the wick and the fire; Russia put them in contact.
As an example, return to the African Initiative: one of the latest notes uploaded to the website reports on an exhibition in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, under the title Ten years of war in Donbas and signature of the Italian Vittorio Rangeloni, who has collaborated with the separatists in that Ukrainian region occupied by Russian troops. At the opening ceremony, Rangeloni stated the following: “Just like during the Great Patriotic War [como los rusos llaman a su participación en la II Guerra Mundial]since 2014, the people of Donbas have been forced to fight for their right to freedom (…) The inhabitants of Burkina Faso are interested in knowing the history of modern Russia and understanding how the same Western countries that colonized Africa act during “a long time and led to the destabilization of the continent.”
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The Global Engagement Center, an organization of the North American State Department that tries to expose and combat disinformation in the world ―with Russia and China at the center of the target―, published last February a brief x-ray of Artem Kurev’s African Initiative ― also linked to a similar project under the name of Rusafro Media―, with offices in Ouagadougou and Bamako (Mali), in which it stated that some of its members had been recruited in Prigozhin’s companies.
Precisely together with Vladimir Putin’s former collaborator, Justin Tagouh, director of Afrique Media, based in Douala, a coastal city in the southwest of Cameroon, was photographed in July 2023 in Saint Petersburg, at a Russian-African summit. Tagouh, rated by the weekly Young Africa As “the voice of Moscow”, it is, together with its media, another of the pillars of the dissemination of the Kremlin’s message in Africa. In 2017, Afrique Media began sharing content from state-run Russian broadcaster Russia Today (RT); Five years later, with the invasion of Ukraine begun and RT sanctioned in Europe, the two media outlets sealed an alliance.
The network describes itself as “the first pan-African multilingual news television channel.” Rough way, three topics focus its coverage: the war in Ukraine, Africa and France. At the end of July last year, Afrique Media published an interview with Nathalie Yamb, born in Switzerland and raised in Cameroon. This woman can be defined in many ways: activist, businesswoman, youtuber… In the conversation with the network he gave a clue as to who he is through his statements: “Russia has been the ally of those who have fought to achieve independence.” Yamb, with an agile verb, is one of the most prominent pro-Russian voices in West Africa. He maintains a YouTube channel alive under the name The Lady from Sochi (Russian city on the shores of the Black Sea). In one of his last videos he dissected the words of a French general, whom he accuses of announcing the “recolonization” of the continent.
In the same league in which Yamb plays, there are other recurring names in studies on the propagandists of the Russian cause in Africa, such as the Belgian activist Luc Michel at the head of the Russosphère project, or today the Franco-Beninese Kemi Seba, with a long-winded production of videos critical of the West, especially France, and with a loaded Pan-Africanist message – Pan-Africanism is a common element in Russian arguments used on the continent as a counterweight to the old colonialism.
Opinion leaders, networks (Africa Corps has its Telegram profile in which information from related media bounces daily), armies of trolls (internet users in the pay of Russian propaganda) and bots (automated profiles), media – the French version of the Russian media Sputnik, banned in Europe, has focused on the French-speaking Sahel -, cultural events and even investment in the country’s image through, for example, Russian flags in demonstrations: an official from the Nigerien civil association Parade – linked to the Russian Foreign Ministry, according to a report by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center – admitted to The New York Times that the distribution of the banners had funds from Moscow. Projectiles one after the other, in short, from an offensive network originating in Russia and destined for Africa that analysts like Limonier identified during Wagner’s years of growth as the “Prigozhin galaxy.”
Putin’s nicknamed chef was one of the great architects of this immersion campaign on the African continent since 2015 and 2016. “First for his interests,” says the Cassini researcher, “and then for those of the Russian State.” However, after the death of the St. Petersburg businessman last summer, Moscow, already aware of the importance and success of this soft power in Africa, has finally centralized these activities around the Kremlin and its intelligence services.
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