Russia Is Divvying Up Prigozhin’s Empire Among Putin’s Cronies

On Aug. 23, the business jet carrying Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed about 60 miles north of Moscow, killing everyone on board. With Prigozhin’s death, people and organizations within the Russian government are now maneuvering to obtain control of Wagner’s network of relationships and assets on the African continent.

The Wagner Group, a nominally private military firm, had operated in several African countries since 2017, participating in conflicts in Mali, Libya, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Wagner provided services to African regimes—including combat operations, security and training, and disinformation campaigns—in exchange for diplomatic support and resources.

The use of mercenaries allowed Russia to expand its geostrategic reach at a low cost to Moscow. Although Russia has publicized the economic opportunities it supposedly offers to Africa in areas such as agriculture, hydrocarbons, energy, transport, and digitization, it actually invests little on the continent.

Economically, Russia has overpromised and underdelivered; the economic factors are less important to Moscow than being able to maintain international connections. Yet the Wagner Group in Africa was largely self-funding, covering its own operational costs through cash and mineral concessions. Until recently, mercenaries also provided a veneer of deniability to Russian operations abroad.

Looking at the history of mercenary forces, most prominent in European history in 16th- and 17th-century warfare, can tell us what might come next for Wagner’s and Russia’s future. As in modern Russia, early modern heads of state hired mercenaries as a way of displacing the costs of raising and administering troops. Mercenary officers fronted the costs of raising and equipping troops themselves as a form of outsourcing, reducing the financial pressure on heads of state. In contrast to the stereotype, these mercenaries were often subjects of the heads of state who hired them, as Prigozhin was Russian. Like the Wagner Group, in modern terms these mercenaries were both state-funded and private.

Military historians and political theorists use the term fiscal-military state to refer to governments that sustain large-scale warfare through resource extraction as well as fiscal innovation such as the creation of a national debt or public credit. The classic example is the United Kingdom after the 1690s; in this argument, financial developments empowered Britain’s rise to great-power status. In Wagner’s case, this innovation takes the form of shell companies and the clandