Deep in South Africa’s wine country near the town of Robertson, past rows of tin shacks and up a gravel road where barefoot children play, sits a little piece of Russia.

The apricot-hued building with its curved dome proclaims its affiliation with the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church on a sign in Afrikaans. The interior is adorned with icons, rugs and candle stands, things more familiar to a place of worship in, say, St. Petersburg than South Africa’s Western Cape. But the outpost is just one of hundreds of similar churches that have spawned across Africa.

The continent has long been a target for Russia. The Soviet Union supported decolonialization and aided new independent states during the Cold War while the West engendered mistrust with policies such as doing little to oppose apartheid in South Africa.

Now, faced with more sanctions over its war in Ukraine and a new geopolitical era, Moscow is trying to leverage its old, soft power ties again in the absence of any significant economic hard power.

Recent years have seen China dominate, becoming Africa’s biggest trading partner and investing in roads, railways and ports. The broader aim might be diplomatic, to garner international support from a continent with 54 votes at the United Nations. The Kremlin and its proxies, though, are also leaning on African countries for recruits to bolster its army and the workforce making munitions it uses in Ukraine.

“Russia is trying to develop its policy of influence in all African countries,” said Thierry Vircoulon, coordinator of the Observatory of Central and Southern Africa at the French Institute of International Relations, known as IFRI. “They want to project the image of a great country that is friendly to all Africans.”

President Vladimir Putin recently created a Kremlin department to coordinate Russia’s interactions and policies with nations personally selected by him. There will be a special team to look after Africa policy, two people familiar with the situation said.

Early on in its war against Ukraine, there were donations of a small amount of fertilizer and grains to African nations to help alleviate shortages caused by the full-scale invasion in February 2022. More recently, Putin ordered ships to sail around Africa, ostensibly to help countries such as Morocco and Senegal map out their stocks of fish.

What’s increasingly visible is the linguistic and cultural push. Russia has opened seven centers known as Russian Houses across the continent and plans more, holding talks over a new site in Namibia in early December. Russian, meanwhile, is being introduced at universities in cities including Abidjan in Ivory Coast and Harare in Zimbabwe.

In 2024, the foundation led by Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova opened a lecture hall at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, to facilitate the teaching of the language.

More than 32,000 students from Africa are currently studying at Russian universities, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in December. Since 2020, the number of scholarships allocated to the African continent in Russia has nearly tripled, reaching more than 5,300 places. They are following in the footsteps of African leaders, many of whom had military or academic training in the USSR.

The Russian embassy in South Africa posted an advert for them in December and a politician in Lesotho facilitated sending students to Moscow-based Synergy University earlier in the year.

And, of course, there’s religion — a way of wielding influence going back to Christian missionaries in colonial times. In less than three years, the Russian Orthodox Church expanded to at least 34 countries in Africa from four, grew the number of clergy to 270 and registered 350 parishes and communities as of June 2024, the latest figures available from the church.

The geographical expansion might be the most significant in the Russian Orthodox Church’s history, Yuri Maksimov, chairman of the Africa Exarchate’s mission department, wrote in a 2025 academic paper.

The Russians attracted priests with better salaries, promises of church construction and rapid promotion, according to a study by Father Evangelos Thiani, an academic and Kenyan priest in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Russian orthodoxy welcomed Alexey Herizo, a Madagascan priest in the capital, Antananarivo, with “open arms.” He did online training with a seminary in Moscow, then practical training on site in 2023 for three months before being ordained as a deacon and then a priest within a few days.

That was after years of waiting for the Greek Orthodox Church to accept him, said Alexey, his religious name. The salaries provided by the Russian church allow us “to live decently, take care of our family’s health, and provide for our children’s education,” he said.

Expanding outreach

It’s hard to estimate the number of worshipers the church has now in communities where religion and social conservatism play a large role in everyday life. The church on the outskirts of Robertson, a town named after a Scottish protestant, switched to the Russian branch of the Orthodox faith in 2022. It’s now home to a small congregation of largely White, Afrikaans-speaking South Africans.

While Russian Orthodox churches in South Africa have mainly recruited from Afrikaans communities, with its conservative values appealing to elements of that group, they have also been seeking to add to their numbers with outreach programs to rural, Black communities.

The expansion is aimed at “trying to pull more countries into their orbit,” said Tom Southern, director of special projects at the Centre for Information Resilience, who has looked at the growth. “It’s like spiritual colonialism.”

Russia’s longstanding ties with Africa loosened following the collapse of communism as the country turned to the West. The continent came back into focus after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and relations with the U.S. and Europe soured.

A report by the European Parliament said Moscow has military cooperation agreements with 43 African countries and is a key supplier of arms. Wagner Group paramilitaries were active trying to fight rebels in places like Mali, though the group has since been disbanded and folded into the government’s Africa Corps. Companies linked with Wagner, meanwhile, had contracts across the continent in security, oil services and gold mining.

African countries have vast economic and human potential and are playing an increasingly significant role in global politics, Putin said in a written address to the plenary session of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum conference in Cairo in December. Lavrov, his foreign minister, told the event that Russia plans to have trade missions operating in 15 African countries by the end of 2026.

A Russian warship in January joined naval exercises held off the coast of South Africa along with vessels from China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The Russian embassy said they focused on maritime security.

Russia’s renewed push into Africa lacks the financial resources of its geopolitical rivals, though. While China is sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest trade partner, Russia ranks 33rd and is superseded by the UAE, U.S., Japan and eight European nations.

