The economic impact of the Russia-Ukraine war has been felt across Africa through the disruption to trade, an increase in the cost of food staples, transport, and fertiliser, and tightening aid and credit conditions.
This has exposed the underlying fragile conditions in many African countries and their vulnerability to changes in external conditions. While highlighting stark differences between Western donors and Africa on the protection of human rights, and a one-eyed view on colonialism, it illustrates shared concerns around the sanctity of territorial norms and protections.
An Economic Whammy or Two
Whatever the challenges with inclusivity and inequality, and the effects of Covid, the world has become a much richer place over the last decade. Average wealth per person globally between 2013 and 2023 increased from $9,767 to $11,578, or 18.6%. Wealth across Asia went up by 42%, in the US by 20%, across the EU by 16.7%, in the Middle East and North Africa at 6%, and in Latin America by 3.4%.
But there is one exception to this global rule of improving wealth.
Only across sub-Saharan Africa was real GDP growth negative over this decade, at less than 1%. The key reason is that the rate of economic expansion has failed to keep pace with the pace of demographic change. Africa’s population was 830 million in 2000. It is 1.5 billion today, and projected to rise to 2.5 billion by 2050.
Around one in five global citizens is today African. But this will shift to one in four over the next generation as the demographic bulge kicks in, with Africa’s population already the youngest globally with a median age of 19.3.
African sources of growth and succour, already weak, are now at further risk. Africa received around (pre-Trump) $42 billion in aid in 2024 from a global total of $212 billion, of which the US share of aid to Africa was around half. This has now been slashed by the Trump administration, a move compounded by the demands of the war in Ukraine and cutbacks from other traditional African aid partners, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The investment picture is not much better. Foreign direct investment into Africa in 2023 was just $53 billion, amounting to four percent of the global total, for a population that represents nearly five times that percentage.
Double investment
To match the sort of capital flows that led to the East Asian economic “miracle”, Africa needs to double investment as a share of GDP from its current level of 16%, getting closer to the global average of 25%, or even more for developing countries. Again, it’s not that investment has failed to increase in Africa – gross fixed capital formation has risen almost four times across the continent this century alone – but it is competing with radical leaps in population numbers.
For instance, Malawi has doubled its population this century to 22 million people. This explains in part why the Central African country has remained firmly rooted among the ten poorest countries worldwide since independence.
These drivers of growth in investment and, to a lesser extent, aid, were moreover available during a more forgiving geo-political age, which has now seemingly passed. For the last 25 years China’s economic rise has stoked the demand for natural resources, while investors have displayed a seemingly insatiable (if somewhat greedily irrational) appetite for “frontier” markets.
There was also considerably more room for African governments to borrow more, due ironically to widespread Western debt relief in the early 2000s. Since then, around half of African countries have been active borrowers in capital markets: more than ever before.
As part of this shift, just as its trade with Africa increased nearly twenty-fold over the first 20 years of the 21st century to reach $300 billion, China became the largest official creditor, lending over $180 billion since 2000.
Now is a much less conducive geo-political time for growth. It’s a time of instability, one which calls for cool heads and clear strategy, not least in the trade and other wars that currently face the world. What is puzzling however, is why Africa does not speak out more openly against Russia’s war in Ukraine, not only because of its economic impacts, but given the continent’s own devastating history of colonialism and suffocating cultural appropriation and oppression.
In sum, regime security considerations, economic interests, fraternal historic ties with Moscow, fear of the impact of a diversion of aid, lack of domestic democracy, and a history of scepticism towards the West explain why so many African governments have been reluctant to condemn Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Voting patterns in the UN are a metaphor for African sentiment on this war – or at least of the views of African governments rather than their people, since most Africans (more than 90%) live in authoritarian circumstances.
Understanding African Sentiment on Ukraine
A tally of all of UN General Assembly resolutions during 2022 and 2023 for example shows 140 African votes in favour of Ukraine, 18 votes against, and 166 abstentions or absences. In Latin America and Asia, by comparison, most countries have backed resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion.
