Putin's Private Army: Using Mercenaries Against Kyiv
Vladimir Putin has internationalized his war against Ukraine by welcoming mercenaries from the Middle East and Africa, and by continuing to enlist employees of the shady Wagner group in his ground attacks against Ukrainian civilians. Although he falsely accuses the United States, Europe, and NATO of provoking him and Russia, his bringing non-Russians into his Ukrainian maelstrom has now added a new and dangerous dimension to what ostensibly was a war to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s embrace.
Already, elements of “Putin’s Private Army,” former military intelligence operatives recruited to expand Russian state intervention in places like Syria and the Central African Republic, have been brought back to fight first in the breakaway satrapies in eastern Ukraine and now in the massive genocidal assault on all of Ukraine’s civilians. Observers in Central Africa, Mali, and Syria report movements beginning in January of Wagner Group mercenaries returning to fight alongside regular conscripts against President Volodymyr Zelensky’s defending troops in Ukraine. Today, Wagner contingents, along with Chechen fighters lent by the despotic head of that so-called internal republic, are giving backbone to the otherwise hapless Russian forces encircling Kyiv.
The Russian defense minister says that he is also recruiting Middle Easterners to help fight the war, and gave the number of persons ready to fight as “16,000”. But the countries from which those mercenaries are being recruited are not specified. In Africa, however, the Central African Republic is supplying “volunteers,” and Cameroonians and a few residents of the Democratic Republic of Congo also claim to be ready to join their “brothers” on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltering so much that Putin and henchmen need to bolster their military forces with African and Arab reinforcements? Or is Putin’s welcome of such support mostly part of his false news exercise? Doubtlessly, Putin is also looking for friendly advocates wherever he can find them amid a largely hostile globe. And the pro-Russian demonstrations in Bangui, the capital city of Central Africa, are largely aroused and remunerated by Russia’s active embassy there.
Eighteen detachments of Wagner Group mercenaries have been hired by African presidents and despots to guard state palaces, protect unpopular leaders, and provide at least rudimentary security services in a collection of shaky countries. Another ten Wagner Group operatives are active in the Middle East and Asia.
Malian coup leaders in 2021 began pushing away a 5500-strong French force that ousted Islamists from fabled Timbukutu in 2013 and ever since has prevented ISIS and al-Qaeda insurgents from overrunning the populated southern half of that Sahelian country. Two successive military coups by Malian junior officers ousted elected governments, to the annoyance of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and France. The second coup led to a decision by its new military leaders to call in Wagner and dismiss troops from France, the country’s one-time colonial master. According to the UN, the 1000 or so Wagnerites in Mali seem more focused on plunder than on protection. They have “abducted, tortured and killed people on an unabated and unpunished basis.”.
In the Central African Republic, where a 15,000 member United Nations Peacekeeping Mission has separated Muslim Séléka armed rebels from Anti-Balaka Christian defenders since 2018, President Faustin-Archange Touadéra’s hold on power has long been tenuous. He invited the Wagner establishment to keep his peace in 2019; its 1100 men are in one of Africa’s poorest lands, but they can plunder diamonds, gold, and elephant ivory. A former high-ranking member of Putin’s security services now acts as President Touadéra’s special advisor.
Putin’s people call the Wagnerites “private military companies,” and profess to know little about them. But that is another one of Russia’s false flag operations. Wagner seems to be owned or controlled by Yevgeniy Prigozhian, an oligarch who has a catering empire and who is close to Putin and runs other franchises for his president. He may indeed front for Putin in this enterprise as well as in others. Mali claims, however, that the Wagnerites are in that country as part of a formal “state-to-state” arrangement.
Wagner’s work in Libya has been well documented on behalf of the former general who rules the country’s eastern (and oil rich) half (Cyrenaica) and attacks the UN-backed government in Tripoli, in the west. This Wagner outpost is funded from local oil proceeds, but also by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. According to the UN, on behalf of warlord General Khalifa Hifter the Wagnerites plant explosive booby traps in residential areas and commit “summary executions” in support of his agenda. Erik Prince’s Blackwater Group cooperated with Wagner and at one time worked for Hifter.
In Sudan, a Wagner entity five years ago joined the ruling military junta in “violently cracking down” on crowds protesting the continued dictatorial rule of President Omar al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal, before he was ousted by other officers. Wagner’s bosses received lucrative gold concessions.
In Mozambique, Wagner was hired in 2019 by the government to battle ISIS-affiliated Islamist insurgents in Cabo Delgado province, but it has since been replaced by more effective regular Rwandan and South African military commandos.
Wagner has also had active contracts in Madagascar, Yemen, and Syria, where they still work for and protect dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as Russia’s expanded interests in oil and smuggling proceeds.
Mali has gold and lithium. According to Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of the U. S. Africa Command, impoverished Mali is somehow paying its Wagner Group about $10 million a month. Where that kind of money would come from is unclear. However, US Navy Rear Admiral Milton Sands, head of Special Operations Command Africa, told the Washington Post that “Wagner comes in, further destabilizes the country, ravages the mineral resources and makes as much money as they can before they choose to leave…The country is left poorer, weaker and less secure. Every time.”
North of Timbuktu, where the Sahara desert prevails, the Wagnerites have replaced the French, and taken control of bases and landing strips used previously to deter jihadists of the Islamic State in West Africa and their allied and related al-Qaeda counterparts. It is not clear whether Wagner has the capacity or the will to protect Mali and neighboring Ivory Coast, Niger, and Burkina Faso as well as did the French, supported previously by British and Danish battle groups and by American Special Forces operating mostly out of a base in northwestern Niger. However, the president of Niger has condemned the presence of the Wagnerites in his region and in his fight. His Ivory Coast counterpart said that hiring Wagner mercenaries would be “suicide.”
Putin has now summoned these Wagner operatives home from Africa and Syria to employ battle-hardened skills against the civilians of Kyiv. Doing so only accentuates Putin’s genocidal drive, and further deepens death and destruction in Ukraine.