This is the best thing we can wish for. These low-tech, mass-slaughter conflicts put Russians at severe disadvantage because of their low birth rates. A good "sink" for baddies where they disappear without a trace.
But this is a rare case where Russians are put into a fight in a situation where they are deprived of their only advantage: low value put on a human life in Russia both for cultural reasons (it's a political, and thus cultural, descendant of the steppe nomads of the Golden Horde) and economic ones too (petrostate does not need too many people and is not dependent on consumption of the masses for its economic survival). In Africa, they face enemy where value of a human life is even lower and unlike in Russia, they can actually sustain this approach due to their insane birth rate.