Wagner Group’s hired guns in Africa and beyond awaiting their fate

OPINION: After Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup in Russia, what’s to become of Wagner’s sprawling private military presence across Africa, the Middle East and South America?

Your country is going to hell, and the barbarians are at the gate. Who are you gonna call?

For many countries at the brink of collapse, the answer has been: the Wagner Group. The mercenary contractors set up by Russia to work as a private military company around the world shoot first and ask questions later.

They are devastatingly, brutally effective. No accountability, no humanity. For good measure, they crush the skull of their own soldiers with a sledgehammer on camera if they refuse to fight or surrender. As the Ukraine war heated up, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin traveled to Russian prisons to recruit hardened criminals to join the war in exchange for their freedom. 

After its creation as Russia’s unmarked soldiers in its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the Wagner Group has become an effective and efficient solution against insurgents and rebels for countries such as Mali in Africa and Venezuela in South America.

Haiti on the brink of collapse? Leaked documents have indicated Wagner was planning to offer its services to the beleaguered nation. Unfortunately for Haiti, it has very few natural resources it can use to lure Wagner in lieu of cash payments. 

Haiti is in many ways a poster child for the type of nations that could be attracted to Wagner’s services. It was pillaged and plundered by colonialists and sucked dry for centuries by the French, who extorted payments for losing their slaves in the Haitian revolt. 

Centuries later, Haiti is a basket case and its people are desperate as their government has collapsed. Residents of the capital Port-au-Prince are now resorting to vigilantism to restore order in the streets. 

Unlike Haiti, the Central African Republic has enough natural riches in gold, diamonds and iron to attract Wagner, which has entrenched its estimated 1,000 fighters as the president’s private army willing to hunt down his enemies in return for mining contracts for Russian-affiliated companies.

Wagner’s fighting methods were in full display in the Western African nation of Mali where Wagner mercenaries and government forces killed more than 500 people as they hunted insurgents near a town called Moura in central Mali, according to a United Nations report.

Wagner’s dominance in the private military business has come into the spotlight now that the mercenaries have gone rogue on their masters in Moscow. What’s to become of Wagner’s sprawling private military presence across Africa, the Middle East and South America?

Since the rapidly unfolding events out of Russia recently stunned the world as Priogzhin threatened to march on Moscow, the fate of the group’s various enterprises around the world remain in limbo. 

Under the agreement that avoided armed confrontation, Prigozhin agreed to move to neighboring Belarus with his army to follow soon.

Whether that leaves the Wagner leader more time to focus on his foreign adventures is unclear. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Prigozhin’s men have been in the thick of the fighting on Russia’s side, with an estimated 20,000 dead. 

In the short term, the status quo in the dozen or so African countries with a Wagner presence would be unchanged since Prigozhin had already delegated the operation of those activities to others as he focused on the Ukraine war where his troops served as the backbone of the Russian offensive.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wagner’s activities around the world would not be impacted by their run-in with the Russian state.

“I have not seen any sign of panic or any sign of change in these African states’ relations with Russia,” Lavrov told RT, the Russian state news platform.

In the medium term, if Prigozhin makes it out of Belarus alive, he may choose to concentrate his effort on Wagner’s sprawling footprint in Asia, Africa and Latin America where the mercenaries operate a highly profitable protection racket they’ve struck with leaders who need them to brutally crush their opposition.

In the long term, Wagner may struggle to stay afloat without the unofficial but crucial state support from Russia which worked hand in glove with Wagner to enforce Russia’s will around the globe while filling the coffers of Russian oligarchs.

Before the emergence of Wagner, Russia used to send solo arms merchants like Viktor Bout, “the Merchant of Death,” to Africa to exchange weapons for the continent’s resources of diamonds, gold and other riches. (Bout was released from a U.S. jail and sent to Russia last year in a prisoner exchange that freed WNBA star Brittney Griner.)

Then Russia scaled up in the last decade by sending an entire private military company and began reaping vast profits by bringing guns-for-hire to some of Africa’s most fragile tinderboxes. 

“Despite U.N. and Western criticism of the Wagner Group’s conduct in Africa and threats of Western financial consequences for African governments that hire the Russian security company and allow it to perpetrate human rights and civil liberties violations, the Wagner Group — encouraged by the Kremlin and doing its bidding — is highly likely to stay in Africa,” noted Federica Saini Fasanotti, writing for the Brookings Institute, a think tank. “Sanctions are unlikely to change that. But the Wagner Group’s own failures and the counterproductive effects of its actions may in time reduce its allure to African governments.”

Samson Mulugeta has reported from 45 of Africa’s 54 countries and has lived and worked in South Africa for two decades.

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