In early September, former Ukrainian spy-chief Kyrylo Budanov, dropped an intelligence treasure on X. He posted a collage of the Ukrainian defense intelligence service (HUR) operating in several countries around the world.
The first sentence of the post read: “From Russia to Africa, from suits to camouflage”, declaring a much broader operational area than previously admitted publicly . Almost immediately, OSINT researchers tried to locate the exact spots where the pictures were taken. They ended up identifying locations in Sudan, the Sahel, Russia, Syria, all the way to the Congo basin and Antarctica. Budanov wanted to send the message that Ukraine has become a force on the global stage.
Before the 2022 invasion, and especially before the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukraine’s involvement in the international arena was minimal. The occasional Ukrainian mercenary would show up in conflicts across Africa, in such places as Angola, Libya and Sierra Leone, often where former Soviet pilots were in high demand due to these countries’ dependence on Soviet military hardware.
Ukraine’s post-Soviet arms industry, however, was significant, turning the country into a major arms exporter during the first decade of the country’s independence. Having inherited massive piles of Soviet arsenal, Ukraine decided to export the cheap, robust Soviet surplus, such as T-55/T-72 tanks, Mi-24 gunships, and small arms.
As these supplies flooded developing nations, Ukrainian equipment became central to battlefields across the world, especially on the African continent. As the country entered the 2000s, Ukraine’s weapons industry became a specialist in the manufacturing of armoured vehicles, selling military trucks to countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan and Iraq. Yet, none of this was done with a larger geopolitical agenda. Deals were closed out of financial interests and mercenaries operated outside of the Ukrainian state’s purview.
With war comes change
All of this drastically changed with the Russian invasion of 2022. In the first year of the war the conflict was very dynamic, with large swathes of territory changing hands quite regularly. But as the front ground to an impasse and mobile warfare turned into trench fighting, Ukraine’s intelligence services increasingly looked beyond the country’s borders to hit the Russians.
Over the preceding years, Russia had become increasingly involved in foreign conflicts. The battlefields of Syria, Libya, and the Central African Republic gave the Kremlin an opportunity to test new weapons while allowing Russian mercenaries to gain combat experience.
It also made deeply unpopular governments in these regions dependent on the Russian security apparatus. Russia’s foreign operations had provided the Kremlin with a stronger international standing, but now it also provided the Ukrainians with an opportunity to expand their own international outreach. As such, the Russia-Ukraine war slowly went global.
The first country where this became visible was Sudan, which was plunged into a brutal civil war in spring 2023, when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) mutinied against the military government. In the initial months of the war the situation looked quite desperate for the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). RSF fighters had overwhelmed the defenses of the capital Khartoum, besieging SAF troops in small pockets in military installations around the city.
SAF chief-of-staff Abdel Fattah al-Burhan sought out Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on the side of the UNGA and requested his help. Russian mercenaries belonging to the Wagner Groups had allegedly been aiding the RSF, with the Russian’s receiving gold from RSF controlled goldmines in return. Al-Burhan told Zelensky that there was an opportunity for Ukraine to deal a blow to Russian foreign forces and disrupt elements of Moscow's international war proceeding.
