These illusions vanished in June 2023, when Prigozhin, angry over what he saw as intentional lack of support from the Ministry of Defense for Wagner operations in Ukraine, led a march on Moscow. Although Prigozhin’s fighters stopped before reaching the Russian capital, they captured the cities of Rostov and Voronezh, shot down at least seven Russian military aircraft, and killed as many as 29 Russian soldiers. This move sealed Prigozhin’s fate - he died two months later in a plane crash almost certainly orchestrated by the Kremlin - and made it clear to Putin that he needed to rein in his mercenary force, lest it become as dangerous to him as it had long been to Russia’s enemies and ordinary people in the places it operated. The solution was the creation of the Russian Africa Corps. While not formally integrated into the Russian military - thus preserving at least a thin veneer of deniability - the Corps is certainly on a shorter leash than was the Wagner Group. Using the same model as did Wagner, Africa Corps provides coup proofing, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism assistance, military training, and disinformation operations to juntas and authoritarian regimes across the region, including Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Equatorial Guinea. It pioneered many of these techniques in one of the Wagner Group’s first major African interventions, in Libya, where it arrived in 2019. Based on the Libya model, the Africa Corps now engages in ‘limited, flexible, and nominally deniable interventions” meant to “establish influence on the cheap and secure lucrative review streams, such as from gold mining.” Interestingly, the Africa Corps works both sides of the coup issue. As noted, it offers coup proofing to friendly regimes, but has also supported popular movements to overthrow regimes it considers unfriendly (i.e. - those that are pro-Western) and replace them with military juntas. These “popularly-supported coups” are a new phenomenon, one that Russia did not create, but which it is happily taking advantage of. [35] Activity is not the same as effectiveness, and while the Africa Corps has been active in Africa, there are cascading signs that it has been at a minimum ineffective at providing security for hire for its client governments, and may actually be making things worse. Burkina-Faso serves as an example here. Since Russia’s social media star client, President Ibrahim Traore took power in September 2022, insecurity in Burkina Faso has grown more deadly. As an August 2025 report from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies notes, “fatalities linked to militant Islamist group violence have almost tripled in the past three years, reaching 17,775 deaths. This compares to 6,630 deaths in the three-year period prior to Traoré’s coup.” Violence has also expanded geographically under Traore: the same report notes that some 165,000 square kilometers of Burkina-Faso have seen more violence than they did prior to the coup, representing “an intensification of militant Islamist presence in northern Burkina Faso and an expansion westward and southward toward the borders of the coastal West African countries of Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire.” The effect of this intensification and expansion of violence, which is also happening in other Russian client states like Mali, is likely to damage Russia’s reputation as a security provider on the continent. [37] [36] [33] [34]
// RUSSIA AND CHINA IN AFRICA Delphi Global Research Center
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker