Russia

Where it is on record

Sovereign debt is drawn at each country's interior point, sized by the latest stock owed to Russia; hover for the loans behind it. Energy assets sit at their GEM coordinates in the map's status colours. Nuclear agreements and corporate holdings are country-level only, and the holdings, which rest on press reports, are off until switched on.

Countries whose last reported balance predates 2020 are drawn at that last figure. The map's own lender filter does not carry Russia: the records here are country-year balances and agreements, not projects, and are kept off the project map on purpose.

Sovereign loans: World Bank International Debt Statistics

The IDS publishes every low- and middle-income borrower's external debt by individual creditor, from the borrowers' own reporting to the World Bank's Debtor Reporting System. The Russian Federation is counterpart 087; the USSR, for claims made before 1992, is 078. For each African country and year it gives the stock owed, new commitments, disbursements and repayments, from 1970 to 2024. It is open (CC BY 4.0), machine-readable through the same World Bank API the map's other fetchers use, and refreshed every December.

What it cannot say is what a loan paid for. The purpose column below is filled only where a public source says so: El Dabaa, Angola's satellite. It also sees only sovereign and sovereign-guaranteed borrowing, so Rusal's mines, Lukoil's blocks and VTB's 2013 loans to Mozambican state companies are invisible here.

Stocks that end before 2024 are countries that stopped reporting a Russian balance, usually after a write-off: Russia cancelled Soviet-era claims on Ethiopia (USD 5.5 bn, 2005), Algeria (2006), Libya and most of the heavily indebted poor countries. The IDS records a cancellation as the stock going to zero, not as a flow. The Soviet-era column is the peak stock owed to the USSR under counterpart 078.

Energy assets with a Russian role: Global Energy Monitor

Four records in GEM's trackers carry a Russian vendor, owner or parent. Two of them are already on the map, in the power and pipelines layers. The map's power layer takes GEM's Integrated Power Tracker; the Nuclear Power Tracker's August 2026 release adds the reactor model, which is how El Dabaa shows up as Russian at all: GEM books its owner as Egypt's Nuclear Power Plants Authority, and the Russian role is in the model (VVER-1200) and on the wiki page.

GEM's Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker would add the upstream stakes (Lukoil in Ghana, the Republic of the Congo, Egypt and Cameroon; Gazprom in Algeria; Rosneft in Mozambique and Egypt; Tatneft in Libya), but it is released only through a request form, not the open bucket the fetcher reads, so it is not here.

Nuclear agreements: World Nuclear Association

The WNA's Emerging nuclear energy countries profile is the one maintained, dated record of Rosatom's African agreements. It is a narrative page, not a dataset, and almost every entry is a memorandum with no money, no site and no date of works. Only Egypt has a contract and a construction site. Read as announced records at country level they are honest; read as investment they are not.

Direct investment stock: Bank of Russia

The central bank's table of outward direct investment positions by partner country is the only official Russian figure per African country. It was last updated in May 2023 and ends at 1 January 2022; the positions that matter, Algeria, Angola, the Republic of the Congo, Libya, Morocco and Mozambique, are suppressed as confidential. What remains is small: Egypt USD 62 m, Mauritius USD 45 m, South Africa USD 33 m. Shown here for the record, and never drawn.

Corporate holdings: press and company statements

The mining and oil stakes that make up most of the Russian private footprint have no open tracker. The list below is what the press and the companies name, with the source beside each line. It is a reading list, not data: several entries are exits rather than investments, and none is drawn on the map unless switched on above.

How to read this page

One record is

In the debt table, one country and its balance with the Russian Federation by year. In the assets table, one GEM record (a plant or a pipeline segment). In the agreements table, one country's relationship with Rosatom, however many memoranda it spans. In the holdings table, one company stake as a named source describes it.

Status

GEM assets use the map's five statuses, mapped as on the map. Rosatom agreements are announced records, whatever a memorandum calls itself; only El Dabaa is under construction. Debt balances have no status: a loan is approved when committed, disbursing while drawn, and then repaid, and the table shows the money rather than a label.

Money

Debt figures are the World Bank's, in current US dollars, public and publicly guaranteed debt to creditors in Russia, the state and its banks together, as the debt page counts it; the bilateral official part, the state's own claims, is in the table beside it. They are balances, not project values, and are never added to the map's lenders: a debt stock is what is still owed, a commitment is what was signed, and the two are shown side by side rather than summed. Bank of Russia stocks are USD million, directional principle, as the Bank publishes them.

Location

Debt, agreements and holdings are drawn at the country's interior point, the same point the map uses for records it can place no finer than the country. GEM assets sit at GEM's coordinates (exact for El Dabaa and Lurio, approximate for Itu, a route for the pipeline).

Not here, and why

• GEM's Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker, which holds the upstream stakes, is released through a request form only.
• GIGA's greenfield FDI dataset (11,233 projects in Africa 2013–2020 with investor origin) needs a GESIS login and a licence check before any row could be published.
• OECD development-finance statistics hold no Russian records at recipient level: the query for Russia as a provider returns nothing.
• AidData and IATI have no Russian dataset; Russia does not publish to IATI.
• Think-tank reports (IFRI, CSIS, GIS Reports) cite UNCTAD, SIPRI and fDi Markets totals, with no data annex; they put Russia under 1% of foreign direct investment in Africa.

Sources and licences

• World Bank, International Debt Statistics (data.worldbank.org), source 6, series DT.DOD.DPPG.CD, DT.COM.DPPG.CD and DT.DIS.DPPG.CD by counterpart area (all creditors in Russia), with DT.DOD.BLAT.CD (bilateral official) beside them; CC BY 4.0. Release of 3 Dec 2025.
• Global Energy Monitor, Global Nuclear Power Tracker (August 2026), Global Integrated Power Tracker (August 2026) and Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker (November 2025); CC BY 4.0.
• World Nuclear Association, Emerging nuclear energy countries, read 7 October 2026; a hand-kept table of 15 rows.
• Bank of Russia, outward direct investment positions by partner country, table 16e-dir_inv.xlsx, updated 17 May 2023.
• Press and company statements for the corporate holdings, each row linked to its source.

Download

Everything on this page, with the full year-by-year balances per country: russia.json. The debt series are re-fetched from the World Bank API with every data refresh; the hand-kept tables live in the fetcher's source and change when a source is re-read.