Name: How Rwanda is Conquering Their 100x Larger Neighbor
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T17:19:08.000Z
Duration: 33 min 5 s
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In the Western world, our news headlines have been continually dominated by the conflicts going on in Ukraine and Gaza, and

more recently by Donald Trump's territorial threats against Greenland and Panama.

that probably means that in all of the noise that's going on right now, you missed hearing about one of the biggest geopolitical earthquakes in decades that also just took place in Sub Saharan Africa.

Here, Rwanda, a small landlocked country only about the size of Massachusetts, is busy covertly invading and conquering swaths of land from its much larger neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the drc.

At first glance, Rwanda would appear to be vastly outclassed by the drc, to the point where Rwandan invasion almost appears to be insanity.

The DRC has nearly 10 times Rwanda's population and 89 times Rwanda's land area.

It is like a country the size of Massachusetts invading a country the size of the entire western United States.

And yet the tiny country with one tenth the population and 1 89th the land area is currently winning decisively.

In January of 2025, the UN estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 Rwandan soldiers had crossed over the border into the eastern DRC to directly support an armed militia organization there known as M23, a supposedly local Congolese rebel group largely made up of ethnic Tutsis that insists is independent from Rwanda, but

which is actually directed, armed, funded and supported directly by Rwanda.

According to both the United nations and The United States, M23 rebels have been spotted operating in the DRC with State of the art equipment like modern carbines, surface to air missiles, anti tank weapons, helicopter gunships, artillery and armored vehicles that are rare among East African rebels and make them appear as more of a professional army than a rant tag militia.

Throughout 2024, M23 rebels and Rwandan soldiers steadily expanded their area of control in the DRC's North Kivu province, immediately across the border from Rwanda.

But near the end of January 2025, an earth shattering development took place.

M23 and thousands of Rwandan soldiers surrounded and besieged the major eastern Congolese city of Goma, the capital city of the country's North Kivu Province, home to around 1 million people.

Within only a matter of days of fighting, the city fell to M23 and Rwandan forces by 28 January, marking the largest escalation of the conflict in the eastern DRC in more than a decade.

As of this video's production, it's currently unclear how many people were killed in Goma during the week long battle for the city's control.

But the UN has already reported that a minimum of 3,000 people lost their lives during the attack on the city and that more than 700,000 other people have been forcibly displaced, making it also the deadliest battle fought in the Congo in decades.

To put the scale of the devastation here into perspective, M23's rewanded supported attack on Goma at the end of January 2025 likely killed more than three times as many people as Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th did.

And yet there's been barely a heap of interest about it in the Western world.

And since then, M23 and their Rwandan allies have been consolidating their control over the DRC's North Kivu province, and

they began advancing further into the South Kivu province towards the regional capital there, Abu Qavu as well.

Border While M23's leadership have openly stated that their ultimate objective right now is to march all the way to the DRC's capital of Kinshasa and to overthrow the entire country's government, the president of the DRC has already compared Rwanda's President Paul Kagame to that of Adolf Hitler, and

Rwanda, seizure of Goma and the deaths of thousands in the process as amounting to a declaration of war on the DRC.

Historically, Rwanda has attempted to maintain at least six some element of plausible deniability concerning M23's operations in the Congo, consistently insisting that they have nothing to do with actually supporting them.

But during a recent interview with CNN, on the 3rd of February, Rwanda's President was asked this very pointed question.

So let me ask this directly, Mr. President.

Today on the 3rd of February, does Rwanda currently have any troops at all in eastern drc?

Yeah, there are many things I don't know, but

if you want to ask me, is there a problem in Congo that concerns Rwanda and that Rwanda would do anything to protect itself, I'd say 100%.

Before and after this statement by Rwanda's president, there have been many people who have compared Rwanda's recent actions in the eastern DRC to Russia's actions in eastern Ukraine in 2014, with some analysts even calling Rwanda's Paul Kagame the Vladimir Putin of Africa.

Rwanda's government publicly maintains an ambiguous position on whether or not its troops are actively invading the DRC, while its M23 proxy force that has seized control over swaths of land across the border justifies its actions based on the grounds that it is defending the DRC's ethnic Tutsi minority from alleged government persecution.

