Intelligence

Wagner Group
Private Military Company ‘Wagner’, a.k.a.
Chastnaya Voennaya Kompaniya ‘Vagner’, a.k.a.
Chvk Vagner, a.k.a.
PMC Wagner, a.k.a.

The Wagner Group was founded in 2014 to help Russia annex Crimea, but has since expanded into an international organisation with operations in some 30 countries, notorious for its brutality. Up until the war in Ukraine, the group was shrouded in secrecy, carrying out covert missions for the Russian state in countries including the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Syria, offering Moscow convenient plausible deniability in armed conflicts it did not want to be seen to be involved in.

Wagner always uses the same strategy every time it advances: disinformation campaigns (based on rejecting former colonial powers) and an offer of security in exchange for the exploitation of natural resources to supply Prigozhin’s war chest and serve the Kremlin’s interests.

"The tensions with the Kremlin arose on the Ukrainian front, not in Africa where, in contrast, Wagner’s interests and those of the Russian government are aligned," said Africa specialist Thierry Vircoulon, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri). "The paramilitary group is a strategic asset for Russia, and it would be ill-advised to interrupt its activities when it has been the main tool of its diplomacy.”

If Wagner’s withdrawal from Africa does not look like an option today, a restructuring of its activities seems inevitable. According to Vircoulon, there are several plausible scenarios, including splitting up the group's operations. "If Prigozhin remains in the picture, one could see the group dealing solely with external operations and that it would be evacuated from the home front, that is to say from the Ukrainian conflict.”

The United States has sanctioned numerous entities and individuals, across multiple continents, that support the Wagner Group’s destabilizing activity. The Wagner Group has meddled in and destabilized countries in Africa, committing widespread human rights abuses and appropriating natural resources.

Africa is a foreign policy priority, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the first Russia-Africa summit of political and business leaders in 2019. “We are not going to participate in a new ‘repartition’ of the continent’s wealth,” he said. “Rather, we are ready to engage in competition for cooperation with Africa.” Moscow has been building new ties and refreshing alliances forged during the Cold War, when the former Soviet Union supported socialist movements across Africa. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, it largely withdrew from the continent. Since at least 2007, especially in the last few years, Russia has been increasing military and other economic involvement in Africa. The Russian mercenary Wagner Group has operated in Mali, CAR and Sudan for several years, aggressively pursuing Russian foreign policy interests in the region and providing military support to counter-terrorism operations which have seen hundreds of civilians killed. The UK had already sanctioned the Wagner Group, its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and several of his key commanders who have participated in Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

The UK government on 20 July 2023 announced a wave of sanctions against individuals and businesses involved with the Wagner Group in Mali, Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan. These measures will limit their financial freedom by preventing UK citizens, companies and banks from dealing with them, alongside freezing any assets held in the UK and travel bans.

UK sanctions target 13 individuals and businesses linked to the actions of the Russian Wagner Group, including executions and torture in Mali and the Central African Republic and threats to peace and security in Sudan. This includes 3 designations for the mercenary group’s top officials in Mali and Central African Republic (CAR), including the ‘right hand man’ of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who have deliberately targeted civilians in their operations. A further 5 businesses and individuals involved in threatening peace and stability in Sudan, including through disinformation campaigns and providing military equipment, were targeted.

The head of the Wagner Group in Mali, Ivan Aleksandrovitch Maslov, is one of those targeted. Wagner mercenaries, alongside Malian forces, massacred at least 500 people in Moura in March 2022, including summary executions as well as rape and torture. The head of the Wagner Group in CAR, Vitalii Viktorovitch Perfilev, and the Wagner Group’s head of operations in the country, Konstantin Aleksandrovitch Pikalov, are sanctioned for deliberately targeting civilians. Pikalov, known as the Wagner Group founder and CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ‘right hand man’, is the operational head of Wagner in CAR. Pikalov is responsible for the Wagner Group’s torture and targeted killings of civilians.

Wagner Group has also provided weapons and military equipment to Sudan. Three businesses, which act as fronts for the Wagner Group and operate in the country, have been included in the new measures, due to the continued risk they pose to peace and stability. These include M-Invest, and its subsidiary Meroe Gold. These build on recent sanctions against companies funding the conflict.

The prospect of the group expanding its presence in Africa has troubled Western countries such as France and the United States, who say it exploits mineral resources and commits human rights abuses in countries where it operates.

Russia’s overtures in recent years offer cooperation without the “political or other conditions” imposed by Western countries, Putin has said. “Russia provides, as did the Soviet Union before, an alternative vision for African nations” based on “this common anti-Western critique,” said Maxim Matusevich, a history professor who directs Russian studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

However, while the Soviets tried to sell socialist ideas of modernization in Africa, Russians today “are not offering any ideological vision,” he said. “What they’re essentially doing is they’re contracting with African elites on a one-on-one basis. … They insist on the importance of sovereignty and contrast that with the West, which is trying to impose its values, such as transparency, honest governance, anti-corruption legislation."

Joseph Siegle, who directs research for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, part of the U.S. Defense Department. “Every place we’ve seen Wagner deployed around the world and in Africa – be it Libya, Sudan, Mozambique, Central African Republic – it has been a destabilizing force,” Siegle said. “What Russia has been doing has been deploying mercenaries, disinformation, election interference, arms-for-resources deals, opaque contracts … aimed at capturing wider influence.”