Lawfare Daily: The Wagner Group, One Year After Prigozhin with Vanda Felbab-Brown

[Introduction]

Vanda Felbab-Brown: What happened at the end of July was the Tuaregs signing up once again with JNIM and together taking on the Malian forces and Afrika Korps and causing very significant casualties to both. The largest casualties to Afrika Korps in the country.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast, I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare with Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, co-director of the Africa Security Initiative, and senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Vanda Felbab-Brown: And a lot of the policy would be throwing the spaghetti against the wall, just trying lots of different tactics, many of which fails, many of which didn't pan out, but some that stuck. And ultimately there was a cumulative effect of many more of those efforts sticking. Until now, you have a part of West Africa, essentially under Russia's spell.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about last month's ambush of Mali Soldiers and Russian mercenaries in Northern Mali and what's become of the Wagner Group one year after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin.

[Main Podcast]

So, Vanda, I want to start with recent news events in Northern Mali. In late July there were reports that there were significant losses suffered on the side of the Malian army as well as Russian mercenaries who were fighting alongside them. So could you just set the scene? What do we know about what happened in Northern Mali in late July and who was involved? Who were the actors?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Wagner Group, which is now called Afrika Korps, after the demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, presumably at the hands of the Kremlin, has been deployed to Mali for over a year, almost coming on to two years. And the principal selling point of the Wagner group, Afrika Korps, in Mali is that it will do two things. Protect the junta, protect the government, and make sure that it stays in power through the Praetorian Guard services, as well as through a package of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda on behalf of the government. And the second component of its role is to be fighting the various insurgent groups that operate in Mali, of which there are several. Some are linked with Al Qaeda, like JNIM. Others are linked with the Islamic State or, in fact, are a branch of the Islamic State in the Sahel province. And then there are various Tuareg groups and rebellions that are principally focused on autonomy or independence for a Tuareg area, that's called, that they refer to as Azawad. And that at various times make a deal with the government, separate from the government, go close to actors like JNIM, the Al Qaeda linked group, move more independently.

So when the French forces and the UN forces were in Mali, there had been a ceasefire, a peace deal that was struck several years before between the Tuareg groups and the Malian government. And the peace deal was assuring that the Tuareg’s rebellion were not sign up with JNIM in the Al Qaeda group and instead were staying out of that component of conflict. And the international peacekeeping forces and friends were promoting that idea. They did not want the local rebellions motivated by issues of equitable access to resources, to independence, to autonomy, to share of revenues between Bamako, the capital, and the Northern Tuareg areas, that they did not join the broader jihadi branch. So that was the motivation of the UN supporting the peace deal that had been made, that had been signed in 2016, as well as the French government.

Now, when the French government and the UN forces left, the Afrika Korps, Wagner group, told the Malian government, a-ha, we are now willing to go after your enemies, and your enemies being the Tuareg rebels. That's how the junta saw the Tuareg rebels. And so, in the first months of the first year of the Weidner deployment, they have been principally going after the Tuareg rebels and scored some very important successes in doing so, such as retook the city of Kidal, the crucial base, crucial city for the Tuareg population. And so the junta was elated and for the first time you saw pictures of the Wagner group, Afrika Korps fighters, appearing on media in December, showing off their powers. But inevitably what happened is that when the Wagner group started fighting the Tuareg, the Tuareg said, huh, the peace deal of 2016 is gone. The government's going after us, their foreign proxies are going after us, and of course we are going to then reach out to the Islamist groups, whom in the West we see as crucial Islamist terrorist groups, and we'll join with them to fight back against it.

So up till that point, also it's important to note that the Wagner Group, although it officially sells its purposes, and Moscow sells its purposes as fighting counterinsurgency, fighting counterterrorism broadly, it's actually been very selective. The Afrika Korps and Wagner Group previously have gone to great lengths to actually avoid fighting in any way either the Islamic State in Sahel province, or JNIM, the Al Qaeda led group. And instead they would fight the weaker enemies, the enemies whom the junta designated as the primary enemies, the Tuareg. So this is all a long way of coming to say that what happened at the end of July was the Tuareg signing up once again with JNIM and together taking on the Malian forces and Afrika Korps and causing very significant casualties to both, the largest casualties to Afrika Korps in the country. About 20 fighters are known to have been killed. Two are presumably captured and still in the hands of either of either the Tuareg or the JNIM. Not really clear who owns the hostages, as well as significant casualties suffered by the Malian Army.

Tyler McBrien: So I think because of these significant casualties, the event the two days of fighting has been described in the media as a major blow or a major defeat to Wagner slash Afrika Korps and, and even Russia. But, you know, you, you could also think that perhaps this would, this would sour the Malian relationship, the junta's relationship with the Wagner group, but that hasn't exactly played out. So why is this defeat victory binary a little more complicated in the days since late July?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Yeah, well, you know, I, I, I don't, so, so this is no doubt a big tactical defeat that is poking a hole in the narrative of Afrika Korps. And most quoted, here are the superior fighters who are able to deliver security defined in an extremely narrow sense for the government in a way that the West could not. Let's remember that when international forces were in Mali, French forces that were also the forces of G5 Sahel countries. So the whole narrative was, look, the West has failed over the past 20 years to defeat insurgents, jihadists from Somalia across West Africa.

So here Afrika Korps Wagner will do this very quickly. So this pretty dramatic tactical defeat is a big hole in this narrative of they’re being eight feet tall and the great potency and the special skills that the fighters have. But I don't actually think that there are significant strategic implications for the relationship beyond that technical defeat and beyond that chink or hole in the image. Years ago, Wagner was useful to Moscow because it could claim, there was a level of plausible and increasingly implausible deniability. But Moscow could say, we are not the actor responsible here for failures. Of course, they would claim some sort of ownership for successes. And also there was the issue that Russian soldiers, mercenaries dying in Africa would potentially generate blowback, political blowback, political sensitivities, protests, in Russia.

But that issue has essentially been obviated by Ukraine. Some 300,000 Russian soldiers have died in Russia. As well as, you know, many people who are mercenaries in one form or another, many of whom come from Wagner, have been coming from Wagner, are part of a different entity now than Afrika Korps. They are now, after the demise of Prigozhin, part of the Russian National Guard. But the casualties have been enormous, yet this has not led to any significant protest or challenge to Putin's rule, to the rule of the Kremlin. And so, you know, 20 soldiers, 20 mercenaries dying in Mali I think is of very little significance in terms of any kind of public protest, public blowback in Moscow.

The second dimension is, is the Malian government now very angry and unhappy? I am sure they are unhappy, but they also don't have any, many other options. It's not like they can say today Wagner go out or Afrika Korps go out and have a readily available alternative, especially since the government is a junta that made the decision to embrace the two other juntas in West Africa, in Niger and in Burkina Faso, in a visible challenge and pushback against the West. The three countries also created a new Sahel alliance, divorcing themselves from ECOWAS, from the larger regional West African country, as economic forum or economic regional grouping. So it's a chink, it's a hole, it's a problem for the image, but I don't think it carries significantly beyond that.

Now, if we are going to end up in a situation where there are repeated incidents like this, where Wagner, Afrika Korps are coming under attack, are suffering casualties, are not able to hold territories, then cumulatively I think we will be getting in a situation of exposure of the limitation and weaknesses. And that's when we are going to get to strategic effects. I actually think that over time this will happen. Look, the group, the proxy actor, semi proxy, semi private actor of Moscow is appealing to African governments because it's selling a license to brutality. Unlike the West and its assistants, it does not come with demands that it protects noncombatants from violence. In fact, the policy that it sells and that it constantly engages in is we brutalize local populations so they don't support the insurgents and we brutalize the insurgents. There are very many documented cases of Afrika Korps, Wagner Group, engaging in massacres in teaching the Malian forces how to torture prisoners, be they local people or presumably captured Tuareg or jihadi group members. And, and that's their whole selling point which is very appealing to the governments. Much more so than the West saying no, you cannot slaughter entire villages, and no, you cannot torture people, and no, we are not going to give you lethal assistance if this is how you behave.

