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People gather in front of a makeshift memorial during a commemoration ceremony held to pay tribute to Wagner fighters, who were recently killed in Mali, in central Moscow, Russia, August 4, 2024.
Has the war in Ukraine spilled over into Mali?
On Sunday, Mali’s transitional military government cut diplomatic ties with Ukraine. The move came after Mali accused Kyiv of supplying intelligence to Tuareg separatists involved in a recent attack with an al-Qaida affiliate in the Sahel nation that reportedly resulted in dozens of casualties, including 84 Russian Wagner Group mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers.
Kyiv denies involvement, but a Malian government spokesperson said the move was catalyzed by comments from a Ukrainian military intelligence spokesperson, Andriy Yusov, who recently said the armed groups involved in the July attack received the “necessary information” to conduct the attack.
The response and backdrop. On Monday, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry posted a statement on its website condemning Mali’s decision as “short-sighted and hasty,” saying no evidence has been provided to prove Kyiv’s role in the attack. The memo also said Ukraine reserved the right to take necessary actions toward the “unfriendly actions” by Mali.
The spat between Bamako and Kyiv once again raises questions regarding the extent to which the Ukraine-Russia war has spilled into Africa, following prior reports of Ukrainian special forces operating in Sudan to counter Wagner mercenaries. The Wagner Group has been active in Africa for years and was once estimated to have 50,000 fighters in Ukraine. Moscow has restructured and exerted greater control over Wagner ever since its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, launched a failed mutiny against Vladimir Putin in 2023 and died in a mysterious plane crash not long after.
This diplomatic feud also comes amid increasingly tense relations between the West, which is closely allied with Kyiv, and Sahel nations like Mali that have gone through coups in recent years.
Nigeriens gather in a street to protest against the U.S. military presence, in Niamey, Niger April 13, 2024.
Niger Pivots from the Eagle to the Bear
Hundreds demonstrated in Niger's capital, Niamey, on Saturday to demand the removal of US troops, much as they called for the exit of French forces last year. Niger’s military coup in July 2023 has brought changes to the central African nation, including a shift in military alliances. The nation is deepening its relationship with Moscow, as evidenced bythe arrival last week of Russian military trainers tasked with bolstering Niger’s air defenses.
The junta has not yet expelled US forces after ordering them to leave last month. Until last year, the US had been a key ally in combating Islamic terrorists in the Sahel region, funding a $100 million drone base and training elite Nigerien counterterrorist units. But with Russia in the picture now, that cooperation looks moribund.
Unfortunately, some of those US-trained forcesparticipated in last summer's coup that deposed elected President Salem Bazoum. Things deteriorated further last month aftera US delegation visit led by envoy Molly Phee, when Niger's junta announced on state TV that flights from the American-built airbase were illegal and declared the US military presence as “unrecognized.”
Niger’s regime follows the pattern set by neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, which have also distanced themselves from traditional Western allies, cultivated ties with Moscow, and shunned the ECOWAS bloc. We’ll be watching to see whether Niger’s new alliance with Russia emboldens the juntato further delay a return to civilian rule, which is supposed to happen by 2026.File Photo: Nigerien troops, May 23, 2022.
Niger wants US troops out
Niger’s military junta announced Saturday that it would end the agreement that allows US troops to operate in the country. Niamey said the pact was “profoundly unfair,” and cited a “condescending attitude” and alleged violations of diplomatic protocol during a high-level visit last week.
Washington has been trying to find ways to work with the military governments that have seized power in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali to combat extremist militants in the region. But at the same time, the Biden administration has pressured Niamey to set a timeline to restore democratic control and reportedly raised alarm at a possible deal to sell uranium to Iran, which seems to have led to the rupture.
What happens now? The US has about 1,000 troops in Niger and operates a drone base monitoring suspected militants in the north of the country. The State Department is aware of the demand but has not commented on next steps.
If US troops do pull out of their base in Niger, it would remove a major obstacle for Niger to expand its relationship with Russia, as juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso have. The former Wagner Group mercenaries have been absorbed into Moscow’s Defense Ministry and rebranded the Africa Corps, which is expected to deploy on the continent this summer.
