Russia is looking to Africa for new gas buyers as Gazprom struggles to replace the European customers it lost after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to The Moscow Times on October 16, 2026, Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilyov told Russian Energy Week that Russia was ready to supply gas to African countries, explore for deposits there and develop any reserves it finds.
Tsivilyov pitched more than gas. “Our country can offer a comprehensive solution: modernize existing hydropower plants, build solar and thermal power plants, lay power lines, supply substations and transformers, and create power system management and dispatch centers,” he said, as quoted by the state news agency TASS. He described Africa as a “long-term market” for Moscow (The Moscow Times).
The scale of the problem explains the search. Gazprom has lost more than half of its gas exports to countries outside the former Soviet Union since 2022. Economic Development Ministry estimates put this year’s pipeline exports at 77 billion cubic meters, down from 185 billion in 2021 and roughly 200 billion a year in the late 2010s. The ministry expects exports to fall to 72 billion cubic meters by 2028, once the EU ban on Russian gas imports takes effect. That would be a level last seen in the second half of the 1980s (The Moscow Times).
China, the obvious alternative, is driving a hard bargain. Vladimir Putin wants a new deal that would raise Chinese supplies to 100 billion cubic meters a year, but his August 31 meeting with Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek produced no breakthrough, the South China Morning Post reported. Beijing reportedly wants to pay about what Russian households pay, roughly $50 per 1,000 cubic meters, or at most the $120–$130 paid by Russian industry. Moscow wants to start from the $250–$260 China pays for gas through the existing Power of Siberia pipeline, which is already about 40% below Gazprom’s $420 contract price for other customers outside the former Soviet Union. Talks on Power of Siberia 2, which Putin has renamed Power of Baikal, are on hold over price (The Moscow Times).
The African pitch should be read as strategy as much as commerce. What Tsivilyov described is less a gas sale than a full energy-system offer: generation, grids, substations and dispatch centers. Whoever builds and runs a country’s power system gains long-term access, technical dependence and political influence. For Moscow, that is a way to stay relevant in the Global South even as its core export business shrinks.
But Africa cannot replace Europe. Europe was a high-volume, high-price market tied to Russia by pipelines built over decades. African demand is smaller and more scattered, and many buyers cannot pay European prices. The real lesson is that the loss of Europe has left Russia bargaining from weakness: Beijing sets the price in the east, and Moscow is selling influence in the south because it can no longer sell volume in the west.
Source: “Russia Looks to Africa for Gas Buyers as Gazprom Struggles to Replace European Market,” The Moscow Times, October 16, 2026.