Russia Unleashes ‘Cyber Nightmare’ in Effort to Win African Information War

A Russian teen has created an online video game to turn Africans against the United States and its allies.
Russia Unleashes ‘Cyber Nightmare’ in Effort to Win African Information War
A participant sits at a computer monitor to play a video game at the 2019 DreamHack video gaming festival in Leipzig, Germany, on Feb. 15, 2019. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Darren Taylor
Updated:

JOHANNESBURG—The scene on the computer screen is a rubble-strewn street in Ouagadougou, the capital of the tiny West African country of Burkina Faso.

Troops amass on one side, holding automatic rifles and rocket launchers, their uniforms emblazoned with the Burkinabe national flag—two equal horizontal bands of red and green, with a yellow five-pointed star in the center.