On September 22, 2026, Russia's Africa Corps deployed a Molniya kamikaze drone (similar to those utilized in the war in Ukraine) against fighters linked to al-Qaeda who were laying siege to its position near the Dioura area in the Mopti region of Mali.
This constitutes an event that easily commands attention: mercenaries, drones, jihadists, and military regimes.
Yet there is a less noisy story, which is reflected in the figures published in January by the Global Development Policy Center of Boston University.
According to these metrics, Chinese loan commitments toward Africa, which peaked at 28.8 billion dollars in 2016, contracted to merely 2.1 billion dollars in 2024. Concurrently, African governments remitted 22.1 billion dollars more to Beijing than they received in new financing over the past five-year period.
These two developments are frequently portrayed as a single narrative: China withdraws and Russia assumes its place. In reality, however, they concern almost entirely disparate nations.
The retreat of Chinese financing
The massive surge in Chinese loans to Africa crested in 2016, partly driven by a 10-billion-dollar refinancing package in Angola. Since then, capital allocations have contracted almost annually.
In 2024, merely six new ventures were recorded across five nations: Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, and Egypt.
Financing for fossil fuel projects, power generation, and telecommunications has essentially halted. Chinese exposure is now channeled primarily into transportation, power grids, water management works, and the financial sector, within markets that Beijing understands thoroughly.
Today, debt service payments remitted to China exceed new lending across the entire continent, reversing the pattern of the 2015-2019 period, when Africa received net financing of roughly 30 billion dollars.
Russian expansion follows a distinct path
Simultaneously, Wagner Group, which was absorbed into the state-directed Africa Corps following the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, has broadened its footprint from Mali into Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, and Sudan, while maintaining smaller deployments across other countries.
The compensation model differs fundamentally from that of China. Moscow is remunerated primarily through concessions on extraction sites and mineral concessions rather than through sovereign lending.
Thus, the narrative concerning the «succession» of China by Russia is not substantiated by the data.
China's largest sovereign debtors in Africa are Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Zambia, South Africa, Cameroon, Angola, and Uganda.
Conversely, the Africa Corps operates predominantly in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, and the Republic of the Congo.
The overlap between the two rosters is essentially non-existent.
This is no coincidence. Chinese lending, even at its high-water mark, was funneled into nations commanding exportable natural resources and sufficient institutional mechanisms to service sovereign debt obligations.
Conversely, the coup belt across the Sahel, where Russia operates today, never served as a substantial destination for Chinese loans, given that sovereign credit risk was assessed as exceedingly prohibitive.
Russia, therefore, is not filling a vacuum vacated by China. It is primarily filling the vacuum created following the departure of France and Western counter-terrorism missions from the region.
Who truly replaces China?
The substantive question is not who replaces China in Mali, where its footprint was negligible.
The defining question is who assumes its role in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, namely the nations that formed the core of the Chinese sovereign portfolio.
The answer appears to lie in Gulf sovereign capital and multilateral lending institutions.
The International Resources Holding of the United Arab Emirates acquired in 2025 a 56% stake in the Bisie tin mine in the Congo and 51% of the Mopani copper mining asset in Zambia.
The AD Ports Group finalized a 20-year concession valued between 250 and 380 million dollars for the Port of Luanda in Angola, through which 76% of the country's maritime freight transits.
Concurrently, the Saudi entity Manara Minerals, backed by the PIF (Public Investment Fund), is evaluating capital commitments of up to 15 billion dollars across strategic African minerals.
At the same time, the IMF, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank expanded their net disbursements by 124% over the preceding decade and now underpin 56% of net developmental flows into the continent.
The exceptions: Sudan and Angola
Sudan constitutes the most notable exception.
There, China had forged robust links through petroleum-backed financing, while Wagner Group and subsequently the Africa Corps pursued access to gold concessions during the civil war.
This represents the sole case where the narrative of «Chinese exit and Russian entry» accurately characterizes the same country.
The second exception is Angola. In 2024 it emerged as the leading recipient of Chinese credit facilities at 1.45 billion dollars, while simultaneously attracting substantial capital allocations from the United Arab Emirates.
This demonstrates that Beijing is not abandoning Africa outright, but is narrowing its exposure to a handful of targeted wagers it calculates will yield returns.
The premise that a unified struggle for hegemony between China and Russia is unfolding across the whole of Africa caters to the geopolitical talking points of major powers.
Reality is far more intricate, notes Modern Diplomacy in its analysis.
In operational terms, two discrete power vacuums are taking shape across two distinct groupings of states. The first is occupied predominantly by Gulf capital and multilateral development lenders. The second is held almost exclusively by Moscow through security-for-resources arrangements.
To date, practically no global power delivers capital financing and kinetic security simultaneously to the same African states, rendering the continent's future far more fragmented and unpredictable than simplistic narratives of geopolitical succession suggest.
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