A four-minute, 24-second intrusion into Africa House has exposed a concrete failure in the physical security of the African Union’s most sensitive diplomatic compound, and an investigation now identifies the intruder as a Russian military intelligence officer.
The breach occurred on April 28, 2025, at Africa House in the upscale Bole Atlas neighborhood of Addis Ababa, where the African Union secretariat is headquartered. The property is the official residence of Selma Haddadi, Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, the executive arm of the body representing all 55 African countries. That afternoon the house was occupied by Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, the Commission’s Chairman, and his family, who had arrived in the Ethiopian capital only days earlier from Djibouti, Youssouf’s native country, where he had served as foreign minister until the previous month.
The operational sequence is unusually well documented. At 3:32 p.m., a vehicle with diplomatic license plates pulled into the parking area outside the main compound. A white man of medium build with short hair, wearing a button-down shirt and tie, got out. He waited until a car carrying Youssouf’s university-aged daughter passed through an opened security gate, then slipped in on foot before the gate closed behind him. Once inside, he went directly to the bedroom where Youssouf was staying and remained in the building for 4 minutes and 24 seconds. At some point he ran into the daughter inside the house. When he exited at 3:37, a stationed private security detail stopped him and attempted to question him, but the guards feared he might be a VIP who had become lost or entered without proper checks. Amid that confusion, the man drove off at 3:38. Exterior moments of the trespass were captured on CCTV images obtained exclusively by The Insider, which has also published footage of the incident.
What the security apparatus failed to stop, the investigation has since identified. Facial recognition analysis names the intruder as Major Aleksandr Dubikov, a 36-year-old Moscow resident who serves as assistant to Nikita Zayats, Russia’s military attaché in Ethiopia. Zayats was reportedly expelled from Portugal in 2022 over alleged links to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Dubikov, The Insider reveals publicly for the first time, is himself a GRU officer, making his illicit entry into a diplomatic residence an almost certain intelligence operation. It remains unclear whether the African Union or the Ethiopian government knew of Dubikov’s role in the incident or of his work for the agency.
Dubikov’s own paper trail supports the attribution. Records show he was registered to a well-known dormitory of the GRU Academy at 52 Narodnogo Opolcheniya Street in Moscow. His VK profile, last updated in May 2008, identifies him as a student of the Peter the Great Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces, now based in Balashikha in the Moscow region, where he studied computer science and information technologies in control systems. “Like everyone else,” he writes, “I study, but in my own way, combining usefulness with pleasure… Just a cadet.” He described himself as “very kind and cuddly” and a “well-rounded person interested in many things,” and listed Rihanna, Chris Brown, and the Mafia and Max Payne video games among his interests.
More troubling for those assessing the breach is what his phone data shows. An Insider analysis found several numbers belonging to GRU officers, including the second-most frequently called number on the device: that of 37-year-old Vladislav Popov, a known GRU hacker tied to “Sandworm,” or GRU’s Unit 74455, the unit behind a series of destructive cyberattacks. Those include a 2017 shutdown of operations at Danish shipping company Maersk and U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck, and of mission-critical hospital computers in Pennsylvania. NotPetya, the malware Sandworm developed and deployed, initially infected Ukrainian computer systems and caused an estimated $10 billion in damages globally.
The institutional response came quickly, at least in part. A source familiar with the matter, speaking to The Insider on condition of anonymity, said that following the incident the African Union’s Security Directorate strengthened security measures around Africa House. The breach also raises concerns that Dubikov may have attempted to steal files, data, or electronic devices belonging to Youssouf, or to install surveillance equipment to gather information about the chairman. His closeness to Popov and Sandworm only sharpens that suspicion. A spokesperson for Youssouf did not respond to a request for comment.
