Yevgeny Prigozhin, his Wagner private army and related companies have been extracting gold and mineral resources from mines in Africa to prop up the Russian regime against Western sanctions.
The London Bullion Market Association has since March 2022 banned Russian gold, but the country’s gold producers quickly relayed the constant supply from Sudan and the Central African Republic to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey and China.
Gold export records scrutinised by India’s The Economic Times show the UAE received 75.7 tonnes of Russian gold worth $4.3bn since the Russian invasion. In 2021, the UAE imported only 1.3 tonnes.
An investigation by CNN showed how Russia and Wagner’s “security operations” in Sudan have created a steady stream of gold shipments from that country. This “proved an effective way of accumulating and transferring wealth, bolstering Russia’s state coffers while sidestepping international financial monitoring systems”, its findings stated.
According to CNN’s investigation, records from Sudan’s central bank showed that Wagner and its related extraction companies smuggled an estimated 32.7 tonnes of gold worth nearly $1.9bn out of the country between February 2022 and February 2023.
Analysts in SA and abroad agree it is most unlikely Russia or Wagner will discontinue any of their operations in Africa after the past weekend’s show of force by Prigozhin, because Africa’s riches have become a lifeline to the Russian economy.
Analysts have been grappling to make sense of the weekend’s theatre playing out with Prigozhin staging a blitz advance towards Moscow with a convoy of his forces. As incredible as his “brave” attempted confrontation to remove the military leadership seemed, he just as quickly halted his advance about 200km from the Russian capital.
The intervention by President Vladimir Putin’s chief ally in Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko, seemingly convinced Prigozhin to drop his advance and head to Belarus, with Putin announcing that he would not face criminal prosecution.
Within 48 hours and after Wagner shot down a few Russian helicopters and a cargo plane, it was all over. Front-diggers that frantically dug ditches in the highway outside Moscow to prevent the convoy from reaching the capital made way for teams filling up the trenches again.
Business jets were leaving Moscow and Putin himself allegedly fled to the safety of St Petersburg. Yet the almost blitzkrieg seemed too good to be true, which is one of the reasons analysts still differ about what really happened.
According to Julia Stanyard, senior analyst with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, Wagner and all of Prigozhin’s related extraction companies involved in Africa will for the moment continue as normal.
Wagner has agreements with the governments of the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso and with the main rebel grouping in Libya. Stanyard co-wrote an extensive report about Russia’s military, mercenary and criminal engagement in Africa titled “The Grey Zone”.
She says the Russian government in its statements after the weekend’s drama did not refer to what will happen to Wagner in Africa. It was only stated that the private militia’s forces in Ukraine will be absorbed into the Russian military.
One scenario might be to bring Wagner’s operatives and mineral extraction companies on the continent under Russia’s state control, too.
“Wagner will likely maintain its African activities and even expand it. It is difficult to say how much of the money generated by the extraction of massive quantities of gold, diamonds and other minerals from African countries went into the pockets of Prigozhin, and how much to the Russian government’s coffers.
“It is only in Russia’s interest to keep the African operations going as it was generally considered to enhance that country’s influence in Africa on the one hand while also generating financial gains.
“Whether the weekend’s action in Russia will lead to any destabilisation in Africa is doubtful considering that Wagner’s operatives were already involved in large-scale human rights abuses targeting civilians as it is. In most of its [host] countries these incidents were higher than even those committed by the countries’ own forces.
“As such Wagner did not bring about stability in any of the countries it became involved in.”
Should Wagner for some reasons become a totally separate entity from the Russian government in future it will undoubtedly delve even deeper into other countries’ mineral resources for its own gain, leading to more brutality.
“You might then see some breakaway groups who would want to get a bigger slice of the mineral riches for themselves. The potential of violence between such groups will further decimate any chances of stability in those countries.”
Wagner’s extraction companies are generally seen to have financed its fighting forces in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Wagnerites were also paid much better salaries than the Russian soldiers. Should the mercenary forces no longer provide the backbone to Russia’s incursions into Ukrainian territory, the invasion would probably collapse along some of the fronts.
But not all analysts agree that Prigozhin’s advances at the weekend were a genuine attempt to unseat Putin’s military command.
Nel Marais, a security analyst, says the whole scenario might have been an attempt by Putin to remind the oligarchs and elite in his country what could happen if he was to be replaced.
In recent times, Putin has reportedly lost some support of the same elite who did not all agree with his incursion into Ukraine because Western sanctions are hampering their business interests.
“It fits Putin’s nature to have conjured up a plan with Prigozhin rather than to make an enemy of him. The two of them have come a long way. Also, to be honest, if Russia wanted to halt his very visible convoy on its way to Moscow it would not have been too difficult to do so.
“Then for Lukashenko to suddenly intervene in such a perceived crisis and to pull it off in the blink of an eye is just ludicrous. Putin has been in power for 23 years. I would reckon this was a tactical move by Putin to achieve a more strategic outcome — to gather all his traditional supporters back in line, backing his initiatives.”
Marais is also of the opinion that it is too early to speculate whether the events will affect Putin’s attendance of the Brics summit in August in SA. Brics comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA.
“I reckon there has already been an agreement between President Cyril Ramaphosa and Putin that Putin would not attend. The Russian leader cannot afford any legal interventions or attempted civil arrests in SA as it would only humiliate him in the eyes of the world.”
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