But the other selling point is, in addition to the license to brutalize people, is that they will prevail. And they have not been prevailing. You have really only one significant success for Wagner, and that's the original success in the Central African Republic, where they faced a pretty ragtag band, ethnic band of insurgents, that was a big challenge for the capital, that was a big challenge for the government of the Central African Republic. You had those rebels coming very close to Bangui, the capital. But it's a much less potent force than what they are encountering in Burkina Faso, in Mali, in places where you have the Islamic State in the Sahel province and al Qaeda in groups like JNIIM operating, where their effectiveness has been much more limited. And they have been trying to stay out of those fights, focusing on the Praetorian Guard function, on fighting the ethnic weaker enemies like the Tuaregs, and of course on providing security and taking over gold and diamond mines.

You know, there is one other significant dimension to what has happened, which is something that we are still waiting to see. And that is, what kind of response will there then be from Afrika Korps and the Mali forces? Are they going to move into the areas where they were defeated and try to kill a lot of villagers, try to brutalize the population, accusing them of supporting either Tuareg or Jihadi insurgents. You know, are we to see a lot of revenge brutality, which is very much part and parcel of Soviet Russian counterinsurgency doctrine? And is, what kind of conflict dynamics is that going to drive? Now, of course, such acts are horrendous in and of itself, and people suffer and die egregiously through such actions. But such actions also generate blowback and become deeply counterproductive. So this is yet to be seen. What kind of response will Afrika Korps and the Malian army launch in response?

Tyler McBrien: Has Moscow commented on the events of late July or are they still maintaining this plausible, or implausible deniability even in a post-Prigozhin Wagner group?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Well, as far as I know they haven't commented and you know, frankly, this is not very much of the news in Russia now. Of course, all news in Russia is extremely, tightly controlled. And given Ukraine's successful incursion for now into Kursk, you know, there is little motivation in the Kremlin to be highlighting another tactical failure. But the plausible deniability is out. The whole restructuring of Wagner after Prigozhin's march on Moscow and ultimately the assassination of Prigozhin, Utkin, and the rest of the core Wagner leadership was about the visible explicit takeover of the group by GRU, the, the old name for military intelligence in Russia that we still use today, and by the Ministry of Defense.

But it is really the military spies. People like Averyanov specializing in what they call special operations, assassination, sabotage, recruitment, that have taken over the military aspects of Wagner in Africa. And so the relationship is now explicitly with the Russian government. And indeed you know, engagements between Moscow and other countries like in Niger in this summer or this, the spring rather, with São Tomé and Principe, and Guinea-Bissau, and as well as in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are explicitly now engagements with the government of Moscow and the national government of that particular country.

That doesn't mean that all Wagner structures were eliminated especially in a place like the Central African Republic where the Wagner Group was so deeply embedded in the economy, in political relations. Where you in fact had the Russian, former Russian government official be the national security advisor of the president. There are many assets that Moscow has wanted to preserve. But the, the leadership, the relationship, the definition is now the face of the government.

Tyler McBrien: So many, if not all of our listeners are familiar with the Wagner Group, but I suspect that many have not thought about it since last year when Prigozhin, as you mentioned, met his demise in an airplane crash. You began to talk about how the Wagner Group was restructured, how some of the assets were redistributed, rebranded to Afrika Korps. Could you just fill out that story? What has happened in the past year after Prigozhin's death? What lessons did Putin take from, from the, you know, the, the march on Moscow? What, what is what has been going on with Wagner over the past year?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Well, so the most important lesson for Moscow was that these privateers, who were never fully privateers like Prigozhin, had to have a much shorter leash. And that the government control would become much more intrusive, much more explicit, much more direct, so that there would be no chance of any kind of rebellion and threat occurring.

