U.S. Levies New Sanctions on Wagner Group

The Biden administration rolled out a new package of sanctions on the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group related to its activities in Africa, including ties with corrupt regimes and gold-smuggling operations.

The Wagner Group has grown dramatically in size and influence in recent years under Yevgeny Prigozhin, its chief and erstwhile ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, including playing a key role in Russia’s botched battlefield offensives in Ukraine, until Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny over the weekend. But it concurrently expanded its operations across fragile states in Africa, including the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, and Sudan, plundering resources such as timber and gold to bankroll its war machine.

The latest sanctions target the Wagner Group’s activities in CAR and include public guidance for companies and regulatory bodies on how the group carries out gold-smuggling operations. The Treasury Department listed four companies—two in the CAR, one in the United Arab Emirates, and one in Russia, as well as Andrey Nikolayevich Ivanov, a Wagner executive, in its new sanctions package over their roles in illicit mining schemes to bankroll Wagner’s global military operations.

The sanctions showcase how Washington is aiming to cripple the Wagner Group’s international operations beyond the war in Ukraine, even as Moscow may cripple Wagner’s operations closer to home; the Wall Street Journal reported that the nominally private military contractors will hand over their heavy weapons to Russian state forces, a sign the group could soon be disbanded. The sanctions indicate that Washington still views the mercenary outfit as a threat to stability and security in some regions of Africa despite its rapid collapse of influence back in Moscow.

The Treasury Department has already levied sanctions against the Wagner Group to start undermining its money-making operations, designating the group as a transnational criminal organization in January and sanctioning the head of Wagner Group’s operations in Mali, Ivan Aleksandrovich Maslov, last month.

U.N. investigators and independent human rights watchdogs have tracked mounting evidence of Wagner fighters’ roles in atrocities and war crimes against civilians in Africa as the mercenary group expands its business empire there. A new investigative report from the Sentry, a human rights watchdog, found that the Wagner Group has co-opted power in the chronically weak and unstable Central African Republic’s government, and its fighters have been implicated in possible war crimes and crimes against humanity including the massacres of civilians.

“Wagner has managed in just five years to infiltrate and control CAR’s military chain of command, as well as the country’s political and economic systems. Russia has revealed its plan for psychological warfare and domination—a truly new kind of ultra-violent colonialism,” said Nathalia Dukhan, senior investigator and head of the Wagner program at the Sentry. “Without urgent and coordinated global action to counter this threat, Wagner’s predatory terrorist network will continue to spread and sow devastation wherever it takes root.”

The French government last year accused Wagner fighters of committing atrocities in Mali, then staging bodies in mass graves to implicate Paris in the killing of civilians, based on overflight images and other intelligence. A military junta in Mali, which took power in a coup in 2021, pushed France to withdraw a counterterrorism force as Mali began expanding ties with Russia and the Wagner Group. Last week, the Malian junta called on the United Nations to halt its U.N. peacekeeping operation there. Experts have described that U.N. mission, MINUSMA, as flawed and ineffective, but also warned that dismantling the mission could fuel further chaos and instability in a region where extremist terrorist groups are gaining ground.

Update, June 28, 2023: This article was updated to include new details after the public release of the sanctions.