People demonstrate in Niger's capital Niamey to show their support for the coup plotters.
What’s next for Russian operations in Africa?
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022, Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, recently killed in a plane crash, was scarcely known outside diehard Russophile circles.
Prigozhin’s celebrity status rose further after this summer’s short-lived mutiny, when, after feuding with Russia’s military leadership, he led thousands of his men from the frontlines in eastern Ukraine toward the heart of Moscow in protest.
Since Prigozhin was killed last week in an explosive event that few believe was an accident, there’s been much speculation about the future of Wagner and its global operations, particularly across Africa, where the group has invested the bulk of its manpower in recent years.
Now that the man at the top is dead, along with his main deputies, what does this mean for the group’s surreptitious activities across the world’s fastest-growing continent?
Wagner: the origin story. After spending nine years in jail for robbery and theft, Prigozhin was released in the dying days of the Soviet Union. He then opened a successful hotdog stand in St. Petersburg, which transformed into a booming restaurant business that endeared him to Vladimir Putin, and ultimately led to him filling the bellies of the Kremlin’s elite.
Prigozhin’s entrepreneurial spirit peaked in 2014 when he started a private mercenary organization known as Wagner, named for Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer and ideological kindred spirit. Although Wagner has been described as a private military company, it’s closely intertwined with the Russian state, particularly the military and intelligence corps.
Wagner troops were first identified in a foreign conflict zone in 2014 when Russian troops invaded Crimea. Since then, they’ve operated in Syria, fighting alongside the Russian military to prop up the regime of Bashar Assad, and more recently, have zeroed in on Africa, serving as a security guarantor for authoritarian regimes across the continent.
Wagner in Africa
Under this burgeoning arrangement, Russian mercenaries have been given access to African natural resources in exchange for providing security guarantees – including arms and security services – to help authoritarian African military regimes stay in power.
In the process, Russian state-controlled arms companies have secured fat deals in West Africa while mining companies – both those controlled by the state as well as Putin-linked private enterprises – have also made a mint.
Wagner’s first foray into Africa appears to have been in Sudan in 2017 after the Kremlin signed a series of lucrative deals with longtime Sudanese despot Omar al-Bashir. This included Russia setting up a naval base on the Red Sea as well as gold mining deals that also involved a Wagner subsidiary group.
In exchange, Wagner was charged with training Sudanese troops and helping crack down on protesters calling for the ouster of al-Bashir, who ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades until he was forced out in 2019.
Since then, Wagner fighters have been invited in by various rogue regimes – most notably in the Central African Republic, where they thwarted a coup against President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, as well as in coup-prone Mali.
A similar dynamic has played out in Syria, where Russian mercenaries have gained access to key oil outposts. This helps explain why the newly installed military junta in Niger, one of the world’s top producers of uranium, reportedly wants to bring Wagner on board.
But the resources-for-protection game is only one part of a complex dynamic. Russian mercenaries in Africa also aim to sow discord and anti-Western sentiment in the world’s fastest-growing continent in a bid to dilute Western influence in the region.
Pointing to this week’s coup in the central African state of Gabon, Joana de Deus Pereira, a senior research fellow at RUSI Europe, says that anti-Western disinformation campaigns are now more dangerous than the aforementioned security arrangements with African regimes.
This propaganda pervades many countries, particularly in West Africa, and “prompted the end of the Burkhane operation [an anti-insurgency mission in West Africa led by France] and also led to the current withdrawal of UN troops in Mali, which is one of the biggest retreats of international personnel.”
Pointing to the deepening Russian presence in the region and its propaganda machine (in CAR, for instance, there are posters proclaiming “Russia: hand in hand with your army!) have given rise “to a new trend that’s triggering nationalist movements that are unleashing new coups,” de Deus Pereira says.
The future of Wagner in Africa
Prigozhin was a savvy business person, turning a scrappy private army into one of Russia’s chief foreign policy tools. Having cultivated close ties with African leaders and criminal enterprises – as well as serving as Wagner’s chief financier – Prigozhin’s death will certainly prompt something akin to a company rebranding. But will it impact the group’s regional operations?
