On 25 March 2026, a high-level interagency coordination meeting took place at Ukraine’s Presidential Office, chaired by Kyrylo Budanov. The subject was the expansion of Ukraine’s presence on the African continent — and it was the first such meeting in the country’s history at this level. Priority countries have been identified. Coordination mechanisms agreed. A draft action plan has been submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers. The priority regions are the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Budanov said: ‘For the first time, Ukraine has set itself the goal of comprehensively influencing the situation on the African continent and protecting Ukrainian interests in this part of the world. Ukraine must confirm its status as a competitive and influential geopolitical player.’
A geopolitical vector framed as the protection of Ukrainian interests — and this is stated openly. In the absence of an independent Africa strategy with its own budget, the uncomfortable answers to this question suggest themselves to the international community.
A country that itself depends on external assistance and weapons supplies is positioning itself as an international actor. How is this possible, and why?
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The question is not rhetorical. Let us try to make sense of it insofar as is possible given the limited public information available.
What Ukraine Has to Offer
Until September 2024, Ukraine’s Africa policy was built around a concept that Foreign Minister Kuleba described as the ‘Ukrainian-African Renaissance.’ At its core was the positioning of Ukraine as the heir to the Soviet Union’s military, economic, technical and humanitarian presence on the continent — supplemented by new elements: food security through the grain deal, the opening of new embassies, the first Ukraine-Africa summit, and the appointment of a special representative. This was an attempt to build a comprehensive, independent foreign policy — including as a ‘diplomatic counteroffensive’ against Russian influence. President Zelensky’s only visit to Africa — South Africa, April 2025 — took place within the framework of this concept.
Today, little of this remains in the public domain. The grain deal has ceased to exist. Ukraine’s economy has been devastated by war and is sustained by Western financing. Activities not directly related to the conduct of hostilities survive — sometimes even in spite of state policy. There are no technical or humanitarian resources for an independent African policy.
The replacement of Kuleba by Sybiha exposed a declarative vacuum. The effective transfer of the African dossier to Budanov in March 2026 marks a shift in logic — from diplomatic to security-driven.
The head of the Presidential Office, Kyrylo Budanov, is not simply a politician or diplomat. He is the former head of Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (HUR), who personally oversaw special military operations against Russia well beyond Ukraine’s borders, and is known for his public statements.
To compete with Russia in Africa, it is not enough to be anti-Russian. One must offer what Africa needs — and do it better. That is not yet happening.
And today, what we see is only a military footprint. President Zelensky’s own rhetoric confirms this — Ukraine must demonstrate that it knows how to fight. What is not declared does not exist as policy.
But this footprint is precisely what Africa may be able to use. Ukraine now holds a rare and distinctive form of experience: The experience of surviving high-intensity war against a formidable adversary. Modern communications technology. Drone tactics. Decentralised operations. Rapid field adaptation. The ability to build combat effectiveness quickly, from almost any human material, under conditions of severe scarcity.
Above all, Ukraine has applied these methods in a high-intensity war against a superior adversary: a living, tested model of asymmetric survival combining patriotism, moral resilience, discipline, command initiative, professional competence and modern technology, forged under the pressure of actual war. This is a product that travels without a procurement contract. What it requires is access — political, institutional, and operational.
The demand is real. Not theory. Not institutions. The existential experience of fighting for survival and independence.
The question is: who in Africa is prepared to accept it, and on what terms.
Ukraine’s Strategic Interest
Is Ukraine a genuinely independent geopolitical actor, or a proxy aligned with Western strategic interests — with a Ukrainian face but a broader agenda? Or is it a business model in which Ukraine serves as an exporter of force and experience?
There are grounds for suggesting that Europe perceives Ukraine primarily as a vanguard in the confrontation with Russia — rather than as an independent actor with its own agenda. Ukraine, in turn, risks perceiving Africa not as an independent subject — but as a space for the realisation of its own interests.
Officials from HUR have stated publicly that Ukraine will fight Russia wherever Russia is present. That is not the language of diplomacy or cooperation. It is the language of war. And when Ukraine positions itself as a geopolitical player in Africa, this is read through the lens of its confrontation with Russia. From that moment, every Ukrainian offer — drones, training, expertise, partnership — risks being evaluated as part of an external conflict being imported onto African soil.
Ukraine may genuinely wish to build independent partnerships. But as long as the fundamental decisions on war and the economy are taken in significant part not in Kyiv but in Western capitals, African governments will see a proxy with a Ukrainian face. They are not wrong because the structural dependency is not concealed — it is declared openly by Budanov himself when he speaks of Ukrainian interests financed by Western assistance.
Ukrainian ambassadors in Africa have already received formal diplomatic notes after calls were made for African volunteers to fight on Ukraine’s side. The response was unambiguous: such actions contradict the principle of non-interference and violate the legislation of the host countries.
This dynamic is well illustrated by the competing narratives on the continent. Russia’s security export has repeatedly been accused of escalating violence and serious abuses of humanitarian norms. Rather than resolving conflicts, it tends to freeze them at a level manageable for the incumbent regime — a stability that holds only as long as sufficient external support continues, and at the cost of significant civilian casualties.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has faced formal accusations of supporting terrorism from the Alliance of Sahel States. The trigger was the engagement at Tinzaouaten in July 2024 in Mali, when CSP-PSD rebels inflicted significant losses on Malian forces and Wagner personnel. In the aftermath, Kyiv’s own officials provided the ammunition for the accusation: HUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov stated that the rebels had received ‘necessary information’ for the operation — words subsequently confirmed by Ukraine’s ambassador to Senegal. Whether this constitutes evidence of systematic support for armed groups, or simply reflects Ukrainian intelligence sharing against a common adversary in the form of Russian Wagner — remains contested.
