The reported death of the founder and leader of the Wagner group in a plane crash in Russia could have huge consequences for a motley crew of regimes and warlords across Africa, but also for hundreds of millions of ordinary people, the west and all the powers battling for influence on the continent.
Some analysts now suggest that the demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin may strengthen the Kremlin’s hand in Africa among powerful actors who have relied on Wagner’s loose network of shadowy companies and paramilitaries to bolster their own power – and impress others who may be thinking of doing the same.
“The responsibility for the crash still needs to be attributed but possibly this is something that will make African leaders even closer to the Kremlin … [It’s] a show of force and power and leadership that probably many African leaders will appreciate and see as more effective than communiques from western embassies,” said Enrica Picco, the central Africa project director for the thinktank International Crisis Group.
But others say leaders may now feel their supposed friends in Moscow are possibly not as “steadfast” as their Russian interlocutors have boasted.
Over the last five years, about a dozen rulers or ambitious challengers in key strategic African states such as Mali, Libya and Sudan have entered a Faustian pact that allowed Prigozhin to extend Russian influence across swathes of the continent while extracting large quantities of lucrative raw materials such as gold and timber, earning vast sums for the Kremlin.
Smaller countries too fell under Wagner’s influence, allowing the mercenary group to build a network that now reaches from the shores of the Mediterranean to Mozambique.
Last week, Prigozhin, armed with an assault rifle and wearing combat fatigues, appeared in a video clip apparently filmed, he said, “on the African continent”. Multiple sources suggested Prigozhin was in Mali, where 800 or so of his men are deployed alongside local armed forces fighting Islamists and other insurgents. This followed a deal with the country’s military regime in December 2021 after a coup ousted its democratic government.
Before Mali, Prigozhin may also have visited Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic (CAR) where Wagner has built its most extensive and successful operation since being invited into the desperately poor and anarchic country to bolster the corrupt and predatory regime of Faustin-Archange Touadéra five years ago.
In return for lucrative mining and timber concessions in the CAR, the Wagner group provided fighters who became infamous for their indiscriminate violence against civilians as well as rebels. The group also stationed communications specialists, built a Russian cultural centre and set up a radio station. Commercial ventures included the production and sale of vodka and beer, as well as unregulated diamond trading.
Wagner has also worked to expand into Cameroon, Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. An attempt to help the struggling government in Mozambique against Islamist rebels went badly and bloodily wrong but there was success in Sudan, where Wagner built a relationship with the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, that led to the export of more massive quantities of gold. Another win came in Libya where a thousand fighters were deployed under the nominal command of Khalifa Haftar, the self-styled general who runs much of the east of the country.
Until relatively recently, the Kremlin denied it had any link to Prigozhin, his fighters and shady businessmen. The group’s fighters’ prominent role in the war in Ukraine, where thousands died in a brutal battle for the town of Bakhmut, and its increasingly prominent role in Africa led the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to admit a connection.
In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s abortive rebellion in June, there was little evidence of any immediate effort by the Kremlin to assume control of Wagner’s networks and holdings in Africa.
Now that Prigozhin may be dead, this is likely to change, analysts say. Also reportedly killed in Wednesday’s plane crash was Dmitry Utkin, a brutal neo-Nazi former special forces soldier who played a leading role in implementing Prigozhin’s vision. Several other veteran Wagner operatives were also listed as being onboard.
“It’s likely the [Russian] ministry of defence and private military contractors affiliated to [it] will basically take over both the military and economic operations,” said Picco.
Most observers agree that Wagner has been “too successful for the Kremlin to lose”. Moscow continues to look to Africa to recruit allies in its confrontation with the west. The gold and other resources extracted by Wagner companies helps bolster Russia’s sanctions-hit economy.
“They want to try and preserve what Prigozhin has achieved but just make it more accountable,” said Dino Mahtani, an independent analyst and veteran observer of African affairs.
This week, Russia’s deputy defence minister flew into Benghazi in Libya to discuss “military cooperation” with a clearly rattled Haftar, sources in Tripoli said.
Achieving a smooth transition may not be straightforward for the Kremlin. Though the prospect of relatively high wages and remunerative side-hustles motivated many of the thousands of Wagner fighters, technicians, communications specialists and administrators across Africa, personal loyalty to Prigozhin and a commitment to his brand of belligerent, bitter Russian nationalism was important, too.
The latter thrives, and will help integrate existing Wagner employees into whatever new structure the Kremlin seeks to build, but personal relationships will count as well, experts say.
By taking on overt responsibility for Wagner’s operations in Africa, the Kremlin is embarking on a high-risk venture, said Dr Alia Brahimi, an expert at the Atlantic Council thinktank and host of the Guns for Hire podcast.
In 2018, US troops in eastern Syria killed large numbers of Wagner fighters in a clash with pro-Syrian government forces over an important oilfield. The Kremlin disowned the Wagner group at the time, avoiding a diplomatic clash. That would now be much harder.
Brahimi said: “I think it’s safe to say that the cult of personality is over, and that might be no bad thing when you’re trying to both institutionalise and expand. But [Vladimir] Putin now owns the geopolitical risk. He has lost the proxy element. There is no deniability now. Wagner have been active in a very strategic region that is of great interest to the US and their allies too. So the risk of escalation now is much higher.”
