A CCTV frame, published October 23, 2026, from the April 28, 2025 visit to the African Union's Africa House residence in Addis Ababa that The Insider attributes to a GRU officer. Image: The Insider via X
A Russian military intelligence officer slipped into the Addis Ababa residence where African Union Commission Chairperson Mahamoud Ali Youssouf was staying and spent more than four minutes inside, The Insider has reported.
The investigation, published on Friday by the Russia-focused investigative outlet and written by Michael Weiss and Roman Dobrokhotov, says the visit took place on April 28, 2025, at Africa House in the Bole Atlas neighborhood. The house is the official residence of the commission's deputy chairperson, Selma Haddadi, but at the time it was being used by Youssouf and his family, who had arrived from Djibouti only days earlier. Youssouf had been Djibouti's foreign minister until the month before.
According to the report, a car with diplomatic plates pulled into the parking area at 3:32 p.m. A man in a shirt and tie stepped out, waited for the car carrying Youssouf's university-aged daughter to pass through the security gate, and walked in behind it on foot before the gate closed. He went straight to the bedroom where Youssouf was staying and remained inside the building for 4 minutes and 24 seconds, running into the daughter at one point. Guards stopped him as he left at 3:37 and tried to question him, but they held back because they worried he might be a lost VIP.
The Insider says CCTV images it obtained, run through facial recognition software, identify the man as Major Aleksandr Dubikov, 36, assistant to Russia's military attaché in Ethiopia, Nikita Zayats. Zayats was reportedly expelled from Portugal in 2022 over alleged links to the GRU, and the outlet says Dubikov is a GRU officer too, registered at a well-known dormitory of the GRU Academy in Moscow and a former student of the Peter the Great Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces, where he studied computer science.
What makes the case more serious, in the outlet's account, is the company Dubikov keeps. Its analysis of his phone data found several numbers belonging to GRU officers, and the second number he called most often belongs to Vladislav Popov, 37, a GRU hacker linked to the unit known as Sandworm. That unit is blamed for the 2017 NotPetya malware attack, which shut down operations at the shipping company Maersk and the drug maker Merck and caused more than an estimated $10 billion in damage worldwide, according to The Insider.
A source told The Insider that the AU's Security Directorate tightened security around Africa House after the incident. The report says the visit raises the concern that Dubikov tried to take files, data or devices belonging to Youssouf, or to plant surveillance equipment. The Insider says flight records show he is still in Ethiopia, which, it argues, means the Ethiopian authorities either failed to identify him or chose to look away. It is not clear whether the AU or the Ethiopian Gov't knew who he was.
"Ethiopia has long been an important operating base for Russian intelligence in East Africa," Philip Obaji, a Nigerian investigative journalist who reports on Russian operations in Africa, told The Insider, adding that senior GRU officials Anton Papshev and Yury Mikheyev were based in the country for years.
No official answer has followed. A spokesperson for Youssouf did not respond to The Insider's request for comment, and by Saturday evening neither the AU Commission, the Russian embassy in Addis Ababa nor the Ethiopian Gov't had said anything in public about the report. Mereja has asked the AU Commission and the Russian embassy to comment on the report and will update this story with any response.
The timing is awkward for Moscow. The third Russia-Africa summit opens in Moscow on October 28, co-chaired by President Vladimir Putin and Burundi's President Évariste Ndayishimiye, who holds the AU's rotating chairmanship this year. "While it officially engages in cooperation with African Union members, it does not hesitate to use manipulation and lies to achieve its aims," a Western security official said in comments to The Insider, describing what the official called Russia's "twofold game."