Africa - A Cold War

Bulletin From The Borderlands Special Report

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This next piece is a deep dive by a great analyst and Bulletin Team Member, Northern Provisions. He has started to dive into Wagner Group operations throughout Africa, examining their destabilizing effect on the continent, and how those operations tie into larger Russian Federation strategic objectives.

Be informed, be prepared, be lethal.

Africa: A Cold War

- Northern Provisions

Mid-April kicked off with fresh fighting in Sudan between the Sudanese Army and a collection of militias known as the Rapid Support Forces. As of today, Wednesday the 3rd of May, over 540 people are confirmed to have been killed and well over 4,000 people have been wounded in action, with thousands more fleeing from the region as refugees. It wasn’t long after the renewed clashes began that regional experts and analysts confirmed Russian Wagner forces were operating in Sudan, providing weapons to the Rapid Support Forces in their fight, specifically surface to air missiles. Wagner Group has been the talk of the town as they spearhead the assault on the embattled city of Bakhmut in Eastern Ukraine, they’ve also been highlighted for being a major player in the Russo-Ukrainian War overall, even gaining attention from the world as its founder offered to pardon the sentences of criminals as long as they fulfill six month contracts fighting in Ukraine. Though hot and new in the media, Wagner Group is far from new, and the presence of Russian SOF also being confirmed in Sudan may speak to a broader picture.

Wagner Group has also been confirmed to be active on the ground in Libya, having backed Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan General and Commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army. In the wake of the United States’ intervention in Libya and subsequent toppling of Gaddafi, a power vacuum was created, resulting in a follow-on civil war that has left the country a failed state and divided, split and controlled by opposing factions, similar to the fate Syria would find. In Syria, Wagner Group was contracted by Syria's state-owned General Petroleum Corp and ordered to capture and secure gas and oil fields from the Islamic State. There were an estimated 2,500 of them operating on the ground in Syria and while some of them would die fighting various fighting factions, others would die fighting coalition forces. On February 7th, 2018, Wagner Group mercenaries alongside other allies got into a skirmish with US and Syrian Democratic Forces, resulting in dozens dead. This broke news as many did not understand the difference between Wagner Group soldiers and Russian conventionals, nor did they know that backdoor communication was still open between the United States and Russia and that that phone line had been used prior to US strikes.

Finally, it has been confirmed that Russian Wagner Group mercenaries are also on the ground in the Central African Republic as well as Mali. One of their primary roles here is protecting the government of Faustin-Archange Touadéra against rebels amid the Central African Republic Civil War. Aside from that, a secondary primary role is resource extraction and their activities in the CAR has left dozens, potentially hundreds of their fighters dead. As recent as February 2023, Russian Wagner fighters took casualties during a push against rebels to seize gold mines. In Mali, they have filled the vacuum created by the French withdrawal, again, filling a hole left, and in doing some exporting influence in the region. So while Western media and officials may criticize the paramilitary organization and write of their barbarism or international law violations, they are nonetheless filling gaps left by those very Western nations. All this to say, Wagner Group is being used both tactically and strategically. Tactically they are playing a soldiering role, allowing the Russian Federation to use them in place of Russian soldiers to avoid military deaths while also using them strategically for extracting valuable resources and expanding Russian influence. Despite their brutality and documented war crimes, many of the leaders and groups they serve are in general not concerned with such horrific activities, they are more interested in results, results that Wagner Group is providing for these local factions. 

The Biden Administration is attempting to dissuade African leaders from working with the Russian paramilitary group by engaging in a tactic used often; the simple sharing of intelligence. The intelligence being shared with these African leaders is aimed at operations or planned operations and action by Wagner Group that would be detrimental for those actions like the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan. An example of shared intelligence was Chad being notified by US officials of an alleged Wagner Assassination plot against the President of Chad. The aim was to highlight how in the long term Wagner and Russian influence in general will likely worsen the already unstable environment in many of these countries.

As of now, the global influence picture in scale does not appear to appease to Western and American interests as stated above, we have been progressively losing control and influence in the region, but what’s in the future is not clear, what is clear however is that Wagner Group is likely here for the foreseeable future. They recently opened a massive recruitment center in Murmansk, Russia with over 40 other Russian cities expected to get one. Much of the world also saw the turmoil between Wagner Group officials and Russian Federation military officials recently, with the leader of Wagner Group threatening to withdraw from Bakhmut amid an ammunition shortage scandal. This situation has since simmered out with the needed ammunition being promised to the Russian mercenaries. For now, it is up to policy makers and defense planners to ensure western influence overpowers that of Russian influence and perhaps embrace policies that maintain our level of morality while also producing results needed for both parties to feel fulfilled.

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