Is West Africa the new Proxy Location for the Russian-Ukrainian War?

Russia’s presence in Africa long predates its invasion of Ukraine. Moscow’s strategy is built around low-cost, high-impact interventions such as security partnerships, arms deals, disinformation campaigns, political interference, and mercenaries. While China chased infrastructure deals and the West dispensed aid with conditions attached, Russia offered something more attractive to embattled rulers: guns, loyalty, and no questions asked. In exchange, it extracted mining rights, diplomatic cover, and strategic positioning.

Before the war, Ukraine had little interest in Africa, no mercenaries to deploy, mining concessions to offer, or decades-long footprint on the continent. What it had was a war to fight and an enemy to bleed, wherever that enemy could be found. When Russian forces began embedding across the Sahel, propping up juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, Kyiv saw an opportunity. The cost of opening a front in Africa was low, the potential gain, in terms of stretching Russia thin and scoring propaganda victories with Western backers, was significant.

The result is a proxy war in one of the world’s poorest regions, driven by powers with no genuine stake in its future. Russia has deployed mercenaries, hardware, and disinformation. Over 1,700 Africans are allegedly fighting on the Russian side in Ukraine, recruited through informal networks and promises of well-paying civilian jobs. African soldiers have been drawn into Russia’s war in Europe while Russian soldiers wage war in Africa. The exchange is not equal, but the logic is the same, to use African bodies to serve European ends.

Ukraine’s methods have been different but no less deliberate. Instead of deploying boots on the ground, Kyiv has offered training, intelligence, and battlefield technology. Some elements of rebel forces received specialised training in Ukraine on the use of drones, then returned to train other fighters on the ground.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Ukrainian intelligence services of being directly implicated in supporting JNIM, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, which attacked Malian army positions near Koulikoro in May 2025. Whether or not every specific accusation holds up, the pattern is difficult to dismiss. Ukraine is fighting Russia in Africa, through African proxies, on African territory.

Mali’s Foreign Ministry stated that the region is facing a proxy war in which “terrorists are sponsored both by regional countries and external powers providing them significant resources.” That statement came from a government aligned with Moscow, and should be read with appropriate scepticism, but it contains a truth that the Sahel is a theatre, and Africans are the cast.

When Mali’s military junta expelled French forces and UN peacekeepers following its 2021 coup, it turned to Russia to fill the void. By 2022, the Wagner Group had become Mali’s principal security partner. The arrangement was sold to the Malian public as a rejection of neo-colonial dependence, a sovereign choice to partner with a power that respected African autonomy. What followed was an increase in human rights abuses and armed conflict, and by 2024, Mali ranked fifth among countries most affected by terrorism globally. The promise of security produced insecurity, and into that insecurity, Ukraine inserted itself.

In July 2024, Tuareg rebels and al-Qaeda-linked JNIM fighters ambushed Malian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries near Tinzaouaten, a remote settlement on the Algerian border. Up to 84 Russian mercenaries and nearly 50 Malian soldiers were killed in the fighting. It was arguably the worst defeat Russia’s forces had suffered on the continent. Then an Ukrainian military intelligence official suggested publicly that Kyiv had provided the rebels with the information needed to carry out the strike.

Mali’s Prime Minister General Abdoulaye Maiga told the United Nations that “the Ukrainian regime has become one of the main suppliers of kamikaze drones to terrorist groups around the world.” Following that, Mali and Niger severed diplomatic ties with Kyiv.

The cynicism on both sides is clear, Ukraine is a country fighting for its survival against an illegal invasion, and it has earned considerable international sympathy for doing so. It has also, in Mali, provided tactical support to a coalition that includes an al-Qaeda affiliate, to bleed Russian forces at low cost. Analysts note that Ukraine likely exaggerated its role to impress Western partners, while underestimating how rebels are perceived across Sahel capitals, as terrorists, not freedom fighters. Russia arrived promising sovereignty but delivered a massacre. In the second half of 2024, Malian armed forces working alongside Russian mercenaries deliberately killed at least 32 civilians and burned over 100 homes, and arbitrarily executed at least 10 people in January 2025, including women and a two-year-old child. 

By June 2025, the reckoning arrived. Wagner officially declared the end of its Mali mission, concluding more than three and a half years of engagement.  Its exit statement claimed success, but the reality was different. The Africa Corps, the Kremlin’s successor to Wagner, has taken over operations, but has been continually kneecapped by Moscow’s prioritisation of the Ukraine conflict itself. Russia, stretched thin across two continents, is losing ground in both.

Meanwhile, JNIM tightens its grip. The group has brokered local agreements with various sub-populations, built shadow governance structures, and launched an economic warfare campaign, choking off fuel convoys and blockading highways into Bamako. The capital is being strangled by a jihadist group using tactics borrowed from a European war. A JNIM takeover of Mali would represent the first time an al-Qaeda affiliate had taken power in a country. The implications are major, both regionally and globally. It would also be a catastrophic verdict on Russia’s security model, and would show Ukraine’s willingness to fight its enemy anywhere, by any means, regardless of who gets caught in between.

Africa is not a battleground by accident.  It is the consequence of a leadership that has ignored its responsibility to its people, opening the doors to external powers by choosing personal gain over the sovereignty of their nations. When governments hollow out their own institutions, silence political opposition, and drain public resources, they do not just fail their citizens, they create the very vacuum that Russia, Ukraine, China,  and others are more than willing to fill. The Sahel is the clearest proof of this. Mali’s political class spent decades enriching itself while its military weakened and its northern territories fell to armed groups. The General Goïta-led junta that replaced the Malian president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in 2020, and interim President, Bah Ndaw in 2021,  has  not looked inward to rebuild, rather it invited Wagner Group forces in, trading one form of dependence for another.