Wagner Group Leader Resurfaces in Africa

The founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, purported to be in Africa, filmed his first video since leading a failed mutiny against Russian commanders in June.

In the video, Prigozhin is standing in arid desert land, dressed in camouflage with a rifle in his hand, CBS News reported.

Prigozhin says the Wagner Group is making Russia great on all continents, and making Africa “more free.”

CBS News says it has not verified Prigozhin’s location or when the video was taken, but it says it appears to be a recruitment drive on the African continent, where the Wagner Group has been active for years. Some African nations have turned to the mercenary group to fill security gaps or prop up dictatorial regimes against insurgents.

“In most cases, they provide training for local military forces, local security forces, but they are also engaged in VIP protection, also in guarding. And if necessary, they are able to conduct also high intensity operations, I mean real combat,” said András Rácz, a Russian expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

In the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, and Libya, Wagner’s forces are guarding the mines. In the Central African Republic, a CBS News investigation found that Wagner is plundering the country’s mineral resources in exchange for protecting the president against a coup.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has imposed sanctions on gold companies suspected of funding the group’s activities. “The Wagner Group exploits insecurity around the world, committing atrocities and criminal acts that threaten the safety, good governance, prosperity, and human rights of nations, as well as exploiting their natural resources.”

Wagner mercenaries have been accused of atrocities, including mass murder and rape, across Africa and alongside Russian forces in Ukraine — where the group has been a key piece of Russia’s strategy, CBS reported.

“They have all been put there with the support of Russian state ministries of various kinds, and so they are acting on behalf of Russia’s foreign policy interests,” said Kimberly Marten, Barnard College and Columbia University. She was speaking on the PBS News Hour in July.

“They have never really been a completely private company. That’s been sort of a fig leaf put over what they’re doing. And what it means is that Putin is able to establish a relatively large presence in Africa for Russian security forces in particular, and then also in terms of getting gold and other potential precious natural resources, without having to spend a lot of money and without having to put the Russian uniformed military at risk for casualties, which makes it much easier to sell to the home audience, if you can just say it’s a bunch of people who are private actors who are out making money.”