On Thursday April 3, the Crash team was delighted to welcome Maxime Audinet, researcher at IRSEM, for a conference on Russia's new trajectories in Africa. This meeting, prepared with Michaël Neuman (Crash), was moderated by Guillaume Baret (Operations Department).

Since the late 2010s, Russia has steadily increased its presence in Africa, combining diplomatic and economic leverage, military cooperation as well as informational and cultural influence. Russia is now well established in Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Sahel countries.

In addition to conventional means, such as military and intelligence apparatus, Moscow has recourse to hybrid players situated at the crossroads of public and private interests. The Wagner Group, which the Russian Ministry of Defense is now seeking to absorb under the aegis of Africa Corps, is a case in point. This strategy is accompanied by a structured ecosystem of informational influence, combining state media and social network campaigns, subsidizing local influencers and creating relay actors to spread a pro-Russian narrative and denigrate former European colonial powers.

On April 3, we will have the pleasure of welcoming Maxime Audinet, researcher at the “Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l'École Militaire” (IRSEM), specialist in Russian foreign policy and influence strategy, and co-founder of Coruscant, the research collective on Contemporary Russia for the Analysis of its New Trajectories.

With him, we analyzed the interactions between business, military and communication strategies, as well as the arguments mobilized by Russia in the information competition in Africa to counter Western influence and, above all, French influence in the Sahel and Central African Republic. We also looked at how certain health issues can be instrumentalized in these disinformation strategies. Moreover, it was an opportunity to discuss research methods in restricted contexts, in particular OSINT, which our guest has drawn on extensively in his work.