Yevgeny Prigozhin’s son, Pavel, and Vladimir Putin have rebranded the mercenary group as its influence in the Sahel region spreads.
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When Prigozhin staged a mutiny in Russia last June, uncertainty loomed over the military-business network he had meticulously woven across the continent. The fatal crash that claimed his life two months later was expected to disrupt the Wagner machine. Yet since the swaggering warlord’s death, Russia’s security operations in Africa have resurged to a scale and pace unseen since the end of the Cold War.
In an ironic twist, the paramilitary leader’s son, 25-year-old Pavel Prigozhin, has colluded with the Russian defence ministry and Rosgavardiya – Russia’s National Guard – to centralise Wagner’s operations domestically, and rebrand the group as “Africa Corps” on the continent. The power play bears an uncanny likeness to that deployed by Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, whose father was killed by Vladimir Putin’s warlords in Chechnya. Like Kadyrov, Pavel Prigozhin is now one of Putin’s biggest beneficiaries.
Far from being curtailed by the war in Ukraine, Moscow’s hybrid Sahel strategy has been revitalised. While prisoners in CAR are being coerced to repay their debts to Wagner as cannon fodder in Ukraine, the plunder of virgin redwood forests and minerals is providing an economic lifeline for Putin’s war.
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Yet the group’s future existence will largely depend on whether Africa Corps can revive the personal, elite-to-elite loyalties cultivated throughout the region by the larger-than-life elder Prigozhin. When it comes to wooing African kingpins – who rule on patronage-based politics – the ceremonial state visits by Yunus-bek Yevkurov, Russia’s deputy defence minister, have not been successful.
“West Africans like the idea of a ‘Big Man’,” a Malian government official told me. “Prigozhin was definitely a Big Man.”