Under Prigozhin, the Wagner Group presented itself as a private security company of Russia. Or sometimes not even using that label, because legally, private security companies in Russia are not allowed to exist. They are not allowed to operate, or at least were not at the time. There have been some changes to Russia's law since which give it more of a legal standing, and especially now with the direct government visible role and, and takeover. But during Prigozhin, officially, private security companies were not supposed to exist, yet unofficially, here was this conglomerate of private security actors. Many of which had been linked to Russian intelligence services was not just Wagner. You have other companies like Redut that still operate today, Convoy. All linked to Russian intelligence services, staffed and led by people who were either in or formerly in private security, special operations forces, rather for Russia. Wagner was part of it.

And then also were engaged in other activities. Economic activities through the various companies that were being set up to brew beer and sell beer in the Central African Republic, to extract gold and diamonds, to go into the private pockets of people employed by Wagner, including Prigozhin, but as well as to Moscow, and as well as to special operations services. And, of course, there was the propaganda, misinformation, disinformation element.

So Moscow wanted to retain all these assets and their selling points, the services they could sell to government, which in a, a Rusi paper was very aptly called the regime survival package. But at the same time, it wanted a much direct control over the group to prevent the chance that there would be another rebellion and to, in fact, minimize the existing frictions that had been developing over many months. And in fact, some of them were going on over many years. Where you know, Prigozhin was a tool of Moscow, but, but came to believe more and more that he was his own man, that he was very powerful, that he had such a close relationship with Putin, that he, that he could take on his many rivals and enemies in the Ministry of Defense in Russia, including, of course, the Minister of Defense, Shoigu, and the head of general staff, General Gerasimov. And all these very many enemies that he had that were jealous of the income he was making that were outraged by the criticism of their military performance in Ukraine finally got fed up and said, oh no, you are not going to operate this way. Your time is over. And his move on, on, his march on Moscow in June of 2023 was kind of the last desperate push to preserve what he believed was the autonomy of his empire and not allowed it to be taken over directly by the Russian state, which is what has happened.

So, how has the restructuring taken place? Essentially, Wagner was divided depending on what area you are. The Wagner forces that operate in Ukraine have been rolled into the Russian National Guard. Some of them are nominally headed by the son of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Pavel. But pretty much it is widely understood that Pavel is the decorative side of it, that really has very limited power, far less so even than his father had before he fell down from grace. Some of the units have also been incorporated into the Chechen Militias led by Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov is, of course, the strongman in Chechnya, who is a very close ally of Putin, who helped defeat the independent, separatist, Islamist movement in Chechnya, has been a close, loyal ally of Putin, was one of the people early on during the March on Moscow a year ago signaling his full support for Putin, not, not hesitating, not trying to see who will prevail. So some of the Wagner units in Ukraine, Europe have joined his Chechen militia's mercenaries.

In Africa and the Middle East, it really depends on location. The vast majority of the African deployments have been under Afrika Korps. In some cases, like in Syria, which is of course in the Middle East, they have been rolled into the Russian military. There are some Wagner leaders in Africa like Dimitri Sytyi and other in the Central African Republic that are still in place. Elsewhere, you have new people coming in, but the, the leadership structure is a combination of the Ministry of Defense, the deputy minister of defense, and most importantly, the Russian military intelligence services, which we call GRU, and General Averyanov.

Tyler McBrien: I want to go back to Prigozhin for, for just one more question. In preparation for this conversation, I had a chance to revisit a great interview you did in the days after Prigozhin's death on PBS. And the host asked how essential Prigozhin was to the Wagner Empire. And the first thing you said was, there's a lot of mythologizing around Prigozhin. So I'm curious, in the past year, how much of that myth has been dispelled? How much of it has been proven true? What is Prigozhin's legacy now, a year on?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Well, a fantasist who thought that he owned much more of an empire than he was actually allowed to own, right? I mean, if Prigozhin understood all along that he was a servant of the Kremlin and Moscow and did not was satisfied with the significant income that he was making, and was satisfied with the deal, and understood that at the end of the day, whatever his public persona, public propaganda is, he takes order from Moscow, he would still be a very rich and influential man and live a happy life. Instead, he is dead and his economic empire has been carved up. His family lost many of the assets that he built. You know, some are still alive but it's not like the Russian state decimated the rest of the family. But Prigozhin is gone.

