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Chapter 61: The Sahel I: The Coup Belt Playbook: Exporting Instability

The screen glowed in the hushed dark of the listening post, a mosaic of a nation dissolving in real-time. For months, Senior Analyst Chloé Dubois had been living in this digital ghost world, a torrent of social media chatter from a country she knew intimately, yet one that felt increasingly alien. From her sterile, air-conditioned office in Paris, she was watching a nation be psychologically dismantled. She traced the IP addresses, followed the metadata, and watched the same slickly produced videos go viral across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, all emanating from the same dark star: the troll farms of St. Petersburg.

The narratives were brutally effective because they were parasites on a living truth. There was real anger at France, the former colonial power whose decade-long war against jihadists felt like an endless, arrogant occupation. But the Russian information-smiths took this ember of resentment and poured gasoline on it. They created fake news articles, complete with fabricated quotes from French officials dripping with condescension. They photoshopped images of French soldiers standing over civilian bodies from other conflicts and presented them as fresh atrocities. They created thousands of fake accounts—Malian farmers, Burkinabé students, Nigerien mothers—all speaking with one voice, a chorus of manufactured rage demanding that the French leave and a new, stronger friend arrive. The profile pictures were often AI-generated; the anger was not.

Chloé watched with a sickening sense of professional dread as the campaign reached its crescendo. A protest in Bamako, small at first, was amplified online until it looked like a national uprising. The Russian tricolor, once an exotic novelty, was suddenly everywhere. A cadre of mid-level colonels, men her agency had been tracking for their nationalist leanings, suddenly felt the wind at their back. They saw the protests, magnified and validated by the digital echo chamber, and believed the entire nation was with them. They seized the presidential palace in a nearly bloodless coup.

Within hours, the troll farms pivoted. The same accounts that had been stoking chaos were now celebrating the junta leader as a "pan-African hero," a "liberator." Chloé felt a cold chill as she watched the junta’s first press conference. The new leader, a stony-faced colonel, read a statement filled with phrases about "national sovereignty" and "multi-polar partnerships" that sounded as if they’d been lifted verbatim from a Kremlin policy paper. Two weeks later, the French ambassador was expelled. A month after that, the French counter-terrorism force was given its marching orders.

The final act of the play was brutally swift. Chloé flagged the satellite imagery for her superiors. A hulking Ilyushin Il-76, its transponder off, flew not from Moscow but from Benghazi, a straight line across the Sahara. It landed at Bamako’s airport in the dead of night. The thermal imaging showed ghosts disembarking—lean men in sterile uniforms, carrying the distinct profiles of Russian special-forces hardware. The Wagner Group had arrived. Chloé finished her report, her fingers cold on the keyboard. This was not a coup that Russia had cleverly exploited after the fact. This was a coup Russia had cultivated, nurtured, and enabled every step of the way. It was a template, a replicable playbook for a hostile takeover. And as her screen lit up with a surge of identical activity from a network in Burkina Faso, she knew with absolute certainty where the show was heading next.

The Discourse 61: The Playbook for State Capture

Russia's dramatic resurgence in Africa, particularly across the Sahel, is not a series of improvised, opportunistic reactions to regional chaos. It is the result of a deliberate, replicable, and highly effective strategy for state capture that can be best described as the "Coup Belt Playbook." This playbook is a modern form of political warfare, a franchise model for exporting instability that leverages twenty-first-century information weapons and nineteenth-century mercenary muscle to dismantle Western influence and replace it with a Russian-backed kleptocracy. It is a five-stage process, refined with each successful implementation, designed to identify the fracture lines in a fragile state, cultivate the agents of its collapse, and ultimately seize control of its security and economic lifelines.

The first stage is Information Preparation of the Battlefield. Months, and sometimes years, before a coup takes place, troll farms and disinformation networks linked to Russian intelligence and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s structures begin to saturate the target country’s digital space. Their primary objective is not to invent grievances, but to identify and viciously amplify pre-existing ones—most potent among them being the deep-seated, often legitimate, anti-colonial and anti-French sentiment across the Sahel. Using fake news websites, coordinated swarms of bots on social media, and by co-opting local influencers, this campaign creates a single, powerful narrative: the nation’s problems—terrorism, poverty, corruption—are the direct result of a neocolonial partnership with the West, particularly France. The campaign skillfully frames Russia as the only viable alternative, a powerful, anti-imperial partner that will treat the nation with respect. This creates a permissive information environment where a military coup against a democratically elected, pro-Western government is not only seen as acceptable but as a patriotic and popular act of national liberation.

The second stage is to Identify and Cultivate the Conspirators. While the information war is raging in public, Russian intelligence officers and Wagner political operatives work in the shadows to identify and build relationships with a specific type of military figure: the ambitious, nationalist, and often mid-ranking officer who feels sidelined by the existing pro-Western leadership. These officers are identified through military exchange programs, business contacts, and intelligence assets. They are vetted for their charisma, their ruthlessness, and their resentment of the status quo. Russia offers them a seductive alternative to their current path, a vision of themselves as historic liberators of their nation, with Russia as their steadfast partner.

This leads to the third and most crucial stage: the Coup Guarantee. To the identified plotters, Russia and its proxies offer an irresistible package that effectively de-risks the act of treason. They provide a promise of immediate support the moment power is seized. This includes diplomatic top-cover, most importantly the guarantee of a Russian veto at the UN Security Council to block any international condemnation or intervention. It includes a ready-made propaganda machine to legitimize the new regime at home and abroad. And, most critically, it includes the promise of immediate, hard security provided by Wagner mercenaries, ensuring the new junta cannot be easily overthrown by a counter-coup or a popular uprising. This guarantee removes the primary fears of any aspiring coup plotter and gives them the confidence to act.

Once the coup is successful, the fourth stage is enacted: the Inversion of Sovereignty. The new military junta, heavily promoted by the Russian propaganda machine, immediately adopts the language of radical national sovereignty. In the name of freeing the nation from foreign domination, their first act is to systematically dismantle all security and political ties with their former Western partners. French, American, and European ambassadors are expelled. Military agreements are unilaterally terminated. Counter-terrorism forces are ordered to leave. This is a deliberate and essential step designed to create a profound security vacuum, severing the state from the international security architecture that had been supporting it.

The fifth and final stage is to Fill the Vacuum. Into the security void created by the expulsion of the West, Russia inserts its own forces, the Wagner Group, now rebranded as the Africa Corps. Wagner's role is not to provide national security for the country, but regime security for the junta. They act as a praetorian guard, protecting the new leaders from their internal and external enemies. In exchange for this protection, the playbook concludes with a brutal transaction. The new client state pays for these services in two ways: first, with multi-million-dollar monthly cash payments, and second, and more importantly, by signing over sovereign control of the nation's most valuable natural resources—gold mines in Mali and Sudan, diamond concessions in the Central African Republic, and potentially uranium in Niger. This completes the cycle, turning a once-sovereign, if fragile, state into a militarized, resource-plundered, and diplomatically isolated client of Moscow.