The two day summit brings representatives of 48 of Africa’s 54 countries to Moscow, with 22 participating at head of state level, according to Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov. That is up from the 17 leaders who attended the previous summit in 2023. Putin co-chairs with Burundi’s President Evariste Ndayishimiye, the current African Union chairperson, and is scheduled to hold bilateral meetings on the margins, among them with Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed. Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, who arrived on Monday saying he would press Putin directly for a ceasefire in Ukraine, is among the visiting leaders, and Kenya’s President William Ruto arrived on Wednesday seeking export markets and investment.
The agenda centres on political dialogue and cooperation in trade, investment, energy, agriculture, infrastructure, food security, science, technology and education, with transport and logistics routes a specific topic. Running alongside is the Russia Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum for governments, businesses and experts. Ushakov put trade between Russia and African countries at more than $27 billion in 2025, compared with around $16.8 billion in 2019, when the first summit was held in Sochi; that growth figure is the Kremlin’s own and is the claim the summit is built around.
The expected outputs are a final declaration, a Russia Africa Partnership Forum action plan for 2027 to 2029, a separate declaration on cooperation in the civilian use of artificial intelligence, and a set of intergovernmental and commercial agreements. The analytical caution from outside is about delivery: Chatham House’s assessment this week is that Moscow is engaging more with Africa but its delivery remains limited, and the gap between summit communiques and financed projects has been the pattern of the 2019 and 2023 editions.
What to watch on Thursday is therefore textual and specific: whether the final declaration says anything about Ukraine, and how Mahama’s ceasefire appeal is answered in his bilateral readout; whether the action plan names financing mechanisms or only cooperation areas; and whether any grain, nuclear energy or port agreements are signed with numbers attached, rather than announced as frameworks.