The message set is identical, not merely similar, all around the world. Russian intelligence officers are embedded in countries, hammering one disinformation line:
Democracy has failed, voting changes nothing, your problems are caused by outsiders and elites, only a strongman restores order.
It’s all bullshit. That script ran through Doppelgänger and Storm-1516 against Germany and through the same channels in the US. Watching the Sahel version of it now is helpful because it is further along the sequence. Africa shows us what the operation looks like after Russian full-capture succeeds: the security providers kill more civilians than the threat they were installed to solve, and information operations stop being a tool of acquisition and become an extraction scheme.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, violence against civilians by the militaries (and their Russian partners) since 2023 has resulted in more civilian fatalities than those caused by the jihadists.
Despite this collapsing house of cards, Russia and its junta allies remain on the offensive with their most potent asymmetric tool: information operations. Audaciously, this is not just directed at shoring up domestic support for the Sahelian juntas but is also targeting neighboring democratically oriented governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin. Social media accounts linked to Russia and the juntas extol the fictional development and stability realized under the military regimes. Any jihadist gains are blamed on Western collusion.
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West Africa, thus, is in the throes of a pivotal race. Will the relentless negative messaging topple another democratic-leaning government before the fallacy of junta success is exposed? Or will the Sahelian military regimes collapse first, shattering any such illusion?
Russia is a shrinking economy with little to offer other states beyond aging, poorly designed weapons and grievance. Yet its legacy Cold War intelligence network makes it the dominant external actor in the Sahel and much of Africa despite providing 1 percent of the continent’s foreign direct investment, limited security assistance, and a political model few societies admit they would ever emulate. Influence is only made possible by their real product being disinformation, a narrative rather than anything material.
And now for some differences. The vehicle in Africa is still the coup. Russia has been caught in the Sahel, and their pivots to Nigeria and other West African states show they may be losing faith in their own disinformation. In Washington it could be argued whether it is a coup or not, while the public perception is still an electoral vehicle. In Berlin the AfD and BSW look more and more like instruments of Moscow than domestic parties. And the CSU’s Dobrindt keeps showing up to announce Moscow’s latest disinformation operations, a counter-messaging role that shows how deep the intelligence penetration runs.