Dubikov’s operational footprint, meanwhile, appears undisturbed. Flight records indicate he is still in the country, meaning either that Ethiopian authorities failed to identify him before this report or chose to ignore the scandal. The latter cannot be ruled out. The Insider’s analysis of GRU operatives’ frequent travel suggests Ethiopia has become a key hub for Russian intelligence activity in recent years. “Ethiopia has long been an important operating base for Russian intelligence in East Africa,” said Philip Obaji, a Nigerian Russia expert and investigative journalist who has reported extensively on Russia’s covert operations in Africa. “Senior GRU officials Anton Papshev and Yury Mikheyev, who play key roles in coordinating Russian intelligence activities across the continent, were based there for years.”
The timing compounds the awkwardness for Moscow. The third Russia-Africa Summit is set for October 28-29, with Yuri Ushakov, adviser to Vladimir Putin, heading its organizing committee. The second summit, held in 2023, aimed to “bolster comprehensive ties between the Russian Federation and African states, while establishing fresh frameworks for bilateral and multilateral collaboration,” according to its official website. The upcoming summit will be co-chaired by Putin and Évariste Ndayishimiye, the Burundi president who holds the African Union’s rotating chairmanship this year. “While Russia continues to establish relations with many African Union member states, the GRU break-in reveals its twofold game,” a Western security official told The Insider. “While it officially engages in cooperation with African Union members, it does not hesitate to use manipulation and lies to achieve its aims.”
The broader machinery behind the breach is worth tracing. After the death of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash in August 2023, Russia’s African operations were restructured. Wagner, which from 2017 had acted as a plausibly deniable Kremlin arm in Mali, Libya, Sudan and the Central African Republic, was largely absorbed into Africa Corps, a state-run expeditionary force headed by Gen. Andrey Averyanov, now deputy director of the GRU and formerly founding commander of Unit 29155, the service’s black ops team responsible for the Salisbury poisonings, a failed coup in Montenegro, and attacks on weapons storage facilities across NATO territory. Seventy to eighty percent of Africa Corps’ forces are ex-Wagner mercenaries, according to a Reuters investigation.
Wagner’s record in Mali illustrates the delivery gap between promises and results. Brought in in late 2021 at the invitation of the ruling junta to fight the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and Tuareg rebels, the group was routed at Tinzaouatène in 2024, precipitating its withdrawal in 2025. A UN Panel of Experts report from August 2023 noted that Wagner, credibly accused of torture, beheadings and summary executions, had hardly been a successful counterterrorist force, allowing the ISIS franchise in Mali to nearly double its territorial control in under a year. Wagner also attempted to pass off atrocities as the work of the French military, including the on-camera burial of bodies in a mass grave near a Malian military base the group used in April 2022.
Its information operations followed a similar pattern. Using the front organization AFRIC, Wagner imported European neo-Nazis and white supremacists to pose as “election monitors” in several African countries, in reality acting as agents of influence to promote candidates and stir anti-Western sentiment. The group frequently armed and funded opposing sides of the same conflict, notably in Libya, where it worked both for Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and for Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a warlord once beholden to the CIA. “Russia’s broader approach in Africa is highly opportunistic,” Obaji said. “It deals with sitting governments while quietly maintaining relationships with opposition figures working against them. Rather than showing consistent loyalty to any one side, Moscow runs a dual-track strategy designed to protect and advance its own interests no matter which way the political winds blow.”
Alongside the hard power, softer infrastructure is being built out. Rossotrudnichestvo, the Foreign Ministry’s cultural arm, which doubles as a conspicuous clearinghouse for the SVR, plans new “Russian Houses,” educational and cultural centers, in Egypt, Zambia, Tanzania, South Africa and Ethiopia. In 2025, Russia granted 5,000 state-funded university places to African students, mainly from Sudan, Guinea, Ghana and Chad. Whether those programs and the diplomatic goodwill they are meant to build can survive revelations of a GRU officer walking unchallenged through the front gate of the African Union’s own residence in Addis Ababa is now, for Moscow, an open operational question.