US pushes against Russian gains in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya — Fueled by guns, gold and social media, the rivalry between Russia and the West in Africa is rapidly escalating. The latest flashpoint is Chad, a sprawling desert nation at the crossroads of the continent, now a plum target for Russia’s expanding effort.

The United States recently warned Chad’s president that Russian mercenaries were plotting to kill him and three senior aides and that Moscow was backing Chadian rebels massing in the neighboring Central African Republic. At the same time, Moscow is courting sympathizers inside Chad’s ruling elite, including Cabinet ministers and a half brother of the president.

The decision by the U.S. government to share sensitive intelligence with the head of an African state — a disclosure it then leaked — reveals one way in which the Biden administration is moving more assertively in Africa and using new tactics to stymie Russian gains on the continent.

The U.S. is taking a page from its playbook in Ukraine, where it has used classified information to expose Russian plans and preempt what it says are China’s plans to supply Russia with weapons.

In Africa, the more forceful American approach aims partly to shore up the crumbling position of France, which in recent years has ceded ground to Russia in former colonies such as Mali and the Central African Republic. Now, the Russians are looking to topple more French dominoes in Central and Western Africa, and the United States is responding.

A U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the assassination plot in Chad represented “a new chapter” in efforts by Wagner, a Kremlin-backed private military force, to advance Russian interests in Africa.

Until now, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads Wagner, has established footholds in vulnerable African countries by sending his fighters to prop up tottering authoritarian rulers, usually in exchange for payment, or licenses to mine diamonds or gold.

The plot in Chad suggests he is ready to topple leaders who stand in his way. That change has prompted the U.S. to adopt more forward-leaning measures, such as those used in Ukraine, that are intended “to slow, to curb, constrain and reverse” Prigozhin’s expansion in Africa, the official said.

“Where Wagner has been present, bad things have inevitably followed,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on a visit to Niger last week.

The visit, during which Blinken pledged $150 million in aid to the Sahel region, was the fourth to Africa by a senior U.S. figure this year. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Linda Thomas-greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations, and first lady Jill Biden preceded him. Vice President Kamala Harris will begin a trip to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia this month, and President Joe Biden has promised to visit Africa later this year.

To many in Africa and beyond, the heightening great-power rivalry smacks of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union backed rival African leaders, including dictators. It’s a comparison the Biden administration desperately wants to avoid because its strategy in Africa, announced by Blinken to fanfare in South Africa last year, presents African countries as valued partners, not pawns in a global rivalry.

For their part, African leaders have made it clear that they do not want to be forced to choose sides.

“Africa has suffered enough from the burden of history,” Macky Sall, chair of the African Union, told the U.N. General Assembly in September. “It does not want to be the breeding ground of a new Cold War.”

Russian ties to Africa stretch back to the Soviet era, when Moscow backed sympathetic governments and independence movements, and have endured in recent years as Russia became the continent’s largest arms supplier.

But its latest drive for influence started in earnest about five years ago when Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries — many Russian but also Syrian, Serbian and Lebanese — began to appear in some of the continent’s most turbulent corners.

In response to questions, Prigozhin said in a statement, “We have nothing to do with either the Chadian rebels or Mr. Hemeti,” a nickname for the deputy leader of Sudan, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, who wields influence in Chad.

The Russian effort spans the continent but has had the greatest impact in the Sahel, the semiarid region bordering the Sahara. Wagner fighters are battling Islamist rebels in Mali, are bodyguards to the Central African Republic’s president and mine gold in several countries, including Sudan. .

The arrival of Russian mercenaries prompted the French military to withdraw from several countries. In November, France formally ended Operation Barkhane, its eight-year military drive against Islamist insurgents in the Sahel that, at its peak, included troops from five African countries. One of them, Mali, is now firmly in the Russian orbit.