The New York Times cited Valent's investigative work in a major piece on Russian influence operations in Sudan — revealing how Wagner Group-linked networks used disinformation as part of a broader strategy to secure gold mining access and regional influence.
The New York Times cited Valent's work in a major investigative piece on Russian influence operations in Sudan — specifically the use of Wagner Group-linked networks to pursue Russian strategic and commercial interests in the country through disinformation and coordinated social media manipulation.
Sudan has been a consistent focus of Valent's investigative work. The country's combination of political instability, rich natural resources, and strategic geographic position has made it an attractive target for external influence operations. Russia's interest in particular — centred on access to gold mining concessions and a potential naval base on the Red Sea — created strong incentives for the kind of narrative manipulation that Valent's methodology is designed to detect.
Our work on Sudan identified networks of accounts operating to advance specific Russian-aligned narratives: legitimising Wagner's presence, undermining the credibility of political factions seen as hostile to Russian interests, and amplifying content that framed Russian involvement as beneficial rather than extractive. The networks showed the hallmarks of coordinated inauthentic behaviour — simultaneous activity, artificial amplification patterns, and the presence of account types consistent with organised influence operations rather than organic public discourse.
The New York Times investigation placed these findings in a broader context of Russian strategic engagement in Africa — a pattern in which military presence, economic leverage, and information operations work together as a coherent suite of tools. Understanding the information operations component is essential to understanding the full picture.
The Sudan case is not an isolated example. It is one instance of a broader pattern in which Russia, and increasingly other state actors, use coordinated disinformation as a standard instrument of foreign policy. What makes these operations effective is not their sophistication in any individual instance, but their systematic nature: the willingness to invest in long-term narrative infrastructure across multiple countries simultaneously.
For the organisations and institutions that Valent works with, the lesson from Sudan is that influence operations are not solely an election-period threat. They are a permanent feature of the information environment in politically contested spaces — and they require permanent monitoring rather than periodic response.