De Deus Pereira isn’t convinced. “Wagner is an ecosystem. It's not only a person,” she says, adding that “it's been a big mistake to personalize and associate the group with a single individual.”
A similar sentiment was echoed by Ruslan Trad, a security researcher at the Atlantic Council, who says that “Wagner occupies an important role in this broader system, and the unit's structures will be used in one form or another even after Prigozhin.” Trad says that, “ultimately, Wagner is not a creation of Prigozhin, but of the GRU [Russian intelligence] and veterans.”
Another argument for the likelihood of continuity is that things are going pretty swimmingly for the Russians in Africa, and it is indeed in the Kremlin’s interest to keep the cash rolling in to help fund its war machine in Ukraine. This is exactly what the Kremlin is doing in Sudan, where it’s propping up a Sudanese militia in exchange for increased access to illegal gold mining.
Looking ahead. While the US and France are reducing their respective troop presences in the region, Russia continues to leverage the Kremlin’s clout and Russian oligarchs’ vast business interests to deepen its influence on a continent that includes 54 countries and 1.4 billion people.
“Wagner's presence in Africa has a lot to do with capitalization of grievances” – particularly in former French colonies – “that were already there for some time,” de Deus Pereira says. And she isn’t optimistic about where things are heading: “This is just the beginning. These coups will have a contagion effect.”
The last French convoy from Operation Barkhane, prepares to leave Gossi, Mali.
The UN’s dangerous withdrawal from Mali
The UN this week laid out a timeline for withdrawing peacekeeping troops from the West African state of Mali – a mission that UN chief António Guterres has called “unprecedented” because of the vast logistical and security challenges.
Roughly 13,000 UN peacekeepers and police – and 1,786 civilian staff – will be out of the country by Dec. 31, with their infrastructure handed over to Mali’s military government. The withdrawal of UN forces, who’ve been in the country for a decade, is a huge development in a state long plagued by ethnic strife, poverty, and Islamic insurgents.
Some quick background. The landlocked Sahelian country has been grappling with relentless violence since a military coup in 2012, which gave an opening to an expansive Islamic insurgency that’s since spilled over into neighboring countries.
Years of instability have given rise to multiple military coups since then, most recently in 2021. Last year, that junta expelled French soldiers deployed there to help quash jihadist violence. And most recently in June, Mali’s junta leaders – who have close ties to Russia’s Wagner Group, whose troops they invited to help keep things “under control” – ordered UN peacekeepers to leave.
The withdrawal is now a massive operation for the UN, which will try to evacuate troops and equipment from a hostile environment overrun by rival armed groups and terror cells. (Consider that the UN recently said that the Islamic State doubled the amount of territory it holds in less than a year.) Making matters worse, neighboring Niger, a transit country, recently underwent its own military coup and can’t be considered a safe passage.Candles are placed at a makeshift memorial near the former PMC Wagner Center, associated with the founder of the Wagner Group and Yevgeny Prigozhin, in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Wagner and Russia’s next moves
Russia has confirmed the identities of the 10 people who died in a plane crash last Wednesday northwest of Moscow. They included Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, as well key associates Dmitry Utkin and Valery Chekalov.
The question now turns to what happens to Wagner forces and the group’s clients, particularly African nations that are of strategic importance to Russia. Can President Vladimir Putin pick up where Prigozhin left off?
Experts note the personalized nature of Prigozhin’s leadership with both his fighters and his clients, as well as his ability to pull together “disparate entities and people.” Those entities included the leadership of Mali, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, and most recently, Niger. All are battling insurgent groups, including Islamic extremists, and in Mali, the militants have reportedly doubled their territorial control this past year. In Niger, the junta seeking to consolidate power after a recent coup had reached out to Wagner, but no relationship had yet been established.
Some predict that other Russian military operatives, such as Redut and Convoy, could fill the gap. Others note how the Russians have vowed to honor Wagner’s contracts in Mali and CAR. Meanwhile, the Republican Front, which is aligned with the leaders in CAR, confirmed its continued support for Russia and Wagner late last week. So it looks like Russia intends to continue leveraging Wagner in its bid to gain more influence on the continent.
