Wagner’s brutal African operations have become crucial not just to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s empire but to the Kremlin’s approach to the continent
of the past week it seemed that the Wagner Group’s next outpost was more likely to be Burkina Faso than Belarus. But on June 27th Yevgeny Prigozhin arrived in the latter, as part of a deal that the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, said he struck between the mutinous leader of the paramilitary network and Vladimir Putin. From there Mr Prigozhin will try to run the brutal African operations that have become crucial not just to his empire but to the Kremlin’s approach to the continent.
To grasp what might happen next to Wagner’s African empire it helps to understand how it operates. There is no Wagner Inc but a network of firms with links to the Russian state that operate under contracts with foreign governments. Like the colonial enterprises of the 19th century, these deals allow the Russian state to partake in adventures with less accountability than if it used regular troops.
The second element of Wagner’s business model is economic—the quid for a security quo. Wagner should not be thought of as a hierarchical business, but instead as a loose conglomerate with a network of subsidiaries. In January America added Wagner to its list of “transnational criminal organisations” that face sanctions. There is little transparency into its revenues or profitability, but what seems clear is that Africa is a crucial part of its money-making.
Wagner has also been a critical part of the Kremlin’s resurgent interest in Africa over the past decade. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and again last year, Russia redoubled its engagement on the continent. Next month Mr Putin will host African leaders at a summit in St Petersburg. Wagner is far from the only tool in its African toolkit, but it has been a low-cost high-impact instrument.
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