But the governments of Mali, Niger and Burkina-Faso interpreted it as an official acknowledgement of support for terrorism. In August 2024, all three submitted a formal letter to the United Nations demanding action. Mali and Niger severed diplomatic relations with Ukraine the same month.
In this information war, what matters is not who is right — but how African governments read their own survival. And that calculus is determined not by narratives, but by concrete economic realities.
Rivalry with Russia
Russia is not simply present in Africa despite sanctions and war — it is using Africa to demonstrate that isolation does not work. Ukraine understands this. It is precisely why the African dossier has passed to Budanov.
Africa does not support Western sanctions. They hit its own economy, disrupt logistics, fuel inflation. When Russia’s shadow fleet supplies the continent with fuel in circumvention of Western restrictions — this is a real function that a number of African governments value.
Ukraine has consistently declared operations against this shadow fleet. In November 2025, a tanker off the coast of Dakar sustained serious damage from external explosions — Senegal mounted an operation to prevent an oil spill in its own waters. No one claimed official responsibility. But the nature of operations against the shadow fleet is public and consistent.
For Ukraine, this is a continuation of the war with Russia. For Africa — a threat to its own logistics and the sovereignty of its waters. No one articulates this as a contradiction out loud. But it exists.
Those perceived as obstructing Russia in this context are seen as obstructing the governments themselves. This is not a pro-Russian position. It is not bias. It is these governments’ own calculus.
It is precisely for this reason that the picture of Ukraine’s receptivity across the continent is so uneven — determined not by declarations but by concrete calculations of survival.
The Reaction from African Capitals
Unreceptive above all are the countries where Russia is already present — Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso, the CAR. The Sahel Alliance does not live in narratives and is not choosing sides in someone else’s war. It lives in its own complex reality. In Mali and Niger, military governments came to power through coups — and turned immediately to Russia as a guarantor of regime survival. Not because they share Russian ideology. But because Russia offered what was needed, here and now: control of the capital, suppression of threats, time in power. In the CAR, the same logic has kept a regime afloat for several years.
Unreceptive may also be countries with active separatist movements — the Tinzaouaten precedent has raised a question that many governments now ask themselves: if Kyiv supports armed rebels against one regime, what prevents it from doing the same against another?
The West itself is not uniform in its attitude to Ukraine’s Africa mission. A degree of tension in Kyiv’s relations with Washington complicates Ukraine’s presence in countries critically important to the United States.
Receptive above all are countries oriented towards the EU and the United Kingdom — where the Ukrainian narrative is embedded in a broader European agenda and is not read as the import of a foreign conflict.
A second category of receptive states are those with a concrete demand for military transformation — rather than simply regime protection.
Ethiopia, rebuilding after the Tigray war, faces the challenge of restructuring its armed forces for conventional threats — precisely the type of problem where Ukrainian experience is relevant. Somalia confronts Al-Shabaab as a quasi-conventional force that controls territory and conducts coordinated operations — closer to the Ukrainian theatre than to classical counterinsurgency. Kenya and Rwanda are countries with professional armies seeking not protection but modernisation: tactics, technology, methods. SADC, after its failures in eastern DRC, is reconsidering the very architecture of peacekeeping. Mauritania and Ghana are countries where concrete discussions of military training and defence cooperation have already taken place.
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What these countries have in common is that they are not looking to Ukraine for what the Sahel seeks. They do not need regime protection. They need knowledge. And it is here that Ukraine’s model may be assessed on its own merits — rather than through the lens of the war with Russia.
Some governments may seek to use Ukraine’s security business model as leverage against Russian influence while maintaining formal non-alignment. Others may find the association too costly. The calculus differs by capital.
Russia, meanwhile, is not the only external actor on the continent offering such services. The security export market in Africa has never been a duopoly. Ukraine is entering an already crowded, multipolar space. Beyond existing Western mechanisms of military-technical cooperation, China is present through infrastructure credits and military training, Turkey through Bayraktar drones and bilateral agreements, and the UAE through financing, logistics and support for specific regimes.
Conclusion
So what do many African governments actually want? Not doctrine. Not models. Not another external actor arriving with an elaborate strategic vision. Many African governments want survival. To hold power. To avoid losing the capital. To prevent the opposition from gaining external backing.
Russia understood this first. It does not offer a model — it offers a function. Protection, here and now.
The West offers institutions. Slowly, expensively, and with uncertain outcomes.
Ukraine offers the experience of fighting a near-peer adversary. But many African governments are not fighting near-peer adversaries. They are fighting armed groups, terrorist organisations, and internal fragmentation. This is a different kind of war. Ukraine’s model does not automatically calibrate to that reality.
The distinction is fundamental. Russia sells time in power. Ukraine offers tools of war. These are not the same product — and many African governments understand the difference.
Some African governments will likely accept Ukraine as a partner. Some will accept it as a Western proxy — this would not be the first time, nor the last. Others may engage with it purely as a business model built on the export of wartime competencies.
But a pattern across the continent points to one thing that many governments will not accept: the transfer of someone else’s war onto their soil.
Sergey Eledinov is the founder of Convoy Africa, an independent platform for analysis and advisory work on African security. He is based in Dakar, Senegal.
