
Having veered to the extreme right in terms of ideological orientation the current entourage of Putin (and the boss himself) consider themselves very much the heirs of the old Soviet Empire in geopolitical terms. During the “Cold”* War the Soviet Union had strongholds in places as diverse as Angola, Ethiopia, Guinea, Algeria, Mozambique, Egypt and Somalia, although some of these changed allegiances as the result of domestic political changes: the death of a despot, a coup, a war, the end of a war, an election.
(*The War was of course anything but “Cold” in places like Angola, SE Asia and parts of Central America where the two superpowers – USA and USSR – were either directly involved or used proxies for their bloody turf wars. The people living there ended up paying the ultimate price for someone else’s hegemony.)
But Russia today is not the old Soviet Union. Gone is the rhetoric about international socialist solidarity, however thin that ideological veneer was in reality. This Russia does not only want influence and geopolitical turf; it also wants resources and money. Wagner exemplifies this more than anything. It consists of old Soviet intelligence and combat veterans, who, like their political bosses have had no problem shedding the old altruistic mask and donning the much more hard-nosed mug of the businessman. Wagner first emerged in Syria in 2011 and resurfaced in Ukraine three years later, where it cut its teeth in the Crimea and the Donbass Region, as their friends in Moscow were stirring up trouble there. Like all mercenary outfits, Wagner likes trouble; it thrives there.

In Libya, Wagner was among a plethora of private military outfits that came in after the forced removal of strongman Muamar Ghaddafi in 2011, an act spearheaded by France under former president Sarkozy, aided by the USA and the UK and the rest of the NATO gang. It was an act I have described on numerous occasions as criminal.
Wagner found itself on the wrong side of history when it backed the renegade general Khalifa Haftar, an old pal of Ghadaffi’s (he took part in the 1969 coup that brought the then colonel to power). In the following decades he was spotted taking part in Ghaddafi’s numerous efforts to annexe a slice of Chad before turning against his former boss and ally. Haftar staged various of efforts to remove his old pal until 2011 when he finally got lucky, thanks to Sarkozy’s and NATO’s criminal insanity that brought chaos to Libya and the entire northwest corner of the African continent. In April 2019, some 1,000 Wagner operatives joined Haftar in his bid to take Tripoli. It all went badly wrong and an unknown number of Wagner fighters got killed. It is here also that the first allegations of serious human rights abuses – gratuitous killings especially – surfaced.
In Sudan, Wagner was involved in a brutal crackdown of street protests against the continued rule of the mass-murderer Omar al-Bashir. They cooperated with an ultraviolent militia called the Rapid Support Force, formerly known as the Janjaweed, gunmen on horseback who terrorised the people of Darfur during Bashir’s assault on that region. Scores of demonstrators were killed but in the end it was to no avail: Bashir was finally removed in April 2019. Wagner received gold and diamond concessions as payment. Bashir also promised to fulfil another ancient Russian imperialist dream: a warm water naval base. It was not to be. Entirely not incidentally, the same Rapid Support Force partners with the European Union in its quest to have as many refugees hunted down and killed before they reach Europe, as my good colleague Linda Polman reveals in her book on Europe’s century-old Keep ‘Em Out policy.
In Madagascar one year earlier, the company tried to influence an election but failed to get their candidate into the presidential palace. It then quickly shifted support to the eventual winner Andry Rajoelina and managed to retain a chrome mine it had got its hands on. But it was a close shave.

“Badly wrong.” This is the phrase you’ll come to associate most with Wagner. Such was the case, for instance, in Mozambique. In late 2019 Wagner were asked to help eliminate a noxious jihad-motivated insurgency in the northern Cabo Delgado province. Wagner sent a few hundred of its operatives but their performance was so ruinous, culturally insensitive and incompetent that the Mozambican government sent them home. An unknown number of them had to be flown out in coffins. A South African outfit showed up there, too, the Dyck Advisory Group. Both of them were indistinguishable in their callous disregard for the human rights of any civilian having the misfortune to get into their crosshairs. This is true of all their African operations: wherever private military outfits like Wagner and others show up, war crimes are committed and go unpunished.
Arguably, the Central African Republic (or CAR) represents something of a success story for Wagner. In 2018 they got in, thanks to personal contacts between president Faustin Archange Touadéra, Russian foreign minister Sergej Lavrow and Putin himself. Having successfully battled off rebels lead by former president François Bozizé who wanted prevent Touadéra’s re-election in early 2021, the group has been lionized by the political elites, the only ones that are actually profiting from said protection. Touadéra himself had special military advisor, Valeri Zakharov. His successor as of late 2020 is reported to be the equally shady Vitali Perfilev. In praise of their exploits, the Russians produced “Tourist”, a Hollywood-style propaganda film that was shown in the capital Bangui’s main stadium. In December 2021 president Touadéra himself inaugurated a monument in honour of the Great White Mercenary. Here again allegations of very serious human rights abuses (torture and extrajudicial killings among them) have surfaced. There is still fighting going on in many different parts of the CAR.
Like its competitors Wagner is never there to stop the fighting; it is there to profit from it. It got its hands on mining concessions and probably some aid money, prompting the likes of the European Union to turn off the tap. Three Russian journalists were found mysteriously killed in the CAR as they were attempting to find out what the heck their armed and dodgy compatriots were up to.

Wagner latest war theatre, Mali is set to resemble that of the CAR. Mali came into the picture after the August 2020 and May 2021 coups and a rupture with France, the old colonial power that still has difficulty understanding that former colonies make their own decisions, however calamitous these decisions may be. Make no mistake: letting Wagner into the country is calamitous – and deadly. Late March this year troops of the national army and their new Russian mentors went on a killing spree and left 300 civilians dead in the central market town of Moura, a crime Prigozhin’s troll army tried to pin on the French. No independent inquiry will be possible. The UN did investigate and pointed at French military culpability when in the central town of Bounty 17 were killed by airstrikes on January 3 last year. In Moura, no UN team will be investigating what happened and file a report; in fact, they are actively prevented from doing their work. The authorities do not permit any reporting that challenges the narrative that the army is going from strength to strength and only kills ‘jihadists’.
Last part tomorrow