While the 2022 General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion saw widespread support across UN members as a whole, African countries were divided in their votes: 28 out of the 54 African countries (just over half) in the UN voted for the resolution, compared to the 81% of non-African countries that voted in favour.
Of the 35 countries that voted to abstain, almost half (17) were African, including Algeria, Angola, and South Africa. Eight African countries did not vote, and one, Eritrea, voted against the resolution along with Belarus, Russia, North Korea, and Syria.
Some 141 countries backed the 2023 resolution demanding Moscow withdraw its troops and end the fighting, calling for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace” in Ukraine. Of the 32 countries which abstained, 15 were African, as were two (Eritrea and Mali) of the seven who voted against.
Things have become more confused with the advent of the Trump administration, especially in the February 2025 General Assembly vote in which Ukraine’s version of the resolution passed by 93 votes to 18. The US voted against, alongside Russia.
A total of 65 nations abstained in 2025, including South Africa. A second version of the resolution (the so-called US variety) was adopted (93 in favour, eight against and 73 abstentions), but UN members also voted to add the European Union amendments to that resolution, with 60 in favour, 18 against and 81 abstentions.
A further breakdown of African states’ voting record reveals other facets and patterns. For example, General Assembly resolution ES/11-4 – declaring Russia’s annexation of four regions of Ukraine as illegal – received the strongest backing, with 30 African states in favour and 24 abstaining or not being present. No country sided with Russia.
The voting record also shows that those resolutions proposing measures to punish Russia have received more limited support from African governments. Only ten voted in favour of resolution ES/11-3, for example, demanding a suspension of Russia from the Human Rights Council. Similarly, only 15 African states backed resolution ES/11-5, proposing Russian reparations to Ukraine.
Territorial integrity
This demonstrates several aspects.
The first concerns the importance that African states attach to upholding territorial integrity. This is unsurprising, given the potential Pandora’s box this opens on the continent, with colonial borders cutting across peoples. Moreover, an era of critical minerals creates other incentives. Only ask the Congolese about Ugandan and Rwandan interests in the east of their vast territory.
Second, some countries, especially those led by liberation movements in southern Africa (namely, South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Namibia), have historical allegiances owing to the support given by Russia and China during the struggle. These memories die hard, not least since this provides the fundamental legitimacy for the rule by these liberators today, where contemporary state performance is weak and delivery poor.
The third factor is that African countries are trying, by and large, to stay out of this fight, given the scale and complexity of their own struggles, and the potential cost (and fear) that they have about Russia (and its ally China) specifically, and the costs of this war more generally. This is complicated, too, by the widening war in the Middle East.
In spite of its clear abrogation of international law, the upending of sovereign protections and return to the rule of the jungle, Russia has won a degree of international support for its position. In part this is down to the method of its narrative in following a line defined by simplicity and repetition, centring on a portrayal that Ukraine started the war by moving towards NATO and the West, and that Ukraine is a “non-country”, lacking national identity, full of Nazis, a borderland, and a NATO proxy. Designed to produce a picture of a chaotic world with Russia as a stabilising force, the political genius of Vladimir Putin is not only to convince his insecure public that a war against Ukraine is the means to restore Russia to greatness, but to weave his baleful narrative into one to be believed by people elsewhere who were themselves victims precisely of such imperium, never mind the violation of international law of the suffocating effects of its military and political embrace.
The receptiveness to Moscow’s message and its actions is partly, too, down to Russia telling the global South – or the global “majority” in its parlance – what it prefers to hear about Western double-standards. This over-simplified argument includes Western (and Israeli) actions in the Middle East. In the process, Moscow has successfully tapped into frustrations over the Global South’s own circumstances and, ironically, its own contributing charade of leadership. This helps to explain the attempts at moral equivalence between, for example, the international operation to remove Saddam from power and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In response, the West – and Ukraine – could sharpen both its messaging and its actions.
