The 21st century has not been kind to the Russian state. Since 1989, and its eventual defeat in the Cold War, Moscow’s global power has shrunk significantly, with much of it dying alongside the old Soviet Union.
The past 35 years have seen allies globally shift their allegiances in alternative directions. In Central Asia, China replaced Russia as the dominant trade partner in the region. In Europe, U.S. influence has contributed to NATO’s dramatic eastward expansion along the Russian border. In the Middle East, despite 20 years of U.S. occupations, alliances have regionalized to the point where voices outside Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey effectively do not matter.
In Africa, however, it is different.
Just below the famous Sahara Desert, in an area known as the Sahel, escalating terrorist violence by ISIS, Al-Qaeda and deep-seated grievances against former colonial ruler, France, have together created the ideal conditions for revolt.
From 2020 to 2023, a series of military coups across sub-Saharan Africa overthrew their western-backed leaders with strong support from a large, politically conscious and engaged youth population. Seeking international recognition and powerful allies, it should have come to nobody’s surprise that somebody would come to the coup government’s aid, but the rise of Russia as a regional power player caught many off-guard.
Shortly after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and subsequent Donbas War in 2014, a pro-Russian paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group arose. Operating in Eastern Ukraine, Syria, and much of Africa, and led by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, comprised of former Russian military, and receiving orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, Wagner has acted as an extension of the Russian military.
However, as opposed to Wagner’s mission in Ukraine or Syria, their orders in Africa are very simple: extract wealth, weaken western influence and destabilize. If the goal was to make Russia a popular force on the continent, this should not work as it rhymes with the old neocolonial methods of control, but it has.
In 2018, President Faustin-Archange Touadera of the Central African Republic (CAR) signed a security agreement with Russia to protect his regime from rebel forces. The agreement granted Wagner-affiliated companies extraction rights over gold and diamond in the country. Wagner provided personal security for President Touadera, trained the CAR’s military and helped defend the capital from a series of rebel offensives, but they tore the country apart.
In June 2021, human rights group The Sentry and CNN worked closely on a confidential investigation, later sent to the UN, implicating the Wagner Group in horrific human rights abuses, detailing evidence of “mass killings, extrajudicial executions, torture, pillage, kidnapping for ransom, the burning of villages, and mass rapes.” This violence, matched with Wagner’s monopolization of the mining sector and overreliance on Wagner forces leaves the CAR a hotbed of instability, keeping the country hostage ever since.
However terrible, it is not an isolated case. In the case of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and more within the region, terrorist violence has spiraled out of control, with thousands of civilian deaths reported annually and growing each year, all while Wagner secures minerals they will inevitably send to Russia.
The arrival of Wagner forces in these countries has actually worsened the situation. What was originally a contained insurgency in the desert under French and American supervision has spilled across national borders, expanding to coastal countries Ivory Coast, Ghana and Togo. While one could argue Wagner’s inability to bring stability is a sign of incompetence, this is certainly not the case. They don’t help because they don’t want to.
None of this makes sense until one realizes this has been carefully timed with escalating tensions between NATO and Russia in Europe.
In 2017, when President Trump first threatened NATO member states to increase defense spending, Wagner promptly moved into Africa.
In 2022, when Russia set out to conquer Ukraine, pro-Russian governments had already been installed in Mali and Burkina Faso. By mid 2023, when NATO expanded to Finland and Sweden, Niger followed suit as terror-related deaths rose to almost 12,000 in the region, marking a 20 percent increase from 2022 according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data database.
If the situation continues to escalate, West Africa in the near future will either be a warzone or face the largest mass-migration of people in the region since the Slave Trade, where the likely destination will be Europe.
If this comes to pass, the Common European Asylum System, which governs much of EU immigration law, has no annual cap, no significant barriers to entry and therefore no legal basis to deny the hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions of people that will likely flee an increasingly untenable security situation in their home country. This is guaranteed to put serious strain on EU economies at the same time they are preparing for war with Russia.
Additionally, cultural and racial biases in Europe will clash with the arrival of Black Africans, causing division internally. Public pressure will force NATO to divide attention from the eastern flank to its south, deploying forces to militarily defend countries like Portugal, Spain and Italy to stem the flow of migrants. As Russia regains its strength in the coming years after the Ukraine War, a move like this will weaken the alliance’s deterrence posture in Eastern Europe.
Under these conditions, it is likely that despite their superior economy, defense spending, manpower and overall superior war-making capacity, Europe may not have the political will to face and defeat a Russia battle-hardened by years of war, which means Russia will dog walk them in an eventual conflict. Scary, but this has been done before.
In Syria, dictator Bashar Al-Assad asked Putin to maintain his regime amid mounting threats from opposition forces. In the eventual Civil War, Russia’s air campaign relied heavily on indiscriminate bombing, including munitions, bunker-buster bombs and chemical weapons attacks on refugee camps, hospitals, marketplaces and schools in actions the United Nations confirmed to be war crimes. The threat to civilian lives prompted 6.6 million Syrians to flee the country, including another 6.7 million internally in “the world’s largest displacement crisis,” according to the United Nations.
The arrival of Syrian refugees sparked a wave of right-wing nativist movements across Europe, despite taking in only 1 million of the nearly 7 million Syrians abroad. Immigration simply wasn’t popular, with a 2017 Chatham House poll revealing that 55 percent opposed further Muslim immigration and a similar 2025 poll by YouGov finding increased hostility to immigration, jumping to 70 percent.
This led to right-wing parties taking power across Europe and, at least until Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, they prioritized cultural identity and downplayed tensions with Russia, viewing Putin as a stabilizing force in contrast to the refugee crisis. This pragmatic alliance often overlooks Russia’s destabilizing tactics in exchange for a blind vision of sovereignty and national identity and it will happen again if Europe is not careful.
It would seem that under President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s foreign policy would not be one of law, order or peace. It wouldn’t follow ideological lines like in the Cold War. It wouldn’t build or invest in social goods abroad, but rather make allies with authoritarians, dictators and killers alike.
It would stoke violence, fuel instability, sow chaos and wait until a multipolar world order arose. Russia would then use this opportunity to ride the wave, expose hypocrisies and pick up the pieces from the aftermath to regain its former glory, to hell with the losses.
Europe finds itself at the barrel end of this plan, and it is vulnerable to the growing geopolitical threat posed by Russia’s destabilizing activities, but nobody’s talking about it.
Failing to acknowledge this growing threat could lead to a much larger crisis on Europe’s borders, with the potential to pave the way for Putin’s troops. Europe must take this threat seriously to avoid a much harsher geopolitical reality. This is Moscow’s Model of Madness.
Copy edited by Anijah Franklin
