Putin's paramilitary 2.0
What the Wagner Group's successor has been doing, after its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a failed rebellion this week, three years ago.
This week, three years ago, Wagner financier and leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a failed rebellion. I sat down with international affairs expert Candace Rondeaux to discuss its successor, Africa Corps.
The Wagner Group operated as the Kremlin’s shadow army, deploying mercenaries across Africa and the Middle East for political influence, weapons sales, and mineral riches — committing massive human rights abuses along the way.
It was “an experiment in 2014 that had a Frankenstein quality by summer in 2023,” Candace had told me before we spoke on SpyCast. On June 24, 2023, Prigozhin captured military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and advanced toward Moscow with his columns. After he died in a plane explosion, Vladimir Putin’s security services moved to assert direct control of his paramilitary.
“I really would cast this as Wagner 2.0 in Africa,” Candace said, author of Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. Some Wagner forces went into Russia’s National Guard, others trained special forces in Belarus. Information operations went to the SVR, Russia’s foreign intel service, and military operations are overseen by the GRU, Russia’s military intel service.
Candace described similar military detachment structures, “but the social contract that Prigozhin offered under the guise of Wagner seems like it has been broken on some level.” Our conversation was dominated by a tug of war between people and operations in Ukraine and Africa.
Citizens of such countries as Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa “have been bamboozled into thinking that they’re going to get private military security training or be bodyguards.” Then they get deployed to the front in Ukraine. What started as a few hundred Africans has become thousands, she said, citing Ukraine’s special forces. “What this tells us is that Russia is really having a manpower problem [in Ukraine].”
Africa Corps’ operations are running smoothly in the Central African Republic. But in Mali, it has faced both internal and external strife. In 2024, a confrontation with rebels near the border town of Tinzaouaten saw dozens of Africa Corps forces injured and killed.
“This was a moment when I think people on the ground in the Africa Corps started to realize that maybe the [Ministry of Defense] didn't care about them nearly as much. There were complaints about bodies being in refrigeration for weeks and months before they were sent back home for burial. There was a lot of problems [regarding] hostage-taking.”
In 2025, jihadist forces upended what had been Wagner’s command of Malian airspace. And wouldn’t you know, these Azawad rebels were supported by Ukrainian special forces. “One was drone operations, but two was Starlink. The Ukrainians are just masters of this technology, combining it all together,” Candace said.
Then came Africa Corps’ “mini mutiny” in Mali, which she said lasted a few weeks. “There was a detachment that refused to fight.” It’s unclear what happened to those men.
We also talked about how mercenaries are turning up on vessels that belong to Russia’s shadow fleet, an armada of old tankers secretly carrying oil and gas to evade international sanctions. “A conveyor belt affect,” she called it.
In January, the U.S. seized the Bella 1, which had attempted to evade capture for 18 days. Most of the crew was found to be Russian and Ukrainian (from Crimea and Odesa). “They discover after interviewing all the crew members that the first mate and the captain had been basically on the phone the entire time, getting directions from a guy named ‘Kiril’... the assumption is that he was a GRU contact.” The vessel had also been working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is thought that these vessels have been transporting uranium, as well as gold.
Ukrainian special forces have also been targeting these ships. For example, they attacked a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean back in March. “Initially there seems to have been some coordination with U.S. intelligence and the Ukrainians targeting these ships with drones,” she said.
I asked her if the U.S. intelligence community was keeping a close watch on Africa Corps. “I think that this administration, the Trump administration, has completely depleted the capacity of our U.S. intelligence forces to do any work on the Russia file, frankly, and has done so purposely,” she said.
I asked her how Africa Corps would evolve, if the U.S. intelligence community wasn’t prioritizing Russia or its paramilitaries, whether Africa Corps will be degraded country by country from within. “I would argue that while the war in Ukraine continues, it will be very hard for Russia to achieve the scale that they originally had in mind for the Africa Corps.”
Episode length: 38 minutes
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