Madagascar lies near the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, on the sea lane connecting southern Africa to the Gulf and Asia, next to some of the largest untapped gas reserves on the continent. That position has made it a quiet prize in a contest most coverage still frames as Sahel-specific. Colonel Michaël Randrianirina’s October 2025 takeover opened the latest chapter, but Russian interference in Madagascar did not begin with the coup – operatives were manipulating Malagasy politics as early as the 2018 election. What accelerated after 2022 was the scale of it, as Moscow, isolated from Western markets and fighting a war in Ukraine, redirected serious resources into Africa as a second front in its confrontation with the West. Madagascar’s transition has simply given that older strategy a fixed date to work toward: the constitutional referendum and presidential election scheduled for 2027.
Security Before the Ballot, and Whose Signature Is on It
The military relationship with Moscow rests on a 2018 cooperation agreement and a five-year, automatically renewable military-technical accord in force since March 2022, and it accelerated sharply after the coup. Madagascar’s presidency announced in January that Russian instructors were training personnel from several battalions on newly supplied assault rifles, precision weapons and drones, with local reporting placing one session at the 1st Parachute Battalion in Ivato and noting that personnel responsible for presidential security were among the first trainees. By April, L’Express de Madagascar documented a third post-coup shipment – weapons, ammunition, uniforms and two tracked armoured vehicles – delivered at Ivato with Randrianirina present, and Le Monde subsequently reported that roughly 100 Russian personnel were now protecting the transitional leader and training Malagasy forces.
The identity of the men who delivered that first shipment turns a bilateral training programme into a warning sign. A December delegation was linked by independent reporting to Lieutenant General Andrey Averyanov of the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, and the delegation accompanying Randrianirina’s February meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin included the defence minister, the military-technical cooperation chief and the GRU director. Averyanov commanded GRU Unit 29155, blamed by Western governments for the 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal, and is under UK and EU sanctions. The EU’s designation states he was placed in charge of Russian military operations in Africa, including deployment of the Africa Corps, the structure that absorbed Wagner’s Group continental role. In several countries the coup came first and the Russian deployment followed, so the causal arrow should not be overstated – but a sanctioned intelligence officer with that record does not turn up in a transitional capital by accident.
The Referee, the Airwaves and the Party That Appeared
Madagascar’s election authority envisages a constitutional referendum in June 2027 and a presidential vote in October, and the machinery of that vote is already an arena of foreign access. CENI chairman Thierry Rakotonarivo met Russian election chief Ella Pamfilova in Moscow in April, where Russia prepared a cooperation memorandum offering financial, material and technical assistance. It is worth pausing on what that assistance would consist of: Pamfilova oversees elections that Russia itself has kept closed to outside scrutiny, having declined to invite OSCE observers to both the 2021 parliamentary vote and the 2024 presidential election – the first time in three decades the organization was shut out entirely – which leaves the nature of the expertise on offer an open question. Rakotonarivo has stressed that nothing has been signed and that assistance threatening electoral integrity would be rejected. That caveat is genuine, and so is the pattern behind it. A 2019 New York Times investigation documented Wagner-linked operatives funding candidates, hiring journalists and manipulating the 2018 election before settling on Andry Rajoelina. Moscow now appears to be hedging across several vehicles at once: Randrianirina benefits from Russian security support, National Assembly speaker Siteny Randrianasoloniaiko is a longstanding Moscow interlocutor, and a new pro-Russian party has emerged from a friendship association advocating closer ties with Russia and BRICS. No settled candidate has surfaced. The method is broader than picking one: cultivate several vehicles and secure access to the referee itself.
That same patience runs through Madagascar’s information and cultural institutions. In July, the national broadcaster TVM launched a weekly programme on bilateral relations, including Russian-language lessons taught by a specialist from Saint Petersburg. The University of Antananarivo has hosted Russian-language activities, the Russian Orthodox Church’s African Exarchate secured legal registration in April, and Le Monde has documented Russian-backed billboards, influencer recruitment and planned journalism training. Each item is minor on its own. Spread across the army, the airwaves, the university and the church, they make Russian presence feel ordinary well before any Malagasy citizen marks a ballot.
Fuel, the Channel and the Rival Nobody Named
The commercial file is thinner than the military one but carries sharper stakes for the region, because Madagascar’s weight has less to do with its own resources than with its neighbourhood. A Russia–Madagascar Chamber of Commerce opened at the Russian Embassy in March, and parliament approved a state petroleum importer on July 1 after officials discussed Russian participation in fuel-storage infrastructure. Bloomberg reported that the incumbent petroleum association fears the reform could admit Russian fuel and expose operators, airlines and mining companies to sanctions risk. Under British sanctions guidance, simple blending does not erase Russian origin – only substantial transformation qualifies – so any operator sourcing fuel through a Malagasy hub should treat provenance as a live question rather than an assumption. No evidence shows Russian cargoes being relabelled there today; what is emerging is infrastructure that could facilitate exactly that later.
The larger prize sits across the water. France’s TotalEnergies is restarting its $20 billion liquefied-natural-gas project at Afungi in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, one of the largest energy investments on the continent. Madagascar flanks the Mozambique Channel, while Antsiranana lies near its northern entrance. France has proposed supporting the modernization of Antsiranana, the former Diego-Suarez naval yard, and a combined Russian delegation inspected the same facility in April. The temptation is to call this a chokepoint play, and it is worth being precise about why it is not: the channel is roughly 400 kilometres wide at its narrowest, and LNG carriers leaving Afungi have several viable routes, some clearing Madagascar’s waters entirely. A base at Antsiranana would not let Russia switch off Mozambican gas exports. What it would deliver is persistent surveillance of a busy approach lane and extended refuelling and repair range for vessels in the western Indian Ocean — presence and leverage, not a blockade switch, a distinction worth holding onto because the weaker claim is the one that survives contact with a map. Russia’s 2022 Maritime Doctrine calls explicitly for naval-support points in the Indian Ocean built on regional states’ own infrastructure. No lease or basing agreement exists, but the pattern echoes Mali in slower motion: documented Russian interest in a strategic harbour, arriving just as the water around it grows more valuable to everyone.
Madagascar has not chosen a side. Its government insists none of these arrangements are final, and on paper that is true. What is also true is that a protected transitional leader, presidential-security personnel trained by Russian instructors, a weekly slot on state television, an open channel to the election authority and documented Russian interest in a strategic harbour do not require a treaty to matter. They only require patience – and Moscow, watching a calendar that ends in 2027, has shown it has plenty.
