DEEP DIVE — More than a year after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the infamous leader of the shadowy Russian mercenary outfit known as the Wagner Group, the organization itself lives on. It’s been rebranded and reorganized, but the group is back in action.
Wagner 2.0 now functions under the name “Expeditionary Corps,” sometimes used interchangeably with “Volunteer Corps” and – in its Africa operations – “Africa Corps.” And whatever name it uses, the group no longer operates with an independent hand; it’s now under the direct control of the Kremlin’s military intelligence wing, the GRU.
The datelines have shifted somewhat, but the group’s work is similar – security services and rough soldiering to advance Russian interests wherever its forces are deployed.
“The metamorphosis of the Wagner Group is akin to the change in Twitter,” Andrew Lewis, president of the intelligence and geospatial monitoring firm The Ulysses Group, told The Cipher Brief. “It’s a new name, and there is some new management. However, it still serves the same purpose for Russia.”
Under new management
Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August 2023, two months after his stunning – and ultimately aborted – attempted coup against Vladimir Putin. It’s widely believed that the crash was no accident, and that Putin had ordered the killing. The “Wagner Group” as a name was laid to rest as well, but tens of thousands of its fighters remained and were placed under the control of the GRU’s General Andrei Averyanov in September 2023.
Averyanov heads the GRU's covert Unit 29155, notorious for the targeted killings of anti-Kremlin dissidents and various foreign operations. The unit is believed to have been behind the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom.
Under Averyanov’s rule, the rebranded “Expeditionary Corps” is said to operate with the same resources and a similarly brutal approach. A key change since Prigozhin’s death has been the group’s clear connection to the Kremlin.
Joseph Siegle, Director of Research at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said that since the rebranding, “Moscow can no longer hide behind the veil of deniability that Wagner isn’t part and parcel of Russian Ministry of Defense operations.”
In the past, Siegle said, “when there were allegations of human rights abuses committed by Wagner, the Russian government would deny that they had any control over the group.” Now, he says, “this ‘plausible deniability’ argument no longer holds any credibility.”
New mission: More Africa, less Ukraine
From the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Wagner Group was deployed to aid the Russian war effort. Its forces had been active many years earlier in Ukraine, during Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, and when the full-scale invasion came, an estimated 50,000 Wagner mercenaries were sent to the fight. The Russian victory at Bakhmut, in May 2023, was largely credited to Wagner forces; a Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel later reported that 22,000 of its fighters were killed in that battle alone.
Since Prigozhin’s demise, the group has been less visible in Ukraine, and more active in the place where it first made a name for itself: Africa.
“With the involvement and oversight of the GRU,” Lewis told The Cipher Brief, “the ties they established in Africa now seem to be strengthened.”
According to the Polish Institute of International Affairs, a think tank, in the aftermath of Prigozhin’s death, “the Russian state’s attention in (Africa) not only did not weaken but strengthened.”
Russia first deployed Wagner Group forces to Africa in 2017, as a cost-effective strategy to expand the Kremlin’s influence, and counter the U.S. presence on the continent. Wagner forces were sent to a dozen countries, ostensibly to provide security but often in the pursuit of natural resources and other Russian interests. Nearly everywhere it went, the Wagner Group was accused of widespread human rights abuses as it carried out whatever security services were in demand.
Now, in line with the post-Prigozhin rebrand, the Wagner Group forces are back in Africa, referred to by the Russian defense ministry as its “Africa Corps.”
“Russia’s Africa Corps has bases across northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, including three air bases in Libya that it can use to extend its operations and influence,” Lewis said. “They use these for logistics, power projection, moving resources out of the continent and masking ownership and sourcing to avoid sanctions, all to the disadvantage of the U.S. and Western interests.”
“They are not just undermining U.S. and European policy in the region, they want to present Russia as a more reliable security partner than the U.S. for the juntas,” Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, told The Cipher Brief.
The U.S. still has an estimated 6,000 U.S. troops in various small bases and outposts across Africa, focused primarily on supporting local militaries to counter terrorism in the region.
By contrast, Siegle said that the primary aim of of the Wagner/Africa Corps forces is “to prop up Russian-friendly regimes, thereby providing Moscow an entry point and lever of influence in countries in which Russia has limited engagement otherwise.”
“The Russian forces are not fighting extremists but are attempting to coup-proof these unpopular and fragile regimes,” Siegle explained. “This advances Russia’s geostrategic interests of giving the impression that it is expanding its influence despite Russia’s isolation.”
That influence may grow in the coming years. In the Central African Republic (CAR), the newly minted Africa Corps is reportedly developing a base to host some 10,000 troops by 2030 and serve as a hub for Russian military operations in Africa.
As Hassan Bouba, the CAR's Minister of Livestock, recently told The Economist, true friends “are those who are by your side in the most difficult moments. And Russia was with us in the most difficult of moments.” He was referring to help provided by the Wagner Group when his government faced an armed rebellion in 2021.
Exploiting Resources in Africa
From its first forays into Africa, the Wagner Group has been active in the pursuit of mineral wealth. In the CAR, Wagner won access to the country’s most lucrative gold and diamond mines.
It appears that the same blueprint is in play today. The mineral-rich Sahel region of Africa, a hotspot of violent extremism, military coups, and geopolitical competition, remains a key operational area for the Africa Corps. A recent analysis by Britain’s Royal United Services (RUSI) noted that Moscow is using the Corps to offer African governments a “regime survival package,” which entails trading political and military support for strategic access to Africa’s mineral wealth.
More than one hundred well-armed Africa Corps “advisors” arrived in Burkina Faso earlier this year, with more expected in the coming weeks and months. Meanwhile, hundreds of Russian-backed fighters have been accused of bolstering the military junta in Mali, which took control of the Intahaka gold mine earlier this year. Mali’s natural resources range from gold and timber to uranium and lithium.
“There is warranted concern that the Africa Corps now has given Russia significant control over strategic natural resources in Africa,” Karl Kaltenthaler, Director of the Michael J. Morell Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Akron, told The Cipher Brief. “These resources include lithium and uranium, crucial for Europe’s energy sector. Gaining control over such resources gives Russia income and leverage over countries dependent on these resources.”
And while the former Wagner forces may be less active than they once were in Ukraine, experts worry that the revitalized Africa Corps continues to extract huge amounts of revenue from its Africa expeditions – and that those funds are likely being used to bolster Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
The U.S. response
The U.S. has continued to sanction companies connected to Wagner – whether under the the old name or its new ones.
In May, the U.S. imposed sanctions on two companies supporting the outfit – one firm for allegedly importing mining chemicals and leasing planes to the mercenary group, and the other for having received numerous shipments of heavy equipment from a company linked to Prigozhin.
“The Russia-backed Wagner Group and its network of businesses have exploited the people and natural resources of the Central African Republic to advance the group’s agenda,” said Brian Nelson, the U.S. Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “The United States will continue to use its sanctions authorities to disrupt those supporting Russia’s destabilizing activities in Africa.”
Kaltenthaler said that the U.S. is engaged in diplomatic efforts to restore some of the influence it has lost in Africa, and to blunt Russian gains on the continent, primarily by “helping to contain and degrade the growing jihadist insurgencies in the region.”
But he added that “while the United States government is making more of an effort to treat Africa as a strategically important continent, there is more that can be done in terms of directing American resources and attention to a region where the Russians are successfully using the former Wagner Group to build their power to the detriment of the West.”
Siegle concurred that there is more to be done.
“The U.S. is not directly acting to counter Russia’s paramilitary actions,” he said. “Russia’s attempts to support military juntas in Africa are a threat to African sovereignty and democracy. What the U.S. and West can be doing is communicating and demonstrating that they offer an alternative approach for engaging with the continent.”
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