China's Africa retreat and Russia's Sahel expansion are happening in entirely different countries

On September 22, 2026, Russia's Africa Corps launched a kamikaze drone at al-Qaeda-linked fighters pinning down its position near Dioura in Mali's Mopti region. The strike was the latest in a month that had already claimed thirteen Russian and Malian lives. It is the kind of story that travels: mercenaries, drones, jihadists, a garrison state holding ground in the Sahel. But there is a quieter story hiding in the numbers, one that Boston University's Global Development Policy Center laid out in January. Chinese loan commitments to Africa peaked at $28.8 billion in 2016 and collapsed to $2.1 billion in 2024. Over the past five years, African governments have paid Beijing $22.1 billion more than they received. Both stories are real. Both are usually told as one story—a Chinese creditor stepping back while a Russian garrison steps in. They are not, mostly, about the same countries.

China's lending boom peaked in 2016, partly driven by a one-time $10 billion refinancing deal with Angola, then contracted almost every year. By 2024, China had narrowed to just six projects across five countries: Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, and Egypt. Lending for fossil fuels, power generation, and telecommunications has essentially stopped. What remains concentrates in transport, energy transmission, water, and finance—sectors in countries China already knows and trusts. The arithmetic has flipped. Debt service to China now exceeds new borrowing across the continent, a reversal from 2015 to 2019, when Africa received a net $30 billion from Beijing. Meanwhile, Russia's Wagner Group, folded into the state-controlled Africa Corps after Yevgeny Prigozhin's 2023 mutiny, has expanded from Mali into Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, and smaller deployments elsewhere. Wagner and its successor are paid mostly in mining concessions rather than cash. The two trends are usually narrated as a single handoff from a departing Chinese creditor to an arriving Russian garrison. The countries involved suggest otherwise.

Start with who actually owes China money. The ten largest sovereign debtors to Beijing are Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Zambia, South Africa, Cameroon, Angola, and Uganda. Now list where Africa Corps operates: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, and the Republic of the Congo. There is no overlap on either list. That is not a coincidence. China's lending, even at its most expansive, chased states with exportable resources and institutions stable enough to service debt—oil in Angola and South Africa, copper in Zambia, established economies in Kenya and Egypt. The Sahel coup belt where Russia now operates was never a serious Chinese lending market because the credit risk never justified it. Russia is not stepping into a hole China dug. It is filling a hole France and Western counter-terrorism missions left when they withdrew, and it is being paid not in sovereign debt but in gold and mining equity—a fundamentally different transaction than a Belt and Road loan.

The interesting question, then, is not who replaces China in Mali, because China was barely there. It is who replaces China in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, and the DRC, the actual core of its old African portfolio. The answer, increasingly, is Gulf capital and multilateral lenders, not Moscow. The UAE's International Resources Holding took a 56 percent stake in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Bisie tin mine and 51 percent of Zambia's Mopani copper operation in 2025. AD Ports Group signed a $250 million to $380 million, twenty-year concession for Angola's Luanda port, which handles 76 percent of the country's cargo. Saudi Arabia's Manara Minerals, backed by the Public Investment Fund, has discussed deploying up to $15 billion across African critical minerals and was in talks for a stake in First Quantum's Zambian copper and nickel assets. Meanwhile, multilateral institutions—the IMF, World Bank, and African Development Bank—increased net financing 124 percent over the past decade and now supply 56 percent of Africa's net development flows, roughly $379 billion between 2020 and 2024. None of that is Russian, and almost none of it touches the states where Africa Corps is expanding.

Sudan complicates the picture. China built a real oil-lending relationship there, and Wagner, then Africa Corps, has fought over gold access amid the civil war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. Sudan is the one place where a departing-creditor and an arriving-garrison story can plausibly describe the same country at once. It is also, not coincidentally, the one Africa Corps deployment happening inside a genuine state collapse rather than an orderly coup consolidation, which should caution against treating it as a template for where the other Sahel deployments are headed. Angola presents another complication: it was 2024's single largest Chinese borrower at $1.45 billion, its port and grid concessions now split with Emirati capital too. Beijing has not left the continent so much as narrowed to a handful of bets it still believes will pay it back, and is content to share even those with Gulf money.

The base case, with 55 percent probability, is two tracks running in parallel. China keeps lending selectively to Angola, Kenya, Egypt, and a handful of others it judges creditworthy, while Gulf capital and multilateral institutions absorb most of the financing gap in those same markets. Africa Corps deepens its Sahel footprint, trading security for mining rights in states that remain financially marginal to everyone except Moscow. The two stories keep running without merging into the single great-power handoff narrative both Washington and Beijing find convenient to tell. The downside case is a debt-and-security shock in the same state—a crisis hitting a country that is both a significant Chinese debtor and vulnerable to a security vacuum, most plausibly Zambia, still working through the aftermath of its 2020 default, or an oil producer where falling revenue collides with jihadist expansion from the Sahel. If Gulf capital and multilateral lenders cannot absorb a shock in a country that size, and a coup follows, Africa Corps would be operating for the first time in a market China actually cared about losing. The upside case is more accountable actors filling both gaps: Gulf sovereign funds and multilateral lenders successfully substituting for China across its former core markets, while a reconstituted regional security architecture—whether African Union-led, a revived ECOWAS security mechanism, or a more accountable successor to French counter-terrorism missions—offers Sahel states an alternative to Russian garrisons paid in gold.

The handoff framing flatters both great powers by implying a single, continent-wide contest for influence. The real picture is narrower and, for African governments, more precarious: two separate vacuums, opening in two different sets of countries, filled so far by Gulf capital and multilateral lenders in one and by Moscow alone in the other, with almost no actor offering both financing and security to the same state at once. Watch Boston University's Global Development Policy Center's next Chinese Loans to Africa update, typically released around year-end. If 2025 commitments fall below Angola's 2024 total on its own, that confirms Beijing's African lending book is now a handful of bets, not a strategy, and the vacuum in its old core markets will keep going to whoever shows up with capital rather than credentials.