What does the future hold for Wagner in Africa after Prigozhin?

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.

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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.