Eurasia Press & News
Russia’s outreach to the region has successfully exploited regimes’ frustrations with the West. Yet it has encountered difficulties in navigating the complex interrelations and rivalries.
The Arab-majority states of the Maghreb—Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia—have become an increasing focus of Russian engagement and influence. Moscow is demonstrating a growing appreciation of their strategic value, especially in the domains of arms sales, energy, and, since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, trade (largely to compensate for market shares lost to Western sanctions). Geographically, these countries are part of Africa and are members of the African Union and therefore serve as important elements in Russia’s growing power projection on the African continent. They are also situated on the Mediterranean basin, offering Moscow potential points of leverage on the flow of oil and natural gas and irregular migration into the southern flank of NATO-dominated Europe, as well as potential warm water ports for its navy. Further, linguistically, culturally, and politically, the Maghreb is part of the Arab world and plays a role in Russia’s broader “return” to the Middle East and its increased strategic focus on issues such as counterterrorism, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Iranian nuclear issue, and Syria.
Russia’s outreach to the Maghreb region has been met with successes and failures. It has successfully exploited regional regimes’ frustrations with conditional or limited Western security assistance and, since the eruption of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the popular backlash in the region against the West’s perceived double standards and hypocrisy. However, with limitations in capacity, Russia has encountered difficulties in navigating the region’s complex relations and rivalries.
More importantly, the Kremlin’s ambitions have run up against the obstacle of local agency. With the exception of Libya, where Russia has arguably established an eastern-based militia commander as its client, Maghreb leaders exert far more influence in determining the extent of Russian penetration in the region than is commonly acknowledged. Leery of picking sides, governments in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have long preferred to keep their options open. They continue to hedge and diversify their relations with the many other powers on the scene, including the United States and European countries, despite their frustrations, and more recent arrivals such as China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
Russia’s engagement in the Maghreb is centered on two anchors in the region, Algeria and Libya. Regarding Algeria, Russia has for the past two decades tried to reboot its Cold War–era ties through state-to-state diplomacy. Its efforts have focused on securing hydrocarbon deals and boosting exports of Russian arms, which currently comprise an estimated 70 percent of the Algerian inventory. Despite these efforts, Russia has been unable to move the relationship with this famously nonaligned power from a purely transactional one to a deeper strategic partnership that would yield long-term military access and substantive joint energy ventures. In the wake of the Ukraine invasion, however, relations have warmed. Moscow has been using trade with the North African country to circumvent Western efforts to isolate Russia, and Algeria has continued to purchase Russian arms and hold military exercises with Russian forces, to the chagrin of the West and to the Western-allied Morocco. That said, Algeria is continuing its careful balancing act of maintaining a diversified foreign policy and avoiding excessive dependence on Russia.
Meanwhile, in the weaker and politically fragmented state of Libya, Russia’s approach has been more multifaceted and more successful. This relative success stems largely from the military endeavor now dubbed Africa Corps, which encompasses much of the mercenary force formerly known as the Wagner Group as well as an overt deployment of the Russian Armed Forces. In Libya, Moscow’s main host, facilitator, and donor is not the country’s UN-recognized government, but rather the eastern-based warlord Khalifa Haftar. As a result of that gambit, Russian forces, whose numbers are rapidly increasing, have secured access to major oil fields and smuggling networks, as well as control over key air bases and ports, giving Moscow a dependable logistics hub for its growing security footprint in the Sahel and Sudan. Complementing this armed mission is Russia’s growing diplomatic presence, including in the Libyan capital. The nonmilitary effort is multiplying Moscow’s sway in the economic, energy, and political realms.
Morocco and Tunisia are of secondary importance for Russian strategy. Although ambivalent with regard to the Ukraine war, Rabat remains squarely in the U.S. security orbit and remains suspicious of the Kremlin’s closeness to its rival, Algeria—though Morocco enjoys significant trade ties with Russia and is trying to steer a middle ground amid Western pressure since the start of the Ukraine war. Russian relations with Tunisia are even more limited, with Moscow letting Algeria manage its own relationship toward Tunisia. Yet the country’s authoritarian turn under Tunisian President Kais Saied and its attendant fraying of relations with the West could pave the way for more substantive economic and security cooperation with Russia.