China has built infrastructure in nations from Cameroon to Kenya while the UAE and other wealthy gulf states have become major sources of foreign money in recent years. The European Union is the biggest investor in South Africa and 600 American companies operate in the country.

Putin hosted a Russia-Africa summit in 2019 attended by 43 heads of state, while the second one in 2023 attracted just 17. The Kremlin blamed the low attendance on “unprecedented pressure” from the U.S. and its allies.

There’s an increasing effort to counter that. With U.S. President Donald Trump upending the world order with trade tariffs, rivalry with China and more recently the capture of Venezuela’s president, Russia is trying to assert its narratives in Africa.

The state-owned Sputnik news service is hiring South African journalists and in 2026 plans to open a bureau in the country. It would be the second in Africa, following Ethiopia in early 2025, said Viktor Anokhin, who will run the operation. “Our main goal, as it always has been, is to provide an alternative source of news,” Anokhin said when called by Bloomberg. “A balanced offering.”

Recruiting manpower

Russia has sponsored disinformation campaigns and stoked instability in conflict-ridden nations, according to research groups including the European Council on Foreign Relations. The country is also accused of using Africans to aid its war effort in Ukraine.

One of them was Alabuga Start, a recruitment arm of Russia’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan. It set itself a target of hiring thousands of African women between the ages of 18 and 22, saying they will work in fields such as hospitality and construction.

Most of the young women end up in a military equipment factory, according to the authors of three reports from organizations including the Institute for Science and International Security.

“African women typically don’t have access to as many opportunities in life, opportunities to get a well-paying job, opportunities to get an education, opportunities to travel,” said Spencer Faragasso, a senior research fellow at Washington-based ISIS. “The Alabuga Start program really provides on the surface all those benefits. But in reality, they’re working in a drone production factory.”

Alabuga didn’t respond to requests for comment, while the Russian embassy in South Africa said in August it had no evidence that the rights of those recruited by Alabuga were being violated, describing reports as “biased.”

On the battlefield, Ukraine estimates that more than 1,400 Africans are fighting for Russia. Kenya’s foreign minister said in November at least 200 Kenyans had been recruited to Russia’s military, often after being told they would work as security guards or drivers.

A report this month by All Eyes on Wagner, a nonprofit research group, said Russia has recruited from about 35 African countries and provided the names of about 300 Africans killed while fighting for Russia.

In South Africa, where fighting for a foreign military or assisting it is a crime, a daughter of former President Jacob Zuma is being investigated by the police for allegedly helping to recruit about 20 men for Russia’s military. She told them they were going on a bodyguard training course.

Separately, South Africa arrested and charged state radio presenter Nonkululeko Mantula and four men she allegedly recruited for the Russian military. Her trial is due to start in April. Bloomberg reported on Jan. 7 that Russia targeted South African video gamers as part of the recruitment drive, according to documents involving two men who left to fight.

South Africa, Kenya and Botswana have announced investigations into how their nationals became involved in fighting for Russia. South Africa and Lesotho have publicly warned against accepting some job opportunities and scholarships in Russia.

Religious leaders

The widening footprint of the church is symbolic of Russia’s desire to sway Africans to its cause.

In a 2022 press conference to celebrate the first year of work in Africa, Leonid Gorbachov, the then Patriarchal Exarch of Africa, said the church works with Russian government agencies and was in talks with the government about the exarchate’s needs.

“It is religious leaders in Africa who remain the most trusted and respected, with religion taking center stage in politics, elections and developmental concerns,” Father Thiani, the Kenyan priest and academic, wrote in the July 2024 paper published by Studies in World Christianity. “The use of religion for entering Africa is therefore an ideal form of Russian soft power.”

Churches now range from rural outposts in Kenya, Madagascar and the one in Robertson to the St. Sergius of Radonezh cathedral on the outskirts of Johannesburg, which is adorned with grand golden cupolas. Founded in 2003, it was — until the establishment of the Africa Exarchate — the only Russian Orthodox Church in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The activities of the Russian Orthodox Church have raised concerns in a number of countries outside Africa.

The Czech government placed Patriarch Kirill of Moscow on its sanctions list in April 2023. It cited his support for the invasion of Ukraine, a country who’s church declared full independence from the Moscow patriarchate in 2022.

In Moldova, a former Soviet state with eyes on E.U. membership, the government has described the Moscow-linked church as a tool of Russian influence aimed at spreading propaganda and causing instability.

Priests spoken to by Bloomberg denied the church expansion in Africa was related to Russia’s political objectives.

Nicholas Esterhuizen, who runs the Saint John of The Ladder Church above a café in Cape Town, said ties with Russia were spiritual and “transcend the current political climate.”

“If the state is the problem, if the state is at war, why do you need to draw the church into the state? The president is not a leader of the church,” said Daniel Agbaza, a Russian Orthodox priest in Nigeria, where a new church is being built in Benue State. “Because it is called Russian does not mean that it is a Russian government church.”

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(With assistance from Jeremy Diamond, Eric Laperozy, Nduka Orjinmo, Kaula Nhongo, Fred Ojambo, Katarina Hoije, Mbongeni Mguni, Helen Nyambura, Godfrey Marawanyika, Arijit Ghosh, Simon Marks, Neil Munshi, Viktoria Dendrinou and Anthony Osae-Brown.)

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