Policy Considerations for Ukraine and its Partners
As a first step, there is a need for Western unanimity, an increasingly difficult prospect since the advent of Trump II. This is not a new phenomenon. Differences in British and American plans for the liberation of Berlin in 1945, reflected wider variances between Roosevelt and Churchill. While the former saw a defeated Germany and Japan at the heart of a new world order, for the latter, as the historian Jonathan Dimbleby has written, “victory meant not merely the destruction of the Nazi armies but the establishment of a powerful Western bulwark in the heart of a fractured continent against the threat of Soviet expansionism.” As the British prime minister wrote presciently to Roosevelt on 1 April 1945. “If they [the Soviets] also take Berlin [as well as Vienna] will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?”
It was no joke, but Churchill was ignored by his American ally, and with it went democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights and freedoms in Eastern Europe for decades.
Like Stalin then, Putin has sought to exploit such divisions. To win more support, Western states could stress the importance of defending the norm of territorial integrity as a core tenet of international order. Most African governments would identify with this, not least since they cannot effectively extend governance throughout their own territories. A moratorium on border changes protects them from their own weakness.
The choice of (Western) narrative is also important, especially in linking people with values. Opinion polls show that more Africans support Ukraine, for instance, than do their governments. While such an anti-imperialist narrative is useful to the cause of Ukraine, it would preferably not be driven by perceptions of empathy and sympathy, but by strength, and a cause for alignment on shared interests rather than simply enlightened charity.
Supporting democracy is similarly important. Two-thirds of Africans polled prefer democracy to other forms of government, yet there is very little benefit in terms of foreign aid for democrats over authoritarians, or indeed for support for democracy per se.
More thought needs to be given to finding ways to influence African populations against the forces of fascism now operating across the Sahel, in the form of private Russian military companies.
Ultimately Moscow will find itself in the same mess that the French (and everyone else) routinely does, perhaps more so since it has plunged into a part of the world of which it knows nothing. Its main advantage, notes the Cambridge scholar, Christopher Clapham, “is that they can be as brutal as they like”.
While this might have an immediate impact, it will build up lasting hatreds that can only worsen with the passage of time. The obstacles to success are just as big for Russia as they were for the West.
For those seeking to undo Russian-led Sahelian destabilisation, given that all these regimes are by definition undemocratic and thus highly factional, unstable, and vulnerable, these cracks can be widened by limiting their income streams, supporting internal opposition forces through financing along with media and civil society, and helping regional states to limit Russian influence, not least through intelligence sharing, capacity-building and by way of covert operations.
“Beyond Aid”
There should also be greater rewards for those African countries which display a focus on getting “Beyond Aid”. For the smarter African governments, the geopolitical shift underway would be used to signal an end to business (and the extant, elitist political economy) as usual. It should be used as an excuse for otherwise hard reforms.
Ukraine could for its part pursue a smarter overall diplomatic strategy, with clearer messaging towards key countries, and not just on government-to-government relations. Six key messages stand out, which position Ukraine on the right side of history in distinguishing it clearly from Russia:
- Strengthening links with democracy, and its African proponents, in and out of government;
- Being critical of African authoritarians – or at least, avoiding ties;
- Building a narrative around Ukrainian assistance during Africa’s wars of liberation;
- Highlighting the threat presented by Russia to international law and territorial integrity;
- Putting the interests of people first in international relations; and
- Ukraine as a successful example of high-tech (if relatively low-cost) defence, especially through drones, putting itself in the process at the centre of new security technology.
There is an overall need for outsiders to differentiate countries in Africa, not least through incentivising those countries which uphold shared values of democracy and human rights. For their part, African states should position themselves to become favoured partners through displaying ownership and strength, not weakness.
This is based on a talk given by Dr Mills to the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism” organised together this week in Warsaw with the Polish Institute for International Affairs (PISM).
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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