When the Wagner Group’s combatants advanced on Moscow in June 2023 in an attempted coup d’etat, their abortive mutiny offered a rare glimpse into what happens when a private military company (PMC) grows powerful enough to challenge the state. But as global media attention has remained fixed on the Kremlin’s many woes and internal divisions, the coup’s most enduring consequences have unfolded thousands of miles away—in Africa. The short-lived rebellion was arguably the final nail in the coffin of Wagner’s license to represent Russian foreign policy interests abroad. Its subsequent decline left a vacuum which the Kremlin has since been scrambling to fill. Since 2023, the Africa Corps—a new, state-controlled paramilitary group—has subsumed much of what remains of the Wagner Group and is progressively taking over its operations on the African continent. As the war in Ukraine drags on for the fourth year and Moscow grapples with economic uncertainty, precarious diplomatic arrangements, and waning geopolitical influence, the importance of the African theater’s is skyrocketing. In an increasingly desperate bid to sustain the costly war, the Kremlin is consolidating its foreign influence and assuming direct responsibility for Russia’s security, diplomatic, and economic relations in Africa.
The Wagner Group emerged during Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, with oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin as its owner and financier, and elusive ex-military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin as the field commander. Although PMCs are technically illegal in Russia, the organization received substantial state funding for its operations abroad. From 2017 onward, Wagner became heavily involved in at least six African countries (with suspected operations in at least two others), providing military support and security for governments or armedor powerful military and rebel groups in return for promised lucrative natural resource contracts.
In the Central African Republic (CAR), Wagner mercenaries were essential in propping up the regime of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra from 2018 onwards and supporting the CAR’s military in combating advancing rebel groups (amid accusations of numerous human rights abuses and the suspicious deaths of journalists investigating the group), effectively filling the security vacuum left by the withdrawal of French military forces in 2016. In exchange, through its elaborate network of shell and front companies, Wagner secured unfettered access to the CAR’s abundant gold mines as well as its redwood forests, where Wagner felled trees via dubious front companies. In Madagascar, Wagner combatants protected campaign consultants hired by Prigozhin himself to aid in the reelection campaign of President Hery Rajaonarimampianina. Despite his electoral defeat, Rajaonarimampianina handed over Madagascar’s state-owned chromite production company to a Russian firm right before leaving office. In Mali, from 2021 to 2025, Wagner aided the military junta in subduing an insurgency, likely in exchange for the state turning a blind eye to the group seizing some of Mali’s largest gold mines.
Despite its financial successes, the Wagner Group will soon be no more. After Prigozhin’s mutiny and death, and in the face of growing economic and geopolitical pressure stemming from the ongoing war in Ukraine, Moscow formalized a state-controlled replacement which has already absorbed the majority of Wagner’s structures, obligations, and operations. In 2023, the Ministry of Defense began folding the group’s activities in the Sahel into the new “Africa Corps” and dispatching ministry officials to secure critical relationships with governments in the CAR, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
Africa Corps’s model of operation is simple and, in some ways, similar to that of the Wagner Group. Small teams of advisors, trainers, and consultants deploy under the authority of the Ministry of Defense and train the country’s military. The Kremlin has pushed the CAR to swap Wagner forces for those of Africa Corps; meanwhile, in Mali, Africa Corps publicly vowed to remain on the ground after Wagner announced it was exiting the country in June 2025. Shortly after, Russian state firms sought mining, manufacturing, or trade concessions tied to their security relationships with the client countries. In April 2024, Africa Corps set up an air-defense system in Niger, and in September 2025, Niger and Russia entered talks about potentially developing the country’s uranium deposits.
But why institutionalize this model now, rather than outsourcing Wagner’s activities to one of the other PMCs which the Kremlin uses elsewhere? In light of a struggling war economy, Russia needs long-term, stable relations with African nations. Wagner’s “‘gold-mine model,”’ whereby the Russian firms occasionally profited in Africa, is no longer sustainable. President Vladimir Putin now seeks energy deals, rare mineral agreements, government profits, and sanction-evasion assistance, the likes of which can only be achieved with ministerial involvement, not a PMC. Further suppressing continued support of PMCs are unstable domestic relationships between Putin and his oligarchs. In the wake of the mutiny, rebranding Wagner into a Ministry of Defense-led operation became a priority to reassert state control and prevent the reemergence of Prighozin, a warlord with an independent revenue stream and foreign policy agenda.
Sanctions and export controls have threatened Russia’s access to key technologies and cash. Washington and its Group of Seven (G7) partners tightened controls on microelectronics and other dual-use inputs after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drastically raising costs and forcing Russia to resort to elaborate sanction evasion schemes, largely via its African partners. On the revenue side, the EU embargo and G7 price cap have cut into oil income by forcing Moscow to sell in markets further away, where Russian oil companies are forced to accept lower prices and higher shipping costs. Military spending and battlefield consumption have amplified Russia’s economic woes: Demand for munitions has shot up, forcing Russia to import heavily from its few remaining partners and ramp up its domestic production. The result is a considerable premium on reliable raw materials and steady hard currency inflows that can be secured via non-Western partners. The Kremlin, therefore, is forced to prioritize economic ties to countries with weak ties to the West to fill the vacuum left by now-restricted traditional export markets, and to secure those countries’ assistance in evading sanctions on military technologies and transporting sanctioned goods via the shadow fleet.
Russia’s pivot from using a proxy in its African theater to constructing a ministerial apparatus for those operations is a clear consequence of the economic woes generated by sanctions, battlefield expenses, and restricted global trade options. Africa offers sanction-resilient two-way trading relationships and a cadre of easily influenced governments willing to abet sanction evasion efforts in exchange for regime security. By amalgamating these levers within the Ministry of Defense, the Kremlin prevents the emergence of prospective PMC-owning coupists, consolidates geopolitical influence within the government, and further secures key resource and trade contracts. The quiet replacement of the Wagner Group with the Africa Corps is perhaps the most recent symptom of the ground rapidly slipping from beneath the Kremlin’s feet.