Russian Mercenary Leader Prigozhin Hints at Major African Campaign

This photograph taken on Feb. 3, 2021, shows a truck of the Russian private military group Wagner in the looted Central African Army (FACA) base of Bangassou, attacked on Jan. 3, 2021, by rebels.Alexis Huguet/AFP via Getty Images

In late March, the founder of the Russian mercenary force Wagner Group authored a “letter” to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that left the global intelligence community and governments scratching their collective heads.

In the communication, Yevgeny Prigozhin suggested to Blinken that the United States and Wagner PMC (Private Military Company) should cooperate to ensure “peace and security” in Africa going forward.

Prigozhin wrote that Washington should stop trying to “exert political influence in Africa and focus solely on the security that the Wagner PMC can provide [there].”

The letter was published on Twitter by the international conflict-watching group War Monitor.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia's Wagner mercenary force, speaks in Paraskoviivka, Ukraine, in this still image from an undated video released on March 3, 2023. Concord Press Service/via Reuters

“After the Wagner PMC and I started actively operating in Africa in 2017–2018, we managed to achieve great results in establishing security and order in every country where we were present,” Prighozin wrote.

That claim sparked a chorus of condemnation from international human rights groups and conflict analysts.

“Wagner’s presence in Africa has caused exactly the opposite of what Prigozhin claims,” Jasmine Opperman, a former intelligence operative for the South African military and now a security consultant specializing in terrorism on the continent, told The Epoch Times.

“The Russian mercenaries have caused instability in Africa by means of violence and corruption. They have also interfered in domestic politics, to make sure that Prigozhin’s favored proxies, in the form of local warlords and dictators with whom he can do business, remain in power.

“Prigozhin’s appetite for war—and by extension profit—in Africa, has never been a secret. He sees Africa—and with good reason—as a theater in which his troops can operate above the law, in cooperation with corrupt politicians and illegitimate regimes and dictatorships.”

In Exchange for Riches

“Wagner props them up, in exchange for a share of riches from gold, diamonds, and other precious metals and minerals,” Opperman said of the illegitimate regimes and dictatorships in Africa.

The Biden administration has sanctioned some of Prigozhin’s companies for what it calls “malign political and economic influence around the globe.”

As “ludicrous” as Prigozhin’s missive to Blinken appears to Opperman and others, contained in it is the implication that Wagner is considering moving into Africa in far greater numbers than it has thus far.

It also comes at a time when reports emanating from the Wagner chief’s press office suggest that relations between him and Putin are deteriorating.

“Prigozhin is rightly upset about the numbers of fighters he is losing recently in Ukraine, especially in the ongoing Wagner assault on Bakhmut,” Opperman said.

“He’s lost a lot of experienced men in Ukraine, and he’s afraid that he’ll be left with minimal forces to fulfill his ambitions elsewhere.”

Visitors wearing military camouflage stand at the entrance of the PMC Wagner Center associated with the founder of the Wagner private military group (PMC), Yevgeny Prigozhin, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Nov. 4, 2022. Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images

The West, and the United States in particular, is currently locked in a battle with Moscow and Beijing for African hearts and minds, as well as access to the continent’s natural resources, which include oil, gold, uranium, and coltan ... especially coltan.

“All modern devices, from laptops to cellphones, need coltan,“ Toby Shapshak, one of Africa’s foremost technology experts, told The Epoch Times. ”Basically, this mineral gets broken down into a powder called tantalum. This is then used to manufacture heat-resistant capacitors and that’s what allows modern technological devices to work.”

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where war between government administrations, rebel groups, and jihadists has been raging for decades, is by far the world’s biggest coltan producer.

“It produced about 700 tons in 2021,” said Oluwole Ojewale, Central Africa coordinator for South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

The DRC is also endowed with large deposits of gold, diamonds, cobalt, and zinc.

“Forget politics; this is what all the conflicts in DRC are about and always have been about,” Ojewale told The Epoch Times.

Artisanal miners carry sacks of ore at the Shabara artisanal cobalt mine near Kolwezi, Congo, on Oct. 12, 2022. Demand for the metal is exploding due to its use in the rechargeable batteries that power mobile phones and electric cars. Junior Kannah/AFP via Getty Images

“The global coltan market alone will probably reach $2 trillion in the next two years. Why wouldn’t the Wagner Group want a piece of this action?”

While Prigozhin has denied that his mercenaries are present in DRC, witnesses frequently report attacks by groups that include “white soldiers,” and photographs of bodies wearing Wagner uniforms have been circulated on social media by several armed groups in DRC, who’ve claimed that they’ve killed “Russian mercenaries.”

