On Tuesday, Prigozhin’s private plane landed in Belaur’s capital, Minsk. After the agreement, negotiated by Aleksandr Lukashenko, he has taken 8,000 of his soldiers with him. Vladimir Putin himself confirmed that on Monday evening. According to the Russian newspaper Verstka, Belarus is already in the process of building barracks and training facilities for the Wagner soldiers. They will be stationed in the forests on the border with Russia. Many now believe that the Wagner Group will move its headquarters from the modern premises in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Minsk, Belarus. Photo: AP But what will these war-accustomed ex-criminal soldiers come up with now? Part of the answer may lie in Africa. Wagner already has up to 5,000 soldiers there, according to the Wall Street Journal. The visit from Sudan November 2017. Sudan’s then president Omar al-Bashir is on his first state visit to Russia. Al-Bashir will meet Putin in Moscow again in July 2018. Photo: ALEXEI DRUZHININ / AFP He will meet President Putin, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Shojgu. Along the way, al-Bashir has defied two arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Al-Bashir is charged with both war crimes and genocide in Darfur. In addition, he faces a growing discontent on the streets at home. Vladimir Putin offers a helping hand. A hand named Wagner. The Wagner Group is a hitherto relatively unknown organization that had assisted in the war in Ukraine. They have also helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stay in power. Portraits of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad printed on porcelain in Damascus in 2016, a year after the Wagner group stepped in to help the Syrian dictator stay in power. Photo: Hassan Ammar / AP After al-Bashir’s visit, Wagner’s African adventure begins. The race for Africa The mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin are initially in Sudan between 2017 and 2019. They train soldiers, guard resources and fight against protesters. The countries where the Wagner group is involved militarily are marked in red and where Wagner is involved politically or economically in grey. Source: Council on Foreign Relations and Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. – The advantage of a private military contractor like Wagner is that they are an external actor, with a home base in an authoritarian Russia, explains senior researcher at Nupi, Morten Bøås. – They therefore do not need to ask critical questions, make no demands on human rights or elections, and have little faith in participating in any coup against the regime that pays them, he elaborates. Senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Policy, Morten Bøås, specializes in peace and conflict in Africa. Photo: – / NUPI Wagner is thus also hired in Mali, Libya and the Central African Republic. They are also helping Mozambique to fight the terrorists in Al-Shabab. Some now suspect that Wagner is in the process of establishing himself in Burkina Faso, including the president of Ghana. With that, Prigozhin’s men take over a role long reserved for forces from the UN, the African Union and France. Prigozhin does not particularly bother to hide this activity away. A map with color-coded pins shows Wagner’s involvement in Africa in the background of the mil blogger Konstantin Dolgov’s interview with Prigozhin. During an interview with mile blogger Konstantin Dolgov, a map with 32 color-coded needles comes into view. An analysis by the independent Russian newspaper Verstka shows that these needles match news about the Wagner group’s presence. 32 countries are marked, mainly in Africa, but also in Latin America, Asia and Oceania. Now that the future of the Wagner Group is highly uncertain, a power vacuum may arise. Soldiers for hire Several analysts believe that other private military firms, whether Western or Chinese, will now try to take advantage of the fact that the Wagner group is weakened. Bøås believes that there will primarily be opportunities in Burkina Faso and Mali: – It may be that the military leadership in Burkina Faso will find the Wagner group somewhat less attractive after this, and thus look for other alternatives. Then a vacuum could arise in Mali, because Wagner does not have control over natural resources there. There is no shortage of potential stakeholders. A helicopter from the Dyck Advisory Group lands in Palma in Mozambique. Photo: DYCK ADVISORY GROUP / Reuters A prominent player is the South African firm Dyck Advisory Group (DAG). It has previously been hired by Mozambique to fight jihadists. According to the UN, DAG must have killed civilians and combatants equally in June 2020. Then there is Asgaard, the German company that hires retired soldiers and police officers. They have mainly worked in Sudan, Libya, Mauritania and Egypt. In addition, there is the American CACI and Academi, the French Secopex and the British Aegis Defense. Some also believe that the Chinese will now bet on such mercenaries. – Chinese private military contractors can function in the same way as Wagner in a conflict over Taiwan. That gives the Chinese government a good reason to help them grow, says an analysis published in The Diplomat. There are already many Chinese firms offering security services on the African continent. But these actors have so far been used primarily to protect Chinese firms. An open pit gold mine in Djoubissi in the Central African Republic. Wagner will have contracts to extract resources and be responsible for the safety of such gold mines in the war-torn country. Photo: SIEGFRIED MODOLA / Reuters From trench to gold mine One of the reasons why there are so many private military contractors in Africa is that they help dictators stay in power, Bøås explains. – They are part of so-called “coup-proofing”, i.e. a tool to make sure that you are not exposed to a coup. Wagner has also recruited soldiers in Africa for the war in Ukraine. This screenshot from a video shared on Instagram shows Lemekani Nyirenda, a Zambian citizen who died fighting for Wagner in Ukraine. Photo: REUTERS / Reuters Another reason is that this activity is very lucrative for the mercenaries. – Wagner does several things. They have contracts for military and security services with governments. Then they have agreements with businessmen to contribute to the extraction of resources such as gold and diamonds, says Bøås. As there are large values in circulation, Wagner’s local operations function quite independently. – If you want to understand Wagner, you have to understand it as a private company, with employees under contract. In Russia and Ukraine, they have completely different means of pressure to deploy, but those in Mali can quickly run away or find work elsewhere. Malians demonstrate in support of Russia on the occasion of Mali’s independence day in 2020. Photo: AP Bøås believes that these groups will continue to exist, regardless of what happens in Minsk and St. Petersburg. – It may happen that Wagner goes from being centrally managed from St. Petersburg to either being centrally managed from Minsk, or that they get more independent local groups in a kind of franchise model, says the Africa researcher.
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Wagner’s African adventure – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
