Moscow is waging “a war for the minds” of Africans by rolling out a hybrid network of so-called "Russian Houses" in addition to arms supplies and direct military aid to military juntas in Africa, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) revealed in its recent investigation.
According to earlier research, “Russian Houses” in Africa, targeting above all the youth, are already operating or opening in at least 22 countries, as part of Russia’s strategy to consolidate its influence on the continent.
HUR now revealed that Moscow is currently planning to open centres of influence in eight African countries: Nigeria, Senegal, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Togo, Mali, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
This is being carried out through Russia's federal cooperation agency, Rossotrudnichestvo, in collaboration with the Centre for Public Diplomacy (CPD), an organisation founded in 2024 with the stated aim of expanding the existing network, specifically targeting Africa.
The CPD’s official mission is to convey "accurate" information about Russia to Africans.
Brussels has sanctioned Rossotrudnichestvo, freezing its assets in July 2022 for spreading disinformation tied to the invasion of Ukraine.
Yet it has continued to expand its African footprint despite the penalties, operating more than 85 official branches abroad.
Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service said Russia allocated $1.85 billion (€1.6bn) for foreign propaganda operations in its 2026 federal budget, a 54% increase on the previous year — a sum exceeding the entire annual education budgets of several West African states.
What goes on inside Russian Houses in Africa?
According to available information, the centres screen Soviet and Russian films, often on patriotic themes, and distribute ideologically vetted literature.
They also teach the Russian language and coach young people on how to move to Russia as students or workers.
Organisers sell an image of a "happy Russia,” but according to HUR, in practice that promise often curdles: some recruits sign contracts with the Russian military and are sent straight to the deadliest parts of the front lines in Ukraine.
In 2025, then-head of Rossotrudnichestvo Yevgeny Primakov Jr announced that the government would fund more than 5,000 African students to attend university in Russia.
The educational opportunity is often the most salient motivator for locals to engage with the organisation.
Most strikingly, in January of this year, Primakov Jr himself publicly admitted that a "well-known African private military company" — widely understood to mean Wagner Group, rebranded as Africa Corps following the death of founder Yevgeny Prigozhin — had been directly involved in establishing Russian Houses in Mali and the Central African Republic, and that some of its members had since moved into formal Russian state positions.
Ukraine's Centre for Countering Disinformation described the admission as confirmation that the centres function as elements of hybrid operations rather than neutral cultural institutions.
The Bangui Russian House in the Central African Republic is run by Dmitry Sytyi, a figure who also controls Wagner's operations in the country and reportedly uses the centre as a logistics hub for the group's gold, diamond and timber trafficking, according to media reports.
The expansion of Russian Houses has closely followed the rise of pro-Russian military juntas, particularly in West Africa: centres opened in Mali in 2022, Burkina Faso in January 2024 and Niger in October 2024, all following coups in which Wagner or its successor forces became the new regimes' primary security providers.
Wagner and Africa Corps, which is controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defence, are among the most ruthless armed groups on the continent and are directly implicated in mass civilian killings and other war crimes.
In April, three human rights organisations — TRIAL International, the Pan-African Lawyers Union and the International Federation for Human Rights — filed the first case of its kind before the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, seeking to hold Mali's government responsible for hosting and failing to prevent abuses by Wagner and its successor force.
Run by friends of Putin
Journalist and former Duma member Primakov Jr is the grandson of former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who also served as head of the KGB First Chief Directorate, overseeing its transition to Moscow's foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
The elder Primakov was a staunch advocate of the theory of Russian supremacy and one of the main architects of the Kremlin's idea of multilateralism, a thin ideological veneer meant to act as a cover to Moscow's aspirations for control over former Soviet republics and elsewhere and a key cog of Russian President Vladimir Putin's influence machine abroad.
Primakov Jr has direct ties to Putin. He served as one of Putin's official "trusted representatives" during the 2018 presidential campaign…
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