On March 23, Bloomberg reported that the Russian private military company Wagner Group (Wagner PMC) is preparing to “scale back” operations in Ukraine and refocus on Africa.
Wagner Group head and Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin denied that.
On March 22, Prigozhin’s press office published a letter trolling U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
It called on the U.S. to give up efforts to “exert political efforts in Africa and focus solely on the security that the Wagner PMC can provide.”
It then made this claim about the Wagner Group’s supposed positive influence in Africa:
“After the Wagner PMC and I started actively operating in Africa in 2017-2018, we managed to achieve great results in establishing security and order in every country where we were present.”
That is false. The Wagner Group has fueled instability in Africa through violence, corruption and political interference.
The Wagner Group, which the U.S. Treasury Department has called a “Russian Ministry of Defense proxy force,” has been present in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, Mozambique and Sudan, among other countries.
The Wagner Group’s modus operandi includes dropping into politically unstable countries to secure a share of lucrative mineral resources. It has done this in Africa’s Sahel region, which cover parts of Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan.
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