Moscow’s new scramble for Africa
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
Russia has spent the past decade building what critics call a twenty-first-century colonial enterprise in Africa – one that trades guns and mercenaries for gold, diamonds, and political leverage. The vehicle changed names in 2023, but the transactional logic has not: protect an embattled ruler and take a cut of the country’s mineral wealth in return.
This pattern began around 2017-2018, when Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group forged security and commercial ties with elite networks in Sudan and the Central African Republic, then deployed mercenaries to prop up CAR (Central African Republic) President Faustin-Archange Touadéra’s besieged government. Wagner went on to back Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army from 2018, tried and failed at a short intervention in Mozambique in 2019, and entered Mali in 2021 after a string of coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger opened the door for Russia to displace France as the region’s security patron.
Everything changed after Prigozhin launched a failed mutiny against Vladimir Putin in June 2023 and died in a plane explosion two months later. Moscow used his death to dissolve Wagner’s independent command and fold its operations into the Africa Corps, run directly by the Ministry of Defense and staffed partly by GRU (Russian Federation) military intelligence officers answering straight to the Kremlin. As of early 2026, the largest Russian deployments sit in CAR, Libya, and Mali, with smaller contingents training troops in Niger and Equatorial Guinea and reported ambitions for bases in Sudan and along Guinea’s coast.
The commercial logic behind this footprint is blunt. A Carnegie Endowment analysis summarizes Russia’s stated aim in Mali as simply to “protect the junta and protect the mines” – trading weapons, training, and combat troops for mining concessions and long-term supply contracts. The Africa Center’s “Blood Gold Report” estimates the Kremlin has extracted more than $2.5 billion in African gold since 2022 through mining operations tied to Wagner and its successor across Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic, laundering it through corporate shells and destinations including Russia and the United Arab Emirates to help finance the war in Ukraine. In the Central African Republic, Wagner-linked firms similarly moved into diamond mining and lobbied for lifting the international “blood diamond” embargo on the country, seeking to convert a conflict-mineral ban into a revenue stream for the Kremlin’s regional client.
In Sudan, Wagner’s involvement dates to 2017, when then-President Omar al-Bashir invited the group in after meeting Putin in Moscow. Wagner set up the company Meroe Gold to mine and process gold near Al-Ibaidiya, paying local artisanal miners for their output while relying on the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary of General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, to guard its operations. That partnership entangled Moscow directly in Sudan’s civil war: when fighting broke out between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army (SAF) in 2023, Russian gold interests sat on one side of a conflict that has since killed and displaced millions, illustrating how mineral access and battlefield allegiance became inseparable. The U.S. Treasury has responded with rounds of sanctions on Wagner and affiliated firms, accusing the network of mass executions, rape, and child abductions in CAR and Mali alongside the looting of gold, diamonds, and timber across the continent.
Russian forces have not remained neutral brokers in African civil wars; they have fought. In CAR, they helped Touadéra’s army retake territory from rebel coalitions and provided his personal security, reportedly aiding his reelection to a third term after constitutional term limits were removed. In Mali, Wagner helped the junta seize the Tuareg stronghold of Kidal in November 2023, an operation marred by what Le Monde describes as “countless massacres of civilians.” That gain proved fragile: in April 2026, a coordinated offensive by Tuareg separatists of the Azawad Liberation Front and al-Qaeda-linked fighters overran Africa Corps positions, killed Mali’s Russia-aligned defense minister Sadio Camara in a suspected suicide bombing, and forced Russian troops to negotiate their withdrawal from Kidal even as Moscow publicly claimed to have thwarted a coup.
What emerges is a pattern consistent with historical colonial extraction rather than genuine partnership: foreign fighters entrench unaccountable regimes, exploit resource wealth with little local benefit, and treat African civil conflicts as opportunities for geopolitical positioning against the West. Rebranding Wagner as the state-controlled Africa Corps has not changed that model – it has only tightened the Kremlin’s direct grip on it. As Sahelian militaries discover, Moscow’s mercenaries are reliable so long as the mines keep producing and the client regime keeps standing; when either of them falters, as in Kidal, the limits of this transactional empire quickly show.