And the transition in Africa and in the Middle East and places like Syria and even in Ukraine have really shown that Moscow can go on without Prigozhin. And that it is capable of absorbing the military assets and services and propaganda as well that Prigozhin was delivering. I think where we have the least visibility and where there might be potentially the largest challenges is on the economic side of the empire. But there were very many economic groups, entities, shell companies, frequently changing name as they would come under western sanctions, connected to large scale smuggling through the United Arab Emirates, through Turkey, laundering money through a variety of countries in the Gulf, laundering gold through India, as well as United Arab Emirates. And we kind of have a sense that these have been carved up, gobbled up by other influential privateers, intelligence service actors, military, Ministry of Defense actors, or people in this closed circuit. But who specifically got what, how much, it's much more opaque. And the question is, how well will the economic side of the empire function under new structure, which we also don't have very good sense.

Now, I would say that part of the myth was that Prigozhin was a brilliant businessman. Well, we have to understand that a lot of the money that he was getting was coming from the Kremlin, was coming from the Russian state in the first place. A lot of the weapons were coming from the Russian state. So, it was never the case, really, that the Wagner Group was self-sustainable. I mean, this is often what Moscow would have liked. It doesn't want to be devoting significant resources to this entity. It was self-sustainable to some extent, but you have these complex funnels of: the money would go to Prigozhin under service food contracts for the military, and then Prigozhin would use some of that money that came originally from the contract to put in the Wagner Group, and then Wagner Group would generate some money in diamonds and gold, often exaggerated. You often hear that, you know, they would be getting 2.8 billion out of one gold mine in the Central African Republic, where the entire potential production of that gold mine is 1.8 billion, right? So hardly something they were getting on a monthly basis. They were getting maybe hundreds of millions in totality out of that mine, but way order of magnitude and way order of magnitude of timescale difference than what's being put.

But nonetheless, I think this is kind of the biggest question and challenge, yes. How sustainable or not, economically, will the changes be? How much that will irritate or please Moscow? Russian intelligence services have been overall quite apart from the Wagner Group, really, on instruction over the past two years to be self-funding and to be, and we have seen a much more robust embrace of organized crime and illicit activities of all kinds. All kinds of smuggling, not just as a way to avoid Western sanctions and bring sensitive technologies to Russia under sanctions, but also generate funding for particular operations of the intelligence forces. And you know, I think there's an expectation that Afrika Korps and the GRU in Africa will be generating funding for the operations that it wants to conduct. And if it fails, that might generate displeasure with Moscow. You know, you hear frequently that the price that's being asked of the core governments of Central African Republic and Mali is something like 10 million a month for services. For government of the Central African Republic, this is not small cash.

Tyler McBrien: So in light of everything we've been talking about, the year of restructuring after Prigozhin's death, the recent setbacks in Mali, the way the war is going in Ukraine, what do you make of Russia's Africa policy now? Is Africa still important to Moscow? Is it still worth the trouble? You know, what do you see, what are you looking at in the coming months in terms of Russian operations in Africa?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Well, Africa still continues to be very important for Moscow. Russia's principal lens in Africa is not counter terrorism, it is anti-Western agenda. Second core element of that is acquiring strategic bases from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, where Libya, of course, plays a crucial role. And we've seen tremendous amount of Afrika Korps activity in Libya. Libya is also the place that is one of the big logistical hubs, along with Syria, to be moving Wagner forces, Afrika Korps forces into Africa. And we are seeing activities now along the Atlantic, where I am particularly concerned about engagements with Guinea Bissau and, and São Tomé and Príncipe, which is partially driven by desire to get access to the Atlantic coast.

