Since the death of Yevgeny Prigojine, Dmitri Sytyi is the new unofficial boss of the Wagner paramilitary group in Africa. He has been working for several weeks on the African continent to ensure the private security market.
Last week, a month after the funeral of Yevgeni Prigozhin, the Kremlin made official the new recruiter of the Wagner group: Andreï Trochev. He will now embody the best-known Russian paramilitary company whose main activities are in Africa. A private security market that Moscow does not intend to let slip away.
This is undoubtedly why another 34-year-old man has been working for many weeks in the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Niger, to ensure that Wagner’s clients will not flee. This man is Dmitri Sytyi. He absolutely does not have a military profile, but rather that of a young commercial executive. He went through several European universities, most recently the SKEMA Business School in Lille, before being recruited to join a Wagner troll farm, piloting anti-West propaganda in Africa. Dmitri Sytyi is today the unofficial boss of the Wagner group in Africa. He is responsible for running the shop, with several billion euros from the extraction of wood, gold and diamonds against the expertise and military assistance of 5,000 mercenaries.
More and more mercenaries around the world
The market for Private Military Security Companies (PMSCs) is booming. According to the Geneva Center for Security Governance, these companies today employ – often on behalf of the States which host them – several million people around the world. In an industry worth hundreds of billions of euros, Wagner is not alone and the sector is constantly evolving. Professor Sorcha MacLeod, a member of the United Nations working group on mercenaries, explains for example how the recruitment of these companies has expanded considerably. 20 years ago, we were talking about a few hundred mercenaries in the world, today they are deployed by the thousands in theaters of operations, wherever clients demand them. “What is new and different about the profile of contemporary mercenaries is that States recruit them elsewhere, in countries already affected by the war, by transferring them to different operations. Turkey did this in the conflict of Nagorno Karabakh but also in Libya. The Russians also have it in Libya, in the Central African Republic and even elsewhere.”explains Professor MacLeod.
For 20 years, military companies have been succeeding one another in Africa
States practice proxy warfare: they subcontract military action to private companies, taking care not to be politically exposed. In Africa, over the past 20 years, dozens of military companies have succeeded one another. The Russians from Wagner, the Turks from the SADAT group, the South Africans from Executive Outcomes (among the very first). UN reports also focus on the activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo of the company Agemira, registered in Bulgaria, but founded in France.
A very practical status to escape the rules on mercenarism. This allows us to cover our tracks and evade international laws on the rules of engagement, respect for human rights or humanitarian law. More and more weakened states are turning to these military companies to ensure their security and subsequently realize that they have no way of preventing looting and abuses.