Wagner’s African Hosts Regret Letting Them In

DJIBOUTI—The United States has heard from multiple African countries that they regret giving access to the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group, current and former U.S. military and defense officials said, as the Biden administration tries to use the interregnum in the group’s control to halt its advance.

U.S. defense and military officials have had conversations with representatives of several African nations in recent months indicating a growing frustration with Wagner over human rights abuses and the targeting of civilians. Wagner has significant forces in the Central African Republic, Mali, and Libya and has sent advisors and liaisons in other countries, including Sudan and Mozambique. The Russian mercenary outfit’s presence is a way for the Kremlin to extend its influence in Africa while ostensibly fighting terrorism.

“We’ve had countries come to us and say, ‘We don’t want to be dependent on Wagner. We are seeing problems in their presence,’” said a senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity based on ground rules set by the Pentagon. “We are seeing a growing understanding that this is, at minimum, a double-edged sword but, at worst, a net negative for countries that have enabled Wagner presence.” 

Though Wagner was able to exploit coups that have wreaked havoc across the Sahel, the Russian outfit has only been able to expand in fits and starts since it took a leading role in ensuring the survival of Mali’s military regime and ousting the U.N. peacekeeping mission there. The group, which was led by Yevgeny Prigozhin until his death in August, has recently tried to expand its operations in Burkina Faso, made attempts to exploit the overthrow of President Mohamed Bazoum in Niger by a military junta, and was rebuffed in attempts to enter Chad and expand its influence in Sudan’s five-month conflict of warring generals.

One political faction that has expressed regret about giving access to Wagner forces is the eastern Libyan enclave led by the warlord Khalifa Haftar, whose deputies have privately conveyed to the United States regret about hosting Wagner forces, according to Stephen Townsend, a retired four-star Army general who served as head of U.S. Africa Command until last year. Wagner’s forces have proved ineffectual in the counterterrorism fight in Mali and Libya and have been connected with disappearances, mass killings, and other grave abuses. 

But experts are worried that even as African governments and opposition movements tell U.S. officials that they regret letting Wagner in, groups such as the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Malian opposition are using those talking points against the Biden administration as leverage to extract more U.S. assistance. 

“Unless people are coming to them with a viable alternative, they’re not going to ditch these guys,” said John Lechner, a Washington-based analyst with contacts inside Wagner. “These guys are professionals at balancing outside interests.”

After the death of Prigozhin this summer, official Russian military delegations have gone to African countries to test the waters about the Kremlin’s ability to operate there, the senior U.S. defense official said. Lechner said the effort—“to read guys the riot act”—has largely been coordinated by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov, who traveled to Libya this month after deadly floods caused mass devastation.

The death of Prigozhin has also led the Russian government to evaluate a possible rebrand of the Wagner Group. That might allow it to continue its operations under a different name, avoiding the public relations headaches that came with the old name and possibly giving the Kremlin a way to insert mercenaries into countries such as Burkina Faso, which U.S. officials believe it has long coveted. 

“This might actually open up an opportunity for a foreign intervention without having to deal with the messy label of Wagner,” Lechner said. “But it will be essentially the same guys.”

Though Wagner’s command structure is mostly decentralized, U.S. officials believe it was able to stay intact after the death of Prigozhin, a onetime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who became increasingly critical of the Kremlin’s conduct of the war in Ukraine before launching an ill-fated putsch in June. Though Prigozhin’s travel to Africa was episodic, he and his deputy Dmitry Utkin plotted all of Wagner’s advances in Africa. 

“These guys knew about every major muscle movement,” Townsend said. 

The Wagner Group can likely sustain itself in the near term without Prigozhin, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Djibouti, where he is on his first stop of a three-country tour of Africa, but he added that it cannot do so in the medium to long term without the support of Russia.

“Their leadership has been taken out,” Austin said. “I think what you’ll see in the future here is probably some competition within the ranks to bring about who’s going to be the next leader.”

Austin said the United States had not yet determined whether Putin has made a decision about whether to continue to use Wagner as an unofficial arm of the government, subsume it into the military or defense ministry, or disband it altogether. The mercenary group’s operations in Africa offered a low-cost, hands-off way for Russia to meddle in strategically important countries without nominally involving regular Russian forces.

For now, Wagner’s leadership has remained largely intact. Vitali Perfilev and business school graduate Dmitry Sytii are still running gold, diamond, and timber concessions in the Central African Republic—and even managing a Wagner-branded beer label—while Ivan Maslov was hit with U.S. Treasury Department sanctions for his role in managing the group’s Mali outfit. Wagner couples its ostensible security mission with an appetite for local resources.

Lechner said the group can survive on its own financial networks for some time but would need help from the Russian government to maintain military equipment and supplies of ammunition and other provisions.

The challenge for Washington is that it has little to offer African countries in exchange, even as longtime European partners such as France pull out of Niger and other countries altogether. U.S. Africa Command is already busy training local fighters in places such as Somalia, and coups continue apace across Africa. That means that the group, despite its shortcomings, still has appeal for regimes with a tenuous hold on power.

“I tell you who’s not tired of Wagner—dictators,” Townsend said. “Despots are not tired of Wagner because Wagner is the guarantee of their guarantor of their rule.”