Similarly, in 2014, Vladimir Putin covertly deployed Russian soldiers across the border into eastern Ukraine to support pro Russian separatist militias in the Donbas.

Russia then consistently denied that its soldiers were present while the separatist proxy militias in Donetsk and Luhansk were armed, directed and supplied by Russia anyway, seizing control over a swath of territory in the Donbas, the proxy separatist militias claimed that their actions were done in order to defend Ukraine's ethnic Russian minority from alleged government persecution.

And then eight years later, Putin dropped all of the pretexts when he directly annexed the separatist controlled areas and invaded Ukraine.

In the Rwanda and DRC analogy, what Rwanda has so far done in the eastern DRC is pretty analogous to what Russia did in the Donbass through 2014.

And while no direct annexation of territory has taken place just yet, the areas that have come under M23's control in the eastern DRC are effectively functioning as de facto extensions of Rwanda already anyway.

Valuable resources worth billions of dollars like gold, coltannin, tin and M23s controlled areas in the eastern DRC are being smuggled back towards Rwanda and exported to countries around the world in a wholesale plunder of the Congo's resources.

While M23's capture of Goma and its recent advances further on into South Kivu are risking a dramatic escalation towards a full blown war across the African Great Lakes region that is pitting Rwanda and their allies like M23 and Uganda against the DRC and their allies like Burundi and maybe South Africa.

It is a complicated web of local rivalries and interests mixed with the ambitions of major outside powers like the United States, China and France.

And should the worst come to pass and a full blown war erupts here due to Rwanda's actions, the entire world should tremble.

Because the last time that a war exploded here due to a Rwandan invasion of the DRC in 1998, not even 30 years ago, anywhere between 3 and 5 million people were killed in what has been widely regarded as the date deadliest human conflict in history since the Second World War.

This conflict in the Eastern DRC is very important to understand right now and it has enormous implications for both the future of Africa and for the rest of the outside world as well, including the Western nations who almost all universally support Rwanda in this conflict.

And in order to understand it, it helps to know some of the region's recent history and how this whole conflict today began.

While the origins of the Eastern Congo conflict can be traced back to colonial times, the major trigger began in 1994 with the infamous Rwandan genocide.

Two major ethnic groups comprised most of the Rwandan population.

The Hutus, who made up 85% of the country's population in 1994, and

the minority Tutsis, who made up another 14% of the population back then.

Over a period of just 100 days over the summer of 1994, the radical Hutu extremist regime that was in power in Rwanda at the time carried out a ruthless and Methodist conical genocide against the country's minority Tutsi population and moderate Hutus that killed around 800,000 people, or about 11% of Rwanda's entire population.

A pace of targeted killing that was so extreme that it is only surpassed in all of history by the Holocaust in Europe.

As the Hutu extremist regime focused all of its resources on perpetrating the genocide, a young Tutsi named Paul Kagame and his militia of Tutsi exiles called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or the rpf, based across the border in Uganda, invaded Rwanda and marched on the capital Kigali, taking it over and overthrowing the Hutu extremist regime and stopping the genocide in the process.

During and after the genocide, as Kagame and the Tutsi led RPF took over, fear of reprisals swept through the Rwandan Hutu community, which led to around 2 million ethnic Hutus fleeing across the border into the DRC who began settling in huge refugee camps in the neighboring north and South Kivu provinces, dramatically altering the demographic makeup of these two DRC provinces with huge Hutu populations.

In the process, it also led to the ethnic Tutsi community that was already present in the eastern drc, also known as the Bania Mulenge, to feel increasingly threatened and anxious.

The vast majority of the millions of Hutus who fled into the eastern DRC were civilians, but

among them included many of the Hutu extremists who had directly organized and participated in the genocide.

Kagame's now Tutsi led government in Rwanda accused the dictator of what was then called Zaire at the time, Mobutu Sese Seko, of harboring these hoodoo extremists and allowing them to organize on Rwanda's border and to terrorize the DRC's local Tutsi community, which Kagame asserted was an unacceptable national security threat.

Because of Mobudu Sese Seko's support of rebel groups all across Africa.

Kagame was Able to masterfully gather together a coalition of states opposed to him, including Uganda, Burundi and Angola.

And with the help of the primary opposition leader in Zaire at the time, named Laurent Kabila.

