Russia saves Niger’s junta – but its Africa strategy is failing

AFRICA / RUSSIA

Moscow helped crush an attempted mutiny in Niamey, but its failure to contain the jihadist advance could ultimately unravel its influence across the continent.

Russia’s Africa corps has saved Niger’s military ruler from an attempted mutiny, providing the clearest evidence yet that Moscow has become the ultimate guarantor of Africa’s embattled juntas.

But Moscow’s protection-for-resources bargain with Africa’s autocrats may have a limited shelf life unless the rising tide of Islamist victories is reversed.

Mutinous soldiers briefly seized Air Base 101 at Niamey’s Diori Hamani International Airport on Saturday after gunfire and explosions were reported near the airport and presidential palace.

The uprising was driven by mounting anger among frontline troops over the junta’s failure to curb an increasingly powerful jihadist insurgency.

It presented General Abdourahamane Tiani with the gravest internal threat since he overthrew Niger’s elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, in July 2023.

The rebels reportedly included young special forces officers drawn from Tillabéri and Dosso, south-western regions where troops have suffered repeated losses to Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates.

They took soldiers hostage at the base and outnumbered the elite guards sent to confront them. Three members of the presidential guard were reportedly killed before loyalist forces regained control.

Tiani’s presidential guard prevented the mutineers from taking the palace. But with much of the wider military apparently waiting to see which side would prevail, Russian personnel provided the ground and aerial support needed to recapture the airbase.

Viktor Voropayev, Russia’s ambassador to Niger, confirmed that the authorities had requested Moscow’s assistance and said the rebels were neutralised “particularly thanks to the intervention” of the Africa corps.

The intervention prevented the revolt from becoming a broader challenge to Tiani’s rule.

But analysts say it also exposed the central contradiction in Russia’s expanding African model: Moscow can keep allied rulers in power, but it has proved unable to defeat the insurgencies those rulers promised to crush.

Ben Manzin, Sibylline’s Sub-Saharan Africa analyst, says the mutineers were not aligned with the jihadists.

Many are understood to have come from areas suffering some of the country’s worst violence and had lost confidence in Tiani’s leadership.

“For as long as the Africa corps can provide a backbone or a backstop to the regime, it is going to be very, very difficult to remove,” he says.

Tiani justified the 2023 coup partly by accusing Bazoum’s civilian government of failing to restore security.

He subsequently expelled French forces and forced the US to abandon its major drone base at Agadez, turning instead to Russia for military support.

Yet the insurgency has intensified. Manzin says Tiani discarded Bazoum’s more conciliatory engagement with vulnerable communities, driving some further away from the state while failing to improve conditions on the battlefield.

“This points to a growing morale crisis in Niger and a worsening security situation,” he says.

Paweł Wójcik, an independent researcher specialising in jihadist groups and insurgencies, estimates that around 200 Africa corps troops are based in Niger, compared with more than 2,000 in Mali.

Their roles in Niger are training local forces and protecting the regime.

Created after the dismantling of Wagner following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed 2023 rebellion and subsequent death, the force is directly controlled by Russia’s defence establishment.

Many of its personnel are the same Wagner veterans, now operating under a new command structure.

But Russia’s larger deployment in Mali has failed to halt the jihadist advance.

Kidal, promoted as Wagner’s defining battlefield victory in 2023, was retaken in April by Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked JNIM. Russia’s flagship victory has proved no more durable than the governments it protects.

Alia Brahimi, a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, says the mutiny is the product of the same failure that brought military governments to power across the region.

“You had civilian governments losing the fight, followed by coupists losing the fight, and now, with Russian help, they are still losing the fight,” she says.

Although Moscow’s bargain is commonly described as protection in return for resources, Wójcik argues that its rewards are primarily political.

Russia has displaced France, weakened Western influence and gained client governments, but has so far extracted little material benefit.

Niger illustrates the problem.

Around 1,000 tonnes of yellowcake produced by the French nuclear group Orano remain at Air Base 101. Efforts to export the stockpile have been frustrated by legal disputes, insecurity and the difficulty of moving it through jihadist-threatened territory to a port.

“The resources exist,” Wójcik says. “The point is that Russia isn’t getting them.”

Brahimi compares the emerging relationship with Niger to that in the Central African Republic, where Russian fighters have provided close protection to President Faustin-Archange Touadéra for years.

“The military may become so indebted to the Russians that it erodes their capacity for independence,” she says.

“Russia can capture these states by essentially holding their leaders hostage in the name of protecting them.”

Algeria’s response demonstrates the wider anxiety caused by Niger’s instability.

Algiers dispatched four Su-30 fighter aircraft and a tanker to Niamey after the mutiny, in an unusually visible show of support for its southern neighbour.

Its overriding concern is not commercial. Algeria’s security outlook remains shaped by its bloody struggle against Islamist insurgents during the 1990s and by its determination to prevent jihadist groups from exploiting weak or fragmented states along its borders.

It therefore wants Niger’s government to survive, even though it is wary of Russia’s growing presence and believes Moscow’s indiscriminate tactics can radicalise communities and strengthen the insurgencies they are intended to destroy.

This leaves Russia protecting regimes whose battlefield failures create new threats to their survival while the financial rewards remain beyond reach.

Every mutiny, jihadist advance and costly Russian rescue strips credibility from its promise to deliver security.

By 2028, Wójcik predicts, Mali could decide whether Moscow’s African dream survives. If more than 2,000 Russian troops cannot save the junta, Russia will lose the one claim that sustains the bargain.

“It will no longer be able to say: whatever else you say about us, we protect the regimes.”