Putin’s ally Wagner is poised to further expand militarily and politically across Africa — report

The sinister Wagner private security company with close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin seems poised to further extend its already considerable operations across Africa. 

This warning has been issued in a comprehensive new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crimes (GI-Toc) entitled The Grey Zone: Russia’s military, mercenary and criminal engagement in Africa, written by Julia Stanyard, Thierry Vircoulon and  Julian Rademeyer and supported by Germany’s  Hanns Seidel Foundation.

The authors detail the Wagner Group’s extensive military, economic, political, criminal and disinformation activities, mainly in the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali and Sudan, but also several other countries such as Madagascar. And they caution that Wagner seems to be preparing to explore new frontiers, particularly in Burkina Faso and Cameroon. 

The report suspects Wagner is about to expand into these new countries despite having withdrawn considerable numbers of its troops from Africa to bolster Russia’s stymied effort to seize Ukraine. Wagner was founded and is still run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been described as “Putin’s chef” because he used to provide catering services to the Kremlin. After years of denial, Prigozhin finally admitted his ownership of Wagner in September 2022. The mercenary company has been playing a significant role in Russia’s war against Ukraine, including recruiting convicts to be thrown into the front line as cannon fodder. 

The authors suggest that rather than prompting Wagner to withdraw from Africa, the Ukraine war has given it a new incentive for greater involvement because the money it earns through dodgy mining contracts in countries like CAR and Sudan is helping Russia to offset the economic impact of heavy Western sanctions imposed on it because of the invasion of Ukraine. 

The Grey Zone notes that the US and the European Union and others had already sanctioned Wagner and Prigozhin for their activities in Ukraine and Africa. Last month the US went further, designating Wagner as a “transnational criminal organisation” paving the way for even tougher sanctions. But the authors recommend that other nations should considerably intensify sanctions against Wagner to try to curb its nefarious activities in Africa especially. 

These include “systemic and grave human rights and international humanitarian law violations, including arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances and summary execution,” the report says, quoting from a UN report on Wagner’s activities in CAR. But the report notes that other reports have echoed these accusations in Mali and elsewhere. 



 

Wagner has widely been seen as a deniable proxy for the Russian government in Africa, aggressively advancing Moscow’s interests on the continent, especially in countering the influence of Western countries, particularly France, while allowing Putin’s government to distance itself from the activities. 

“In a few short years, Wagner has become the most influential Russian actor in Africa,” the report says. “Wagner’s engagement in Africa is an example of the interconnection between crime, business and politics, and the group has had a severely detrimental effect on the security of civilians in many of the countries where it operates.”



The authors see the Wagner Group with its complex range of associated companies, as the ultimate example of the way Russian criminal organisations have evolved from the “vory” or violent criminal gangs of the immediate post-Soviet 1990s into “avtoritet”, which are more subtle and complex entities, embedded in legitimate business but also pursuing  illegal activities.  The report says this evolution of criminal organisations in Russia has been accompanied by Putin exerting ultimate control over these enterprises — which were operating quite independently in the Boris Yeltsin era — so that they now essentially act as extensions of the state.