Current Affairs

Wagner turned up in Africa in 2017, its remit was to train troops in Sudan in return for gold. The mercenaries who have fought for Wagner have to a degree been successful in spreading Russian influence and though there have been failures, there is a realisation that Russia’s Africa Corp will remain a significant player on the continent especially in north Africa. The difference to the cold war is that these mercenaries are highly mobile and have no affinity with the state that they are propping up.

The Wagner fighters have been superseded by units affiliated with the GU(GRU), a Russian military intelligence unit that took over the operations of Wagner when Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in August 2023. The model may be the same, but the three facets that the Wagner group stood on have been reset, the commercial, diplomatic and military are now being run by the GRU according to Mark Galeotti speaking at a Brookings event.

Since Prigozhin’s death, the commercial unit has been swept up by business predators who acted as soon as Prigozhin died. It is rumoured that the diplomatic element of the Africa Corp is being run by Denis Pavlov, who is attached to the embassy in the Central African Republic, and the military unit is under the GRU who are rumoured to be very capable of running the military element, but not the commercial or diplomatic.

Prigozhin’s first deal was with Omar Bashir, Wagner was hired to train troops for the dictator. Wagner soon expanded into Libya where they backed the then rebel commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army was struggling to defeat the government in Tripoli. Further adventures by Wagner were in the Central African Republic, where they helped put down an insurgency in the centre of the country and managed to underpin the government with 1000 Wagner fighters. Because of its influence in the CAR, Wagner seized a Canadian owned gold mine, which is said to have deposits exceeding $1 billion.

The failure of the West to tame the insurgency in Mali became the next adventure for Wagner. Sixty percent of the country was under the control of rebels. Tuareg factionalists fought alongside Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the difficulties of countering the insurgency in Northern Mali was undone by continued insurrections, the Malian and Western military were unable to defeat the rebel army, though the allied armies drove the rebels from cities and towns. But there was a realisation that the war in the Sahara and the Sahel would be a continuous insurrection because of the poverty, corruption and unemployment among fighters coming into the country from Libya.

But it was the military coup in August 2020, which removed the Malian leader President Keita. The military argued that the elections held had been corrupt and that the military would return the country to democracy within 18 months. A counter coup took place, which led to an interim government led by General Goita, he argued that rather than the eighteen months that the original coup plotters had promised to reinstall a democratic government, General Goita argued that it would take four years before a civilian government could be installed.

Few of the leaders leading the coup were educated in France, which meant a distancing from the former colonial power. The alienation of France from central government was an opportunity for some of the officers to rekindle their friendship with Russia, where they had trained. General Goita’s military government wanted a more progressive approach to the civil war and Wagner’s success in the Central African Republican had been noticed. But it was the Wests refusal to work with the military government because of the Leahy act in the United States, which stopped the Malian government getting the weapons it needed.

Corinne Dufka, interviewed in the Atlantic, “covered the Sahel for Human Rights Watch from 2012 to 2022.” She argues that it was the presence of child soldiers in a militia that led to the US government refusing to fit transponders on military aircraft, and argues that “human rights based moral diplomacy over realpolitik.,” was the reason for the Malian government going to the Russians. Wagner promised to provide the Malian regime with the weapons it needed. Though the West had been successful in Mali, the continued war meant the Malian military wanted a harder approach to the conflict that the West could sanction. Rebel strongholds, such as in Kidal, had been under insurgents control, Wagner promised that they would retake the market town and expel the insurgents from the town and wider region, which the military government wanted.

Pham a commentator on Mali, argues that if you don’t mind the brutality of the Russians then the problem is solved. As in the Central African Republic there have been atrocities and Human Rights Watch have documented them. “Wagner soldiers with the Malian army raided Kidal and after a brief firefight picked up, tortured and killed 300 people.” It was unclear whether the people taken were involved in the insurgency or had been killed because they were the same ethnic make up as the insurgents. A UN report put the death toll as high as 500. In the CAR the same slaughter took place, Wagner executed 500 Fulani to stop the insurgency in the centre of the country. According to the US State Department, Wagner soldiers have murdered civilians in the CAR and Mali, “participated in unlawful executions, […] raided artisinal gold mines in Sudan and undermined the democratic institutions in every single country they have been in.”

With Burkina Faso moving from a democratic government into military, they too have moved towards Wagner and thrown out the French and Americans. An alliance between the leaders of the Sahel has created a combined force to take on the insurgents but have been criticised by ECOWAS for the ruthlessness of their actions.

In June Wagner fighters with the Malian army were trapped by an ambush set by the Tuareg, which indicated that the rebellion in the north of Mali had not been calmed. The rebel armies have not gone away. Christopher Faulkner believes there is a different narrative in north Africa and argues that the Africa Corp (Wagner) are limited to the cities and moved away from being a retroactive force into being a type of Pretorian Guard that underpins the rule of the juntas.

The question is whether the war between Russia and Ukraine will also be fought out on the battlefields of the African continent. There have been accusations that the Ukrainians fed military intelligence to the Tuareg forces before the battle in northern Mali. The Russian government has questioned whether Ukraine is now involved in north Africa and is helping the Islamist and Tuareg insurgency. Mark Galotti thinks a lot of Western intelligence assets were holding their heads in their hands, angry with the narrative coming from northern Mali, that the West has now got into bed with Al-Qaeda and Islamists. According to the Guardian, Ukrainian forces have been alongside Sudanese government forces fighting Wagner, which is aligned with the RSF in Sudan. Whether the Ukrainians are still there and advising the military government in Sudan is unknown but Ukrainian intelligence has had a massive amount of success in north Africa .

For Putin, the Africa corps success in north Africa has been about his retrospective view of the world. The West itself seems to be glad to see the back of the jihadists in the Sahel and the re-imagining of the world according to Putin, has enabled the West to get out of a forever war cleanly. Whether the Africa Corp comes out of the battles as cleanly as they imagine, the soft power of the West still has enough foresight to realise that there will be continued uprisings. Though France has been removed from this theatre and its ex-colonies have rebelled, there is a realisation that they could not solve the problems of corruption, poverty and ethnic difference that led to the insurgency in the first place. Whether the Africa Corp will get a long term peace is debatable, but an American who had lived in the region for the past ten years said that to drive from Mali to the Central African Republic without a problem, “is a god send.”