Yevgeny Prigojine, a Russian businessman who was nicknamed “Putin’s cook”, admitted on Monday September 26, 2022 to having founded the paramilitary group Wagner whose men “have defended”, among other things, “the African and Latin American poor”.
In Africa, Wagner’s presence has been documented in Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali. But it is often refuted in particular by the Malian and Central African authorities who seem to have aligned themselves so far with Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself denied in October 2021 that the group, whose existence is not official in his country where private military companies are prohibited, carried out its underhanded work and served the interests of Russia.
The businessman, close to the Kremlin, indicated that the paramilitary group was first created to send competent fighters to the Ukrainian Donbass where Moscow orchestrated the emergence of an armed separatist movement. “It was then, on May 1, 2014, that a group of patriots was born which took the name of the Wagner Battalion Tactical Group”he explains in a publication of his company Concord on the Russian social network VKontakte.
“And now a confession (…) these guys, heroes, defended the Syrian people, other people of Arab countries, the deprived Africans and Latin Americans, they became a pillar of our homeland”.
Yevgeny PrigozhinCommunicated
While Bamako and Bangui continue to proclaim that they have relations of equals, the recent exit of the founder of Wagner gives an idea of how he perceives his relations with these African States and thus confirms what the powers Westerners and the media have been asserting for a long time.
The first known deployment of Wagner’s “private agents” on the African continent was in 2018 in Central African Republic where hundreds of men from the group are today among the “instructors” of the army, to the point that Paris evokes a “power capture”. Wagner’s arrival in this country was made possible by a military cooperation agreement that allowed Moscow to benefit from mining concessions in exchange for Wagner’s opaque services and missions. The group is proceeding in the same way in Mali, where the ruling junta has demanded the departure of the French operation Barkhane.
In Libya, the men of the paramilitary group are in the service of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a strongman in the east of the country and at the head of the Libyan National Army. “Wagner’s central base is in Africa, in southern Libya, this is where all the planes transit before being transferred to the Central African Republic, to Mali, has also entrusted on franceinfo Alexandra Jousset, co-director of the documentary “Wagner, Putin’s Secret Army”. Wagner’s operations are at the heart of numerous scandals, diplomatic tensions and alleged abuses, particularly in Syria and the Central African Republic.