“The probability assessment for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries being present in this country [DRC] is almost 100 percent,” the U.S.-based Robert Lansing Institute (RLI), which studies global geopolitics, said in a recent report.

It claimed that “the Kremlin’s quasi-legal troops have engaged in a dialogue with Denis Sassou Nguesso, the president of oil-producing Congo.”

The institute wrote that Wagner is in DRC to gain “shadow access to natural minerals, as their selling provides shadow income for Russia’s top leaders and funding for military operations abroad” and to “expand Russia’s geostrategic influence in Africa.”

‘Wagner Just Destroys’

The RLI stated that Wagner in Africa is increasingly focused on discrediting former colonial ruler France.

“The best proof of this is anti-French rallies in Mali organized by the Russians,” its report reads.

Opperman agrees with much of the RLI research.

“Wagner is the key part of Putin’s strategy to use disinformation to turn Africa against the West. Just listen to recent speeches by Russian leaders; all mention the West’s ‘colonial legacy’ in Africa,” she said.

“But who’s pillaging Africa at the moment? Wagner and China, of course. Who’s slaughtering innocent Africans? Wagner. At least the Chinese make some attempt at development projects in Africa; Wagner just destroys ...”

Prigozhin a True Mercenary

Prighozin appears to have a different perspective.

In a recent video message, he said Wagner’s aim is to “transform itself from the best private army in the world into an army with ideology, and this ideology will be the struggle for justice,” with Africa being the “first stepping stone” toward this objective.

But, in a November 2022 report, the Combating Terrorism Center, based at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, stated that the Wagner Group “has little interest in genuine capacity building and instead seeks to capitalize and profit on insecurity,” using “nefarious practices, including opaque and manipulative contracts, disinformation campaigns, election meddling, and severe human rights abuses.”

“Prigozhin has always been a true mercenary, and his objective in forming Wagner in 2014 to fight in Syria for [President Vladimir] Putin was always less about achieving political objectives than it was about enriching himself and a few others,” Opperman said.

Wagner is spearheading Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Its fighters have been accused of atrocities, including mass killings, rapes, executions of civilians, and beheading POWs, since the beginning of the conflict in February 2022.

“Their modus operandi in Africa has been exactly the same as this,” said Allan Ngari, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch Africa.

“Wagner has committed atrocities across the Sahel region, in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan; wherever it has been.”

In the Central African Republic, Wagner has kept the rulers in place in exchange for control of gold and diamond mines.

On March 19, Wagner operatives allegedly attacked a mine run by a Chinese company, killing nine Chinese citizens. Prigozhin denied that his forces were responsible.

Wagner has gold mines in Sudan, after it supported the military administration formed after the October 2021–November 2021 coup that toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir.

“It uses Darfur [in western Sudan] as a base from which it launches operations in Chad, Libya, and CAR,” Opperman said.

In 2018, in Madagascar, Wagner was given control of chrome mines shortly before then-President Hery Rajaonarimampianina lost the election to Andry Rajoelina.

In Libya, more than 1,200 Russian mercenaries are fighting for rebel leader Khalifa Hifter. The conflict-wracked North African nation is home to the biggest oil reserves on the continent.

Hundreds of Wagner fighters are supporting the pro-Putin, anti-Western military junta in Mali, a country rich in diamonds, gold, uranium, copper, iron ore, and precious stones.

On March 23, Bloomberg News, citing “people close to the Kremlin and intelligence services,” reported that Wagner was preparing to “scale back” operations in Ukraine to refocus on Africa.

That was after Russian military commanders apparently succeeded in cutting supplies of men to Wagner by preventing Prighozin from recruiting convicts and depriving his troops of ammunition.

The Wagner chief blames this on his forces’ failure so far to capture a key target, the city of Bakhmut.

Prigozhin’s critics within the Kremlin, according to the Bloomberg report, made the ultimately successful argument to Putin that the Wagner head was achieving little by sending wave after wave of poorly trained former prisoners to the frontlines of Bakhmut, where they were becoming “cannon-fodder.”

British intelligence has estimated that at least 20,000 convicts, promised freedom should they survive the war, have so far been killed in the siege of Bakhmut.

“There’s no on-the-ground indication yet of Wagner boosting deployments to Africa, but there are signs that it will happen soon,“ Opperman said. ”A few weeks ago, Wagner began a fresh recruitment campaign, asking for soldiers to serve six months in Ukraine and then a further nine to 14 months in Africa.”

But, according to Italian intelligence reports, an influx of Russian mercenaries is destabilizing North Africa and causing a spike in migrant flows into the European Union, with Italy bearing the brunt.

Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, has publicly blamed Wagner for “fueling a surge in migrant boats crossing the Mediterranean.”

Prigozhin denies that.