By Osoro Nyawangah, MWANZA
Tanzania
The Wagner Group known
as 'Wagner Private Military Company'), is a Russian state-funded private military company controlled until
2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia
president, Vladimir Putin.Courtesy
The Wagner Group has used
infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces.
While the group is not
ideologically driven, elements of Wagner are linked to neo-Nazism and far-right extremism.
Evidence suggests that Wagner
has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing the Russian state
to have plausible deniability for military
operations abroad, and thereby hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign
interventions.
The group came to prominence
during the War in Donbas in Ukraine, where it
helped pro-Russian separatist forces from
2014 to 2015. It has supported regimes friendly with Putin's Russia,
including in the civil wars in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic,
and Mali.
Wagner operatives have been
accused of war crimes including murder, torture, rape
and robbery of civilians, as well as torturing and killing accused
deserters.
Wagner played a significant
role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for
which it recruited Russian prison inmates for frontline combat. By the end
of 2022, its strength in Ukraine had grown from 1,000 to between 20,000 and
50,000. It was reportedly Russia's main assault force in the Battle
of Bakhmut.
Yevgeny Prigozhin will be
remembered in various countries, and for different reasons. In Kiev, for
leading his fighters into some of the fiercest battles against Ukraine, in
Russia, as a patriot and as a traitor for his short-lived uprising in June.
Prigozhin will also be
remembered in countries far away from Russia, like the Central African Republic
and Mali, where governments are relying on the services of his Wagner group to
counter security threats.
Increasingly, public opinion
in these countries views Wagner and the Russian government as indispensable
partners helping their countries regain their sovereignty from France.
The presence of Wagner
contractors in Africa was first confimed in 2018 in the Central African
Republic after President Faustin Archange Touadera sought their services to
beat back a rebel uprising.
The Russians have since helped
to rebuild the country's military and secured the capital Bangui.
In Mali, the ruling military
ran to Moscow for solutions to stop a militant insurgency but also to get rid
of French forces. In response, Russia gave Wagner the greenlight to deploy.
It didn't take long before
neighboring Burkina Faso, itself wracked by Islamist militancy and instability
caused by an army takeover looked east for respite.
In Africa, Wagner advances
Moscow's military, political and economic goals, much to the chagrin of Western
leaders who bemoan the loss of spheres of influence.
In Niger, the latest Sahel
country to succumb to a coup d'etat, pro-junta rallies have called for Russia's
intervention, and expectedly, the departure of French forces.
Questions about the future of
Wagner's operations in Africa have been abound since Prigozhin's mutiny in
June. Then, Russia's foreign affairs ministry said the events would have no
bearing on the group's work.
While Prigozhin's death is
undoubtedly a bigger tragedy, Wagner has become too important a foreign policy
tool for Moscow to let go.
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