Its founders may be dead and the Wagner Group of mercenaries may not technically exist, but it will continue to act as a Russian diplomatic instrument and to control strategic resources across Africa, most notably in the Libyan oilfields.
Last week, Britain announced it would outlaw Wagner as a terrorist organisation, but because it is integrated into Russian military intelligence, the GRU, this ban will merely serve to put another bar in the new iron curtain between Russia and the West.
The shadowy outfit, with its air of ultranationalist Russian far right, made its name in Russia’s revanchist annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014. It later notoriously recruited hardened convicts sprung from prisons in occupied Ukraine on an alpha-male “no retreat” ethic.
On June 23, a Wagner column about 5,000 strong that had been blooded in Ukraine abandoned the front and staged a mutinous armoured thrust towards Moscow that very nearly turned into a putsch against Vladimir Putin who has de facto ruled Russia, as prime minister or president, since 1999.
The column was reportedly led by Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, a reputed neo-Nazi and reclusive former lieutenant-colonel in the Spetsnaz special forces in the GRU.
The sharpest Russia observers had warned there was a growing likelihood of a Russian military rebellion as dissatisfaction deepened against Putin’s disastrous conduct of what was supposed to be a blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine from February 24 last year, but had dragged on for almost a year and a half.
Blinded by his own hubris and coterie of yes-men, Putin had failed to learn from Russia’s similarly failed first invasion of rebel Chechnya in 1992, in which ill-prepared Russian conscripts were also lied to about the objectives of their actions, and who were likewise stopped by a determined enemy.
June’s rebellion precipitated two months of high dudgeon in the Kremlin, with Wagner co-founder and former convict Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had ridden the wave of late-Soviet perestroika to rise from running a street hot dog stand to the rarefied realm of the oligarchy, hurriedly seeking asylum in Belarus.
Though grudgingly granting Prigozhin a pardon for halting the column’s advance just 95km short of Moscow, an apoplectic Putin denounced Wagner’s “treason” and demanded his supposed own shadow army immediately swear allegiance to Russia.
By mid-July, he had cooled down to his usual inscrutability, and met Prigozhin and his senior commanders, offering a deal that allowed them to keep their front-line forces intact, but commanded by a man identified by Reuters as Wagner chief-of-staff Andrei Troshev instead of Prigozhin. Call-signed “grey hair”, Troshev is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and a former special forces officer with Russia’s powerful law-enforcement interior ministry.
When Prigozhin rejected the deal, Putin calmly claimed in an interview that Wagner “just does not exist; there’s no such legal entity”, and that its fate would have to be decided by the State Duma, the Russian lower house, overwhelmingly dominated by his conservative United Russia party.
Then, on August 23, a business jet carrying Prigozhin, Utkin and Wagner logistics head Valery Chekalov suffered an in-flight catastrophic structural failure about 100km north of its take-off point in Moscow and crashed, killing the three Wagner chiefs and another seven people on board.
Grey Zone, a Wagner-linked Telegram message group, immediately cried foul, claiming the jet was downed by Russian air defences (Putin has a residency near the crash site guarded by such missiles), but the shoot-down theory appears to be incorrect; an on-board bomb remains a possibility, however.
In the wake of the crash, French government spokesperson Olivier Veran told the France 2 channel that Prigozhin was “the man who did Putin’s dirty work. What he has done is inseparable from the policies of Putin, who gave him responsibility to carry out abuses as the head of Wagner. Prigozhin leaves behind him mass graves. He leaves behind him messes across a large part of the globe. I’m thinking of Africa, Ukraine and Russia itself.”
Indeed, Wagner has been accused of leading mass executions in Africa such as the massacre of 500 civilians in Moura, Mali, in March 2022. This July, the British government issued sanctions including asset freezes and travel bans against three top Wagner officials and a slew of front companies operating in Africa for “executions and torture in Mali and the Central African Republic, and threats to peace and security in Sudan”.
They proscribed Wagner’s chiefs in Mali, Ivan Aleksandrovitch Maslov, for overseeing massacre, rape and torture, and in the Central African Republic (CAR), Vitalii Viktorovitch Perfilev, for targeting civilians, plus Perfilev’s operations chief Konstantin Aleksandrovitch Pikalov for torturing and killing civilians. Yet, in admitting in 2022 for the first time his ties to Wagner, Prigozhin had tried to paint his outfit as a “group of patriots … heroes who defended … destitute Africans….”
The “Wagner web”, as it should probably best be termed, had its first exposure to Africa in 2017, when another Progizhin company, M-invest, won gold-exploration concessions in Sudan in tandem with an agreement that Russia be allowed to build a naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Wagner has since operated in Sudan, the CAR, Mali, Libya, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Madagascar.
In the CAR, it is believed military aid has been rewarded with lucrative diamond, gold, uranium and timber concessions. Investigators speak of billions of euros in diamonds alone, but in the CAR’s notoriously opaque business environment, it is tough to prove.
Wagner’s presence expanded ever since the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019, attended by 43 African leaders including SA President Cyril Ramaphosa, through which Russia sought to challenge Western hegemony and break out of the diplomatic and geostrategic isolation that it had faced since its invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin was reportedly lurking in the wings at this July’s summit, lobbying to retain his group’s Africa role, but the presence of African heads of state was ironically halved as many countries’ post-mutiny confidence in Putin withered.
International relations specialist Prof Theo Neethling of the University of the Free State explains how the Wagner web can be said by Putin to “not exist”, while still endorsing its activities in Africa: “The Wagner Group is actually a conglomerate of firms with security-focused entities, but also entities involved in mining and energy ventures.”
Wagner’s activities demonstrated “significant overlap between public and private interests”, making it “an important actor in the conduct of Russian foreign policy … in Africa … Wagner is regularly appearing as a de facto nonofficial foreign policy instrument, more often than not facilitating and seeking access to resources in African states”.
Wagner’s activities in Libya are its most significant: not only has its battlegroup of up to 2,000 mercenaries supported the rebel militia of Khalifa Haftar against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli, but its control of oilfields, refineries and ports is of great use to Russian petrochemical giant Gazprom.
Neethling notes that by 2020, “Wagner exercised control over the production of the largest oilfield in the country, the Sharara oilfield in southwestern Libya, as well as the Ras Lanuf petrochemical complex, the Zillah oilfield, the Es Sider port and the Zueitina port. Wagner also exercised de facto control over an important network of military and airbases.”
After Haftar’s forces failed to take Tripoli that year, co-ordination declined, leaving Wagner, the British parliament was told in 2022, operating as “an independent actor” in Libya. Given that Libya, on Europe’s doorstep, possesses 39% of Africa’s oil reserves, Wagner’s strategic position there remains the greatest triumph of Putin’s Africa policy.
• Schmidt is a veteran journalist and author.
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