It’s less clear what will happen in Burkina Faso and Niger, so we’ll be watching to see how junta leaders in those countries – and how Wagner’s men – respond to Prigozhin’s death.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin breaks his silence on Prigo
Almost 24 hours after the plane presumed to be carrying Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin exploded midair outside Moscow – presumably killing him and Wagner’s top military commander Dmitry Utkin – Vladimir Putin has broken his silence. On Thursday, the Russian leader sent his condolences to the families of the 10 people killed in Wednesday’s massive explosion.
(For more on Prigozhin’s failed June mutiny, which brought him on a collision course with his boss, see our explainer here.)
Though Putin needs to keep things ambiguous to avoid igniting the wrath of the thousands of disgruntled Wagner troops who remain loyal to Prigozhin, he did make his displeasure with the former mercenary chief known: Prigozhin was a “person with a complicated fate, and he made serious mistakes in life,” Putin said, adding that he “also sought to achieve the necessary results – both for himself and … for the common cause.”
Complicated fate? That’s something the Kremlin and the US intelligence community can agree on. On Thursday, US officials confirmed that the explosion was likely the result of an assassination attempt, though they said the explosion didn’t come from surface-to-air missiles, as some have claimed, but from a bomb placed on board or another mechanism.
Putin is known for killing his enemies, but taking down a loyalist and one-time protege? That would be a first.
Prigozhin presumed dead
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Yevgeny Prigozhin, former head of Wagner Group and would-be putschist against Vladimir Putin's Kremlin and Russia, is no more. It was an unprecedented story, that coup attempt against Putin's regime. This was the man who, of course, had been built up and so loyal to Vladimir Putin with the most powerful paramilitary organization in the world, fighting a battle on the ground in Ukraine and fighting against the Minister of Defense and others, losing that battle and deciding to turn his forces against the Russian regime. First, in Rostov and capturing the seat of the Southern command, and then marching him probably on to Moscow, where at the final moment he backs down and agrees to a quote unquote deal with Putin. Putin, who went on national media and referred to Prigozhin as a traitor.
Let's be clear, the important information from all of this was not that there was a deal that was cut. The important information that NATO is paying very close attention to is that Putin didn't take Prigozhin out immediately. He contained the threat. He took his time and acted in a much more calculated way for Putin's own survival.
And given that we've never seen Putin tested like this, and given that for a dictator, it's important to have some air of unpredictability, that you might just launch those weapons, you might have your finger on the button, and that creates some deterrence. The fact is that when Putin was faced with a truly regime-ending threat, that what he did was very careful, very calculated, and ensured the best possible ability for Putin to keep on keeping on.
Now, as I said, back in June, Prigozhin was a dead man walking. Putin had good reason not to want to take him out at the point of his maximum leverage, not least because it would be very ugly in and around Moscow. It would lead to a lot of people getting killed that you wouldn't be able to contain or not show the Russian public. It quite probably would've showed that Putin himself had fled to St. Petersburg from Moscow, a message that certainly he didn't want to see go out.
And of course, Russia was also fighting what was at that point expected to be a very difficult and dangerous Ukrainian counteroffensive. And opening up a fight on two fronts and taking troops away from Ukraine also would've made that much harder for him. So now, Wagner has been contained. Their media company has been shut, many of their bank accounts were frozen, their contracts are being transferred, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive has mostly been shut down by the Russians.
And that of course makes it far, far safer and easier for Putin to go after the former Wagner chief. And so now Yevgeny Prigozhin and the military command structure of Wagner, that leadership dead in a plane crash. I'm fairly comfortable, even though there is no direct evidence at this point, we probably will never have any, saying that Putin gave that order personally. And hey, he actually had some time on his hands since he can't exactly travel to the BRICS Summit in South Africa.
And I'm also comfortable saying that there's no strong near-term threat to Putin. Let's remember that even when the Wagner forces were on their way to Moscow, that there were no defections from Russia's official military structure, no defections from oligarchs. And of course there was not major instability among the Russian people on the streets.
Yes, of course the Russian economy is doing a lot worse now than it was six months ago, a year ago. But Putin still runs that place, and as everyone in Russia can now clearly see, there remain very serious consequences for taking him on.
That's it for me, and I'll talk to y'all real soon.