But what is even more worrisome to me is the possibility that there really will be a very thick intermeshing between major organized crime groups in Africa from Latin America and Russian intelligence forces if we end up seeing a lot more activity of Russia in Guinea Bissau in particular. It's, Guinea Bissau is a huge cocaine conduit. You have Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación. You have Primeiro Comando da Capital, the major Brazilian groups. You have all kinds of European groups, various of the Italian mafias like 'Ndrangheta. And of course you have African groups and a very troubled government. And so this is a perfect mixture not to become enormously rich for Russia, but it's a perfect mixture to develop connections to widespread organized crime groups, expand and thicken those connections that could be used by Russia for all kinds of really problematic hybrid warfare.

Russia is still very focused on of course, resources. The assets in Africa facilitate both getting income and revenue, but they also facilitate money laundering and creation of networks that evade Western sanctions. Russia has been really successful in developing a wide spectrum of smuggling networks and evasion systems that run the gamut of North Korea, China, Turkey, the Middle East, Central Asian countries. And Africa is part of that money laundering evasion story.

And finally, there is the diplomatic image of Moscow, which Russia has been cultivating and legitimizing its egregious behavior by getting international acceptance. So Ukraine has been focused and hopeful that it will get African countries to condemn Russia's egregious invasion, its massive breach of international law, and has not been successful in that at all. Russia still has a lot of Cold War legacy friends in Africa from very important countries like South Africa to smaller countries in the West, in Central Africa. And so this legitimation, this portrayal of, of Russia as a legitimate actor, as a new partner is a very important part of Russia's policies in Africa.

And you know, we've seen lots of setbacks for the West. The West having to leave Niger where junta took over despite U.S. efforts. The West was not able to reverse the junta military takeover, was not able to induce the junta handing power back to the civilians. Nor was it able to maintain any kind of working relationship with the junta, with U.S. being expelled out of a very expensive, very important counterterrorism base. Relations similarly crashed completely with Mali, with Burkina Faso.

Russia has been very active in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the West still has access to, the U.S. has been making very determined effort to make sure the DRC military and the government, the civilian government, do not solely or strongly embrace Moscow. We have seen some military deals between the DRC and Moscow over the past year. This year there have been all kinds of rumors about Afrika Korps fighters there helping the government fight the M23. So far those have not been really proven. And instead the private, there are many private security companies, but the ones that people were often saying this is Afrika Korps turned out to be Romanian and Bulgarian in principle. But Moscow is very engaged. It's setting up military assistance treaties and deals in DRC.

So it's still making a very active play for Africa with the explicit goal of countering the West and just explicitly driving its policy to be anti-Western. And I would also say that Africa, more than a decade ago, really became the place where Russia just was explicit about what was coming. Look, in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, we saw Russia starting to make problematic moves in Afghanistan, like providing intelligence and weapons to the Taliban to fight the West.

But this was much more hidden, was part of hedging, was not, there were limits to how far Moscow would go with the Taliban. But in Africa, starting 2015, the Russian policy was blatantly, no matter what terrorist issues there are, no matter what other issues there are, the number one operating principle is just cross the U.S. wherever you can. And a lot of that policy would be throwing the spaghetti against the wall, just trying lots of different tactics, many of which failed, many of which didn't pan out, but some that stuck. And ultimately there was a cumulative effect of many more of those efforts sticking until now you have part of West Africa essentially under Russia's spell.

And Russia, of course, claims that this is part of the new fight against colonialism, that countries like France and the United States are just new or extended forms of colonialism, whereas Russia is bringing to Africa true freedom, true independence, true autonomy. Well, Russian policy is far more egregiously colonialist where it really tries to put significant screws on the governments who it supports, where the goal is to acquire disproportionate economic resources to dictate policies as it creates regime dependency on Moscow support. So it's very, very colonial like policy under the propaganda disguise that it is anti-colonialist.

Tyler McBrien: Well, I think as your last answer illustrates so well, Russian operations in Africa can be a very complex web of countries and military groups and competing interests. So I really want to thank you for, for taking the time to talk to me to help disentangle that web if only for a conversation. So thank you so much for, for joining me.

Vanda Felbab-Brown: Thank you for having me, Tyler.

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