And within a year, by 1997, they managed to rapidly overthrow Mobudu Sese Seko's decades long regime.

This conflict was called the First Congo War.

Thousands of people were killed and Kagame's ally Lauren Kabila was installed as Zaire's new leader, who promptly renamed the country back to the drc.

Conspiracies within the DRC quickly began swirling that Lord Kabila was nothing but an installed puppet of Kagame and the Rwandans.

And to try and crush that perception, Kabila began purging ethnic Tutsis from his new government.

And he began demanding that the Rwandan army withdraw from the north and South Kivu provinces.

He began allowing Hutu extremist militias to begin organizing on the border with Rwanda.

Again, relations rapidly deteriorated and Rwanda and Uganda both responded to the change in circumstances by invading the eastern DRC once again in 1998, sparking the Second Congo War.

The Rwandans stated that their primary war aim this time around was to create a buffer zone in the eastern DRC that would be militarily occupied by their soldiers in order to create space between Rwanda itself and the Hutu extremist militias operating in the eastern drc.

And the result this time was the biggest war that has ever been fought on the African continent in all of human history.

Rwanda's invasion was supported by Uganda and Burundi, while the DRC was backed up by troops coming from their former enemy Angola, along with Chad, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

While dozens of various rebel militias supported one side or the other, a complicated web of alliances that have led some people to call this conflict the African World War.

Lord Kabila, the president of the DRC who was installed during the First Congo War, was assassinated in 2001 as the war continued and his son Joseph Kabila assumed power in the DRC in his place.

Between 2002 and 2003, the junior Kabila entered into peace negotiations with the Rwandans that ended the fighting of the Second Congo War.

After nearly five years of apocalyptic warfare.

The massive scale of the fighting and the widespread famines and other humanitarian disasters that were directly caused by that war caused millions of deaths according to multiple different sources.

According to lower estimates, up to as many as 5.4 million.

Deaths, according to higher estimates, making the Second Congo War, fought between 1998 and 2003, by far the deadliest conflict fought in history since the Second World War and tragically known about by hardly anybody in the Western world.

In the aftermath of the war, a tenuous peace was reached, but

instability continued, reigning supreme in the eastern drc, in the frontier provinces of south and North Kivu and also Ituri, along the borders with Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda.

More than a hundred different armed militia and rebel groups have since been sparked into existence here across the eastern DRC as the central government of the country has struggled immensely for decades with maintaining its authority in the area.

This is largely because still to this day, the DRC has no railways or even any paved roads that connect north and South Kivu to the rest of the country.

The DRC's capital, Kinshasa, is around 1500 kilometers away from the major cities here in Goba and Bukavu.

And everything the DRC wants to transport to them, whether it's troops or supplies, have to cross vast distances, largely over gravel highways if they're lucky, or muddy flooded earth tracks if they're not so lucky.

Meanwhile, Goma and Bukavu are both literally right across the border from Rwanda and only about 100 km away from the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

While Rwanda today has a much more extensive network of paved roads than the DRC has, with paved highways that can efficiently carry troops and supplies leading directly to both Gohma and Bukavu, straight from the capital Kigali.

Now, among those 100 militias and rebel groups that came to exist in the eastern DRC was a major Hutu extremist militia with members who directly perpetrated the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, called the FDLR.

The FDLR came to prominence in the eastern DRC during the 2000s, and

they rapidly attracted thousands of radical Hutu fighters to their cause.

And they found themselves in conflict both with the DRC government and a Congolese Tutsi militia that also formed in the North Kivu province that was known as the CNDP, the predecessor organization to the modern Tutsi M23 militia.

For years across the 2000s, there was basically a three way insurgency in the eastern DRC between the Hutu extremist FDLR militia, the Tutsi CNDP militia, and

the DRC government until on 23 March 2009, the Tutsi CNDP militia agreed on a peace treaty with the DRC government.

This date, March 23rd of 2009, is where the later M23 movement would take its name from.

A few Years later, in 2012, alleging that the DRC government had failed to adequately implement the March 23rd peace treaty, hundreds of mostly Tutsi officers and soldiers within the DRC military, who were largely former members of the CNDP militia, mutinied and formed the new M23 rebel militia.

It's widely believed that almost immediately after M23 began being supported and armed by the Rwandan state intelligence and security agencies, and

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