Algeria
The near concurrent election in 1999 of Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria and Vladimir Putin in Russia heralded a reboot of the two countries’ robust relations during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was among the first countries to recognize Algeria’s formal independence from France in 1962 and served as a major arms supplier. Their relations started diminishing shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and deteriorated further during the chaos of the post-Soviet period and the turmoil of Algeria’s brutal civil war in the 1990s. In the following years, cooperation quickly expanded, with Russia and Algeria signing a “strategic partnership” agreement in 2001—Moscow’s first such agreement with any Arab country—followed in 2005-2006 by a military assistance and modernization package, which reportedly constituted Russia’s largest arms deal with any country since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Additionally, some agreements on oil and gas have been inked between the two countries’ state-owned energy companies, which some analysts framed as a bid by Moscow to prevent any lessening of EU dependence on Russian energy flows. Moscow also agreed to write off Algeria’s external debt in exchange for a promise of arms purchases and signed additional deals on automobile manufacturing and atomic energy.
But in the decade since this flurry of agreements, the record of actual cooperation has been mixed. According to Russian officials and media reports, results from the strategic agreements of the early 2000s have been disappointing. Issues have included late arms deliveries and vague or nonbinding terms in signed documents on hydrocarbons. Russia’s and Algeria’s respective state-owned energy companies, Gazprom and Sonatrach, have certainly collaborated on pipeline and exploration projects, but they have also maintained strong incentives to compete, especially on the export of gas to Europe; Algeria has shown little willingness to join a Russia-led gas cartel. Moreover, the volume of Algerian trade with Europe continues to vastly outweigh potential benefits from any cooperation with Moscow. Strategically, Russian officials have been disappointed by Algeria’s repeated refusal to grant Moscow permission to build a sought-after naval base at the Algerian port city of Oran.
In tandem, the complexities of international diplomacy and regional rivalries—magnified by Algeria’s adherence to the principle of noninterference and neutrality—have complicated Russian inroads. At the height of the regional and international opposition to Russia’s intervention in Syria, Moscow welcomed Algeria’s diplomatic blessing and maintenance of ties with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. But on Libya, the two states found themselves on opposite sides of the factional divide. On the Western Sahara issue, meanwhile, Moscow has tried to position itself as a mediator between Morocco and Algeria but has met with little success. Beyond the Middle East, Algeria was one of the first countries to recognize Ukrainian independence in 1991 and voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, drawing Moscow’s ire.
Nevertheless, the period since the coming to power of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in 2019, and especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has witnessed a warming of bilateral relations between the two countries, particularly as Algeria has defied Western pressure to isolate Moscow. In conjunction with a plan in late 2022 to double its defense budget, Algeria signaled its intention to sign an arms deal with Moscow estimated at $12–$17 billion, which would reportedly include fifth-generation fighters and bombers, submarines, and air defense systems. The announcement, unsurprisingly, elicited strong bi-partisan opposition from members of the U.S. Congress, who demanded that U.S. sanctions be applied against Algeria. Added to this, Moscow and Algiers conducted joint military maneuvers, including naval exercises and a provocative antiterrorism exercise near the Moroccan border involving Russian special forces and Algerian infantry. Agriculture has also anchored the relationship, with Algeria becoming increasingly dependent on Russian grain, nearly quadrupling its imports of wheat from 2021 to 2022 and displacing France’s market share. Diplomatically, at the United Nations, Algeria has repeatedly abstained from condemning Russia’s aggression and has voted against a General Assembly resolution to expel Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. And in the wake of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the two countries find themselves adopting similar positions regarding calls for a ceasefire and efforts to reconcile Palestinian factions.
As in the past, however, it would be a mistake to read such ties and alignments as evidence of Russia forming a truly political and strategic partnership with Algeria: despite the appearance of a more pro-Russian foreign policy, Algiers is continuing to chart an autonomous path that avoids becoming too closely dependent upon any one patron. On the issue of arms exports, for example, Algeria is taking steps to compensate for disruptions in the transfer of Russian-made systems—resulting from the corrosive impact of the Ukraine war on the Russian defense industrial base—by turning to other suppliers, including China, Germany, Italy, and Türkiye.
And for all the hype, there is no evidence yet that Algeria has received Russia’s most advanced jets, including the Su-34 fighter-bomber and especially the stealthy multi-role Su-57, which Algiers has long sought, but whose production has been plagued by delays. Moreover, at the United Nations, the country’s record of voting cannot be lumped with the coterie of reflexively pro-Russian states, including Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and Syria, who have defended Moscow’s actions during the Ukraine war. Algiers continues to maintain security ties to the West in the form of participation in NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue. And in late 2023, it applied for membership in the so-called BRICS forum, originally comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa; although Russia welcomed the (unsuccessful) bid as yet another blow to the U.S.-led order, Algeria framed it as an effort to maintain its equidistant position from competing great powers and, in the words of its president, protect itself from “friction between the two poles.”
Libya
Russia’s ties to Libya are also historic and deeply rooted in the Cold War period, when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi started importing large quantities of Soviet weaponry and hosting thousands of Soviet advisers in the early and mid-1970s. By 2008, Russia had forgiven Libya’s substantial debt in return for deals on energy, weapons, and transportation infrastructure. Yet, as in the case of Algeria, these security-centric ties did not convert Libya into a reliable Russia client, and the never-implemented announcement of a Russian naval port in Benghazi was in fact a stratagem deployed by Gaddafi to gain leverage over Russia and the West.
Following Gaddafi’s ouster, the dysfunction and fragmentation of Libya largely dissuaded Russia from reestablishing a presence. But when a nationwide civil war erupted in early 2014, a multitude of Libya political actors drew in competing regional and international powers, particularly Russia. In the years since, Russia’s goals can be broadly described as the following: to recoup and exceed the economic benefits it enjoyed under the Gaddafi era through infrastructure and energy deals; to obstruct and undermine European diplomacy on Libya through aggressive initiatives unencumbered by human rights; to establish military bases and logistical hubs for its power projection into the Sahelian states to the south and along the Mediterranean’s littoral, where it can threaten NATO’s southern flank; and, since the start of the Ukraine war, to get cash through illicit smuggling. Its strategy in pursuing these objectives has been flexible, opportunistic, scalable, and, since a good portion of it has been conducted through private military companies, nominally deniable. It has also been geared toward a diverse range of Libyan actors: Gaddafi loyalists; a local militia controlling oil facilities; the internationally recognized government in Tripoli; and especially the eastern-based military leader Khalifa Haftar, whose rise to prominence was due in no small part to Russian assistance, along with support from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
Working in conjunction with these Arab powers, Russia sent spare parts and medical care to Haftar’s self-styled Libyan Arab Armed Forces, as well as to technicians, logisticians, advisers, and intelligence personnel. It also printed banknotes for the Haftar-aligned, unrecognized Central Bank in eastern Libya and launched a propaganda campaign on behalf of the militia chief, using official state media and clandestine channels. When Haftar launched his military campaign to topple the internationally-recognized government in the Libyan capital, mercenaries from the Wagner Group acted as artillery spotters and snipers and in some cases directed battlefield maneuvers. Though ultimately unsuccessful due to a Turkish military intervention on behalf of the Tripoli government in early 2020, the resulting battlefield stalemate and frozen conflict has been adroitly exploited by Moscow to reap strategic dividends. Russian paramilitary and regular forces currently maintain access to key oil facilities and occupy major air bases in central and southern Libya. From these bases, they have been ferrying weapons, supplies, and personnel to fragile and conflict-wracked states to the south, including Sudan, where Russia has backed the Rapid Support Forces, as well as Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, and Niger. Moscow is also using its air bases in Libya to profit from the transregional smuggling of gold, fuel, and narcotics—especially Captagon pills from Syria. More recently, in the wake of the tragic flooding in Libya’s coastal town Derna in September 2023, Russia has solidified its relations with Haftar through the dispatch of doctors and medical aid and through high-level visits. This support was followed by a massive uptick in military materiel, such as air defense systems and armored vehicles, flowing into Libya’s eastern port of Tobruk, which the Kremlin hopes to eventually convert into a more permanent basing arrangement.
While much of this Russian activity takes place on territory nominally controlled by Haftar, Moscow is in no sense beholden to the warlord, but rather acts autonomously. Moreover, Russia is increasing its outreach to the Tripoli government and its patron Türkiye on economic and energy matters, while bolstering its soft power in the form of a polished, Arabic-speaking Russian ambassador, an Arabic-language satellite channel, and engagement on Libyan education—all of which contrasts with the absence of a permanent diplomatic presence by the United States. American efforts to erode Russia’s foothold in the country and to affect the departure of foreign military forces more broadly through a democratically elected executive have been stymied by the obstinacy of Libya elites and militia bosses, who are benefiting economically and politically from the status quo and from Washington’s unwillingness to significantly sanction or pressure two of its closest Arab allies in the region, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, whose policies have directly enabled Russia’s growing influence. And unlike in the battle against the Islamic State, the United States cannot call upon Libyan proxy militias to pressure or confront Russian forces in the country.
While the question of a post-Haftar transition looms over Libyan politics, Russia will almost certainly adapt to and benefit from his successor, which will most likely be his more powerful son Saddam or the more discreet Russian-trained son Khaled. Over the near and mid-term, then, it seems likely that Libya will continue to serve as Russia’s most significant point of entry into the Maghreb and its most successful intervention on the African continent, which now serves as a launching pad for Moscow’s growing footprint in the south through its Africa Corps.
Morocco
Morocco does not factor significantly into Russia’s strategy to gain influence in the Maghreb, given Rabat’s enduring security ties with the United States and Europe. Along with Tunisia, Morocco enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally, and it routinely participates in U.S.-sponsored military exercises in the region. It was also the first Maghreb country to send military aid to Ukraine, in the form of twenty renovated T-72B main battle tanks. That said, Morocco has substantial economic relations with Russia. Trade grew by 42 percent in 2021 alone, and the country depends on Russian imports of key agricultural products such as ammonia and fertilizer to sustain its farming sector, which employs an estimated 45 percent of the Moroccan workforce and contributes to 15 percent of its GDP. Coal, petroleum, fishing, and nuclear energy are other areas of substantial cooperation. As a result, Morocco has tried to steer a middle course amid growing Western pressure on Russia since the start of the Ukraine war, exemplified by it refraining from casting a vote against Russian aggression during an early 2023 UN General Assembly meeting. Rabat also reportedly seeks to preserve Russia’s position of qualified neutrality on the Western Sahara dispute. Despite Moscow’s declared support for Sahrawi self-determination and backing of the insurgent Polisario Front, some analysts have argued that Morocco has been encouraged by the Kremlin’s voting record at the United Nations and reportedly believes Russian officials can exert a moderating influence on Algeria’s belligerency on the issue.
Tunisia
As in the case of Morocco, Russian inroads in Tunisia have been offset by the country’s historically strong security relations with the United States, which have endured and grown despite the tumult and authoritarian turn of the post-2011 transition. That said, Tunisia has long depended on Russian wheat supplies and has remained a “significant customer for Russian gas and oil exports during the post-Ukraine EU embargo.” More recently, the two countries’ educational and cultural ties have grown, with the Russian state press hailing Tunisia as the first country in North Africa “to officially recognize Russian as a supplemental language in secondary education.” Moreover, since his 2021 “self-coup” and in the face of growing Western pressure, President Saied is seeking to diversify the country’s external relations, which includes cultivating closer ties with Russia. And, already, Tunisia is following its neighbor Algeria’s example of applying for membership to the BRICS. For its part, Moscow is trying to capitalize on Tunisia’s chilling of relations with the West to exert greater influence, using the multifaceted approach it has pursued elsewhere in the region. It is unlikely, however, that Tunisia will become a full-fledged Russian client, given the liabilities it could create for Moscow as an economically troubled and politically unstable state, as well as Saied’s predilection for hedging through continued ties with other countries, including China, Europe, the Gulf states, Iran, and the United States.
