How Russian interference threatens to derail malaria vaccines in Africa

Disinformation has been a key factor in enabling Russia’s growing influence on the continent, particularly in west and central Africa.

Social media platforms like X and Telegram have enabled Russia to recruit African bloggers and influencers to undermine democracy, promote military rule and attack the West.

The campaign has contributed to seven military coups in the past four years, with Russian military advisers and mercenaries often emerging in the aftermath to support newly installed juntas.

Russia-backed military governments in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have ordered Western forces to leave their countries, replacing them with Russian troops.

Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns targeting Western-funded healthcare programmes are an important part of this strategy because they undermine confidence in the West and spread anxiety through society that Russia can exploit, according to Ivana Stradner, a disinformation researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think-tank in Washington.

“The Kremlin knows how effective health disinformation can be,” she said. “During the Cold War the intention was to make HIV appear to be an ethnic weapon, targeting Africans.

“A very similar thing is happening today. They know it is an effective weapon because things related to disease trigger specific emotional responses that are linked to fear and uncertainty, especially after Covid and especially if there is an ethnic context.”

When Stasi and KGB involvement in Operation Denver was at its height in the late 1980s, Vladimir Putin, now Russia’s president, was a KGB spy in Dresden.

It is unknown if he was involved in the campaign, but given that KGB spies had to spend a quarter of their time concocting and disseminating disinformation, according to ex-spies, it seems reasonable to conclude that he would have known of its existence.

Mr Putin’s background in espionage certainly explains the importance of disinformation as a Russian policy strategy, some believe.

“This is a repeat of the 1980s,” says a western diplomat who covers the West African region. “It is a cynical, morally bankrupt campaign that shows no regard for the collateral damage that will be inflicted in terms of human lives — and Putin must know this and approve of it.”

At the heart of the new operation, according to US officials, is African Initiative, whose senior Russian staffers were either employed by the FSB, the KGB’s main successor, or the Wagner mercenary group, which has been active in several countries on the continent.

Before Wagner’s founder Prigozhin moved into the mercenary business he was a key figure in Russian state disinformation, running the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St Petersburg that sought to interfere in elections in the United States and elsewhere.

Wagner maintained a disinformation arm in Africa until Prigozhin’s death last year when a bomb exploded on his plane, killing all on board.

African Initiative is headed by Artem Kureyev, identified in Estonian court documents as an officer in the FSB, and has been accused of running Russian influence operations in Europe for years.

The group’s founder and chief financier is Viktor Lukavenko, a former Wagner operative who served five years in prison for beating to death a Swiss national of Sri Lankan extraction during an ultranationalist rally in Moscow in 2009.

While Russian nationals head the disinformation unit, the most important element of the spin cycle are African activists, journalists and bloggers with a large following on social media.

Many reliably churn out pro-Russian and anti-Western rhetoric as well health-related disinformation. Diplomats suspect that at least some are in the pay of the Kremlin, though no evidence has so far been produced.

These African influencers can be relied on to amplify disinformation, which often emanates initially from a senior Russian defence ministry official, Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, who heads the country’s anti-biological weapons unit.

Gen Kirillov has claimed that the United States moved secret bioweapons laboratories from Ukraine to Nigeria after Russia’s invasion and is engaged in germ warfare development in Kenya, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Uganda.

He also alleges that the mpox epidemic which began last year may also have been deliberately manufactured in US biolabs in Africa.

Despite the fact that none of these claims has any basis, they have been readily amplified on social media, both on Kremlin-backed channels on the Telegram app and by pro-Russian African influencers.

They also repeatedly claim that the United States is creating diseases to kill Africans in order to eliminate migration and keep the continent poor.

Likewise, they further allege that vaccines are being manufactured not to prevent disease but to render African women infertile, again as part of a campaign to depopulate the continent.

Such disinformation could not come at a worse time.

Medical health experts describe the malaria vaccines as a milestone in global health. Yet, in part because Russia has targeted almost every single Western-backed malaria project on the continent, many Africans are likely to shy away from the vaccines that could save their children’s lives.

Egountchi Behanzin, the Togolese activist with 600,000 social media followers, has been at the forefront of the campaign. Recently, he has set his sights on Target Malaria, a research consortium working in Burkina Faso that is releasing genetically altered mosquitoes which cannot transmit malaria in an effort to disrupt the breeding of those that do.

According to Mr Behanzin, the mosquitos were designed not to protect people from malaria but to infect them with it.

His unsubstantiated claims have been amplified by pro-Russian influencers across Africa, as well as in stories published by African Initiative, which linked a Dengue Fever outbreak that killed 600 people in Burkina Faso a year ago to Target Malaria’s work without providing evidence.

Last December, African Initiative hosted the “International Conference for Health Care and Sovereignty” in Burkina Faso where participants repeatedly heard from speakers claiming that Western pharmaceutical companies were deliberately introducing illnesses to Africa.

Such views that were once common on the periphery are increasingly in danger of entering the mainstream, particularly because of the acceptance of such disinformation among Evangelical Christians in Africa.

Conferences, particularly Christian ones, have become an increasingly effective way of spreading disinformation – and may well be a particular target for the FSB.

Mr Putin is increasingly presenting himself as a champion of Christian spiritual and moral values in the belief that this is the kind of ideology that Africans and others outside liberal Western circles can rally around, notes Ms Stradner, the disinformation expert.

In May Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, attended a gathering calling itself the African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty presided over by his wife Janet, who is also a cabinet minister.

Conferences and movements in Africa involving the word “sovereignty” are usually a sign of Russian state backing, diplomats say – with the Kremlin eager to present itself as standing for African sovereignty and against Western neocolonialism.

Among the speakers was Wahome Ngare, a Kenyan gynaecologist and conservative Christian activist who repeated many of the Kremlin’s favourite vaccine tropes as he addressed delegates.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine does not prevent cervical cancer but causes infertility among women, he told them.

The same was true for other vaccines, including the new malaria ones. Be careful, he urged his audience: At least 80 percent of pregnant African women who took the covid vaccine miscarried in their first trimester.

Is it not strange, he wondered, that somehow every new vaccine introduced by the West had the effect of reducing African fertility? His audience nodded along in rapt attention.

Dr Ngare denies being a conspiracy theorist, saying such terms are dreamt up by Western oppressors “who have something to hide”.

Of course, there is no evidence to suggest that Dr Ngare is in the pay of the Kremlin. Unlike other influencers in Africa he does not have a track record of praising Russia.

Yet for the architects of Russia’s disinformation campaign, this is exactly the end result they have hoped for.

Their allegations, dreamt up somewhere in the FSB’s vast global spider web, are being made by people with no links to Russia in front of an audience of African politicians, cabinet ministers, clergymen and even a sitting president himself.

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