This week, before Yevgeny Prigozhin was reportedly killed, the founder of the mercenary group Wagner had appeared bullish in a self-styled publicity video, holding a rifle and dressed in desert camouflage. He was understood to be somewhere in Africa, and stated that he was proud to be “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa more free”.
Just days later, Russian state media and Wagner itself would report Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash which also apparently killed Dmitry Utkin, often described as a Wagner co-founder, and other senior figures from the organisation. The immediate questions in western capitals were whether Vladimir Putin was responsible, and what the death of Prigozhin means for Wagner and for politics in Russia now.
His death also raises other questions, such as how Russia will continue to project influence into Africa. African governments will be assessing what Russia’s competition with the west and Moscow’s ambitions in Africa mean at a time when the continent’s prolific deposits of oil and gas and critical rare minerals are more coveted than ever.
Wagner’s first notable deployment into Africa was in 2018, when it sent trainers and combat units to Central African Republic, eventually becoming indispensable to that country’s president and his efforts to stave off rebel forces. In return, the mercenary group, which was accused of perpetrating atrocities in the country, was granted access to lucrative mining sites. The security-for-resources swap would become a template used elsewhere as Russia weathered western sanctions.
As the relationship between Wagner and Moscow became more evident, the mercenary group also ramped up activities in the Sahel, a vast desert strip that runs across Africa from the Red Sea in the continent’s east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Russian officials say the reason Moscow is interested in this area is because it wanted to sort out the mess created by western governments. It was their disastrous airborne intervention in 2011 in Libya that had ushered in the collapse of the state there and the proliferation of weapons and armed fighters across the Sahel, now home to al-Qaida and the Islamic State-backed jihadi organisations and vigilante groups who blight the lawless and parched countryside.
But far from bringing security, or even making Africans more free, Wagner made friends with bloodthirsty and repressive allies in the region, especially those that control resources. During the past few years, Wagner has provided oil protection services and military support for Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, who threw his country into turmoil again in 2019 when he attempted to seize the capital, Tripoli. The group has also backed a paramilitary faction of Sudan’s army that slaughtered pro-democracy protesters in 2019, seized goldmines and started a civil war this year. While its fighters have fought against jihadis on behalf of a military junta in gold-rich Mali, these campaigns have, however, killed hundreds of unarmed civilians.
If Wagner has arguably created more insecurity in the region then this has served perhaps a higher objective for Moscow. Russia has been looking to destabilise and roll back western interests in the Sahel. Indeed, as the security and humanitarian crisis in the Sahel rocketed over the past few years, protesters in some of the region’s capital cities began taking to the streets, burning French flags and brandishing Russian ones as they denounced the corruption and ineptitude of their own governments.
The rising anti-French and anti-government sentiment, fuelled by Prigozhin’s army of online trolls, reached a fever pitch in 2021 in Mali, a former French colony, where putschists took their chances and launched a coup. Juntas also seized power in Guinea and Burkina Faso, also ex-French domains, that year and the next. France would subsequently withdraw its military forces from Mali and Burkina Faso, where they had been deployed to fight the jihadi groups.
At the time of Prigozhin’s death, Wagner was probably eyeing a possible relationship with the generals of another junta in Niger, who had seized power in July. The coup there was a major blow to France’s military, which, after its withdrawal from Burkina Faso and Mali, had cosied up further to the now ousted civilian government in Niger in a last-ditch attempt to keep its floundering regional counter-terrorism operation alive.
It is for all the reasons above that Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said, even days after Prighozin’s mutiny, that he expected Wagner’s work in Africa to continue in some form or another. But with Prigozhin gone, it is unclear what precisely the future will be for Wagner. Whether it is absorbed into the Russian deep state and made fully accountable to Putin, or disbanded and replaced or not by another outfit, Moscow will still want to keep the game going in Africa.
Western governments should, however, try to take advantage of the fact that Putin and his generals, hemmed in by the war in Ukraine, may not be able to pull off what Wagner was able to do as a freewheeling private military company. But they cannot afford to be complacent.
Part of the reason for France’s plummeting popularity in the Sahel was that its counter-terrorism operations were never matched with a meaningful economic Marshall plan by Paris or its partners. Political engagement to incentivise and support Malian elites to reform and address the chronic governance problems at the root of the country’s crisis was essentially impossible without that. Similarly, when Europe’s obsession with stemming migrant flows from the Sahel led to pressure on Niger’s civilian government in 2015 to crack down on human trafficking gangs – a major source of hard currency for the regional economy – it was never matched with the scale of investment that could have delivered alternatives for the country’s frustrated youth.
It is this development deficit the west urgently needs to tackle if it wants to re-establish its credibility in the eyes of many Africans. And yet the current set of policies on the table in western capitals threatens to make things worse. A possible designation of Wagner group as a foreign terrorist organisation by the UK and US may now be redundant if Wagner disappears as an organisation. But if Wagner remains intact, its sanctioning will probably dissuade humanitarian agencies from providing much-needed aid to countries whose governments are seen to be collaborating with the mercenary group.
In addition, a tentative plan to invade Niger and roll back the junta, which is being developed by pro-western members of west Africa’s regional political bloc, will – if executed – destabilise the Sahel further, an outcome that is likely to keep Wagner or its successor in business. The people of the Sahel deserve better than to be pawns in this violent and cynical game of great power competition.
Dino Mahtani is an independent researcher and writer
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