Is the following summit price it? Asks OUMAROU SANOU
Less than a month earlier than the Third Russia-Africa Summit, scheduled for 28–29 October in Moscow, African delegations face a query that has nothing to do with diplomacy and all the pieces to do with arithmetic: is it well worth the danger of flying right into a capital that Ukrainian drones now attain with uncomfortable regularity, and what, exactly, does Africa get for making the journey in any respect?
The safety query solutions itself first. On 6 October, roughly 650 drones struck the Moscow area in one of many largest such assaults of the conflict, killing two folks and setting a warehouse ablaze; it adopted a 20 September assault through which some 450 drones have been aimed on the capital particularly, a part of a wider barrage of 1,600 launched throughout Russia that day. These are usually not remoted incidents however a sample, and one which has already reached African carriers straight. In early September, Air Tanzania suspended its Dar es Salaam-Moscow route following a danger evaluation, resuming it solely days later beneath industrial and diplomatic stress. “If Air Tanzania judged it necessary to temporarily suspend flights, it was not without reason,” a Tanzanian official near the matter is reported to have mentioned. “But what happens if Moscow is struck again during the summit, or if air defences are activated while we are there?”
That query deserves greater than Moscow’s choreography will enable. The hazard just isn’t that Ukraine would intentionally goal an African delegation; it’s that civilian aviation and dwell air defence operations now share the identical airspace over the identical metropolis, with precedents that ought to focus minds. In 2014, flight MH17 was shot down over japanese Ukraine, killing all 298 folks aboard. In December 2024, Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 crashed after apparently being struck throughout Russian air defence operations towards drones, killing 38. Neither concerned an African provider, however each present what occurs when industrial plane fly via contested skies.
“If Russia cannot secure its own capital, what exactly is it offering the African governments that have come to treat it as a security guarantor?”
Moscow’s pitch to Africa rests on a narrower premise than its rhetoric suggests, not improvement, not shared prosperity, however safety, delivered via non-public navy contractors and now the state-run Africa Corps in Mali, the Central African Republic and past. Putin mentioned in 2023 that Russia had military-technical cooperation agreements with greater than 40 African states; US congressional analysis has recognized regime safety, not institution-building, because the principal attraction. That comparative benefit is strongest exactly the place African establishments are weakest, which is a distinct enterprise from improvement fully.
The financial case is not any sturdier. At the inaugural Sochi summit in 2019, Putin set a goal of roughly doubling Russia-Africa commerce inside 4 to 5 years, implying a determine close to $40bn. By Lavrov’s personal account, 2025 turnover got here in at simply over $27bn, and Russia nonetheless accounts for lower than 1% of overseas direct funding into Africa. That hole has not gone unnoticed contained in the delegations themselves. “It would be interesting to discuss the ‘win-win’ aspect of this partnership. For now, that is not the case,” a supply near Ghana’s delegation mentioned, including pointedly: “AI can wait, political stability cannot,” a rejoinder aimed squarely at Lavrov’s personal checklist of summit priorities, synthetic intelligence, digital funds, different currencies, which reads much less like an African agenda than one exported wholesale from Moscow. Gabon has reportedly settled the matter outright, declining to ship its president or his internal circle to a summit held removed from its borders and additional nonetheless from its residents’ considerations.
More troubling than the shortfall is what more and more fills it. A US Congressional Research Service evaluation notes studies that African gold and different assets have helped Russia cushion sanctions stress. Now one other useful resource seems more and more related: folks. Amnesty International’s September investigation documented misleading and coercive recruitment of overseas nationals, disproportionately from poorer Global South international locations, into Russia’s armed forces, concluding that in lots of circumstances the practices amounted to human trafficking. A partnership can not credibly be known as mutually useful if Africans looking for bizarre jobs find yourself supplying manpower for another person’s conflict.
This can also be why the summit’s location deserves scrutiny, not simply its agenda. Russia has now held three summits with Africa, Sochi in 2019, St Petersburg in 2023, Moscow in 2026, and has by no means as soon as introduced the gathering to African soil. Compare that with France’s Africa Forward Summit, held in Nairobi on 11–12 May 2026 and co-chaired collectively by Macron and Kenya’s president, the primary such summit in Africa, with African hosts, African protocol and African convening energy. Whatever one thinks of France’s personal report on the continent, the selection of venue signalled one thing Moscow has by no means provided: treating African leaders as co-chairs of their very own partnership somewhat than invitees to another person’s capital. If Russia’s engagement with Africa is genuinely a partnership of equals somewhat than an illustration of whose capital instructions the visitor checklist, there is no such thing as a structural cause the following summit couldn’t be held in Addis Ababa, Nairobi or Abuja, co-chaired by an African head of state.
That it has not been, after three editions, says as a lot concerning the relationship as any communiqué will.
None of this argues for severing ties with Moscow. Russia stays a big arms provider and a helpful counterweight for states diversifying away from former colonial patrons, and strategic autonomy means maintaining choices open, not foreclosing them. But engagement just isn’t deference, and a summit just isn’t proof {that a} partnership is working. As one official near the preparations put it: “For three years now we have been discussing a summit held in Africa; it remains a dead letter. But on top of that, we now run the risk of being bombed.” Before African leaders signal on to a different spherical of declarations in a metropolis that can’t totally assure their bodily security, the least they owe their very own residents is an sincere reply: if Russia can not defend itself, and won’t even meet Africa midway by itself soil, what precisely is that this partnership defending?
Sanou is a social critic, Pan-African observer and researcher specializing in governance, safety and political transitions within the Sahel. sanououmarou386@gmail.com
