Mercenaries from the Wagner group guarding the VIP stand that the president sits in during Labour Day, or May Day, celebrations in Bangui, Central African Republic. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
HOURS after Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenary group ended their rebellion, officials with the Russian Foreign Ministry phoned the president of the Central African Republic to assure him that the thousands of Wagner fighters deployed in his country would stay, and that Russia would keep looking for new ventures in Africa.
Thousands of miles away, and as the rebellion was still under way in June, Russian troops in Syria had surrounded several bases that host Wagner fighters, fearing the contagion might spread beyond Russia.
Russia’s leadership had encountered some issues with “the head of the paramilitaries”, they told the Central African president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, but those issues had been resolved and the Kremlin, they assured him, was in control.
But others aren’t so sure. The Wagner group was the personal project of Prigozhin, who built it over nearly a decade into a sprawling enterprise, with tentacles reaching from Libya, across Africa and into the Middle East.
The group has deployed troops in five African countries, and Prigozhin’s affiliates have been present in more than a dozen in total.
With Prigozhin in exile in Belarus and thousands of his mercenaries scattered or being forced to join the Russian military, it isn’t clear how the whole structure will be maintained.
“They know people on the ground, they have the institutional knowledge and know-how,” John Lechner, an independent researcher currently writing a book on Wagner, said about the group’s executives in African countries.
“The Kremlin cannot replace these guys and expect things to work the way they did before.”
Furthermore, the rebellion was touched off by the Russian Defence Ministry’s order for all Wagner members to sign a Russian military contract, effectively destroying the group’s autonomy. The same demand has been made of Russians and Syrians working with Wagner in Syria, but it is not yet clear whether the order will extend to Africa.
Details about Russia’s diplomatic efforts to reassure Central African Republic leaders after Prigozhin’s mutiny were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
A statue of Russian soldiers protecting civilians in Bangui, Central African Republic, in November 2022. — Filepic/©2023 The New York Times Company
The Wagner group provides security to African presidents, props up dictators, violently suppresses rebel uprisings and is accused of torture, murder of civilians and other abuses. It also meddles in politics, organises propaganda campaigns and, in one instance, even held a beauty pageant.
In return it receives cash or lucrative mining concessions for precious minerals like gold, diamonds and uranium.
For years, until the Ukraine war, Prigozhin denied any link with Wagner and even its very existence, and only recently did President Vladimir Putin acknowledge Russia’s connection to the group.
That deliberately murky relationship enabled the Wagner mercenaries to take advantage of Russian military assets like transport planes and heavy armour while posing as non-state actors.
In return, the group provided Moscow a means to project power, often with indiscriminate violence, while denying responsibility.
For now, however, Wagner’s clients seem prepared to take Moscow at its word, perhaps unwilling or in some cases, frightened, to contemplate governing without the group’s iron-fisted backing.
“Russia gave us Wagner, the rest isn’t our business,” said Fidèle Gouandjika, a special adviser to Touadéra in the Central African Republic.
“If it’s not Wagner anymore and they send Beethoven or Mozart, it doesn’t matter, we’ll take them,” he added, a reference to the group’s taking its name from the German composer Richard Wagner.
The Central African Republic is considered by most analysts Wagner’s most accomplished business model and example of state capture.
The dizzying range of its activities and revenue streams there amply illustrate the problems the Kremlin will encounter in trying to assert control.
Russian mercenaries shopping at a supermarket in Bangui, Central African Republic in November 2022. — Filepic/©2023 The New York Times Company
Wagner makes liberal use of shell companies to conceal its activities, but through at least a half-dozen known entities in the Central African Republic, it runs a radio station and a brewery, and soon will be bottling water.
It provides bodyguards for Touadéra and trains the country’s army.
It also controls hundreds of miles of formerly bandit-infested roads connecting Bangui, the capital, to the port of Douala in neighbouring Cameroon, where the trucks from Wagner-affiliated companies carry timber and other merchandise but pay no taxes, according to a Western diplomat in Bangui.
“There are so many African subsidiaries,” said Julia Stanyard, a senior analyst at the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, about the entities that link back to Prigozhin. “We only know the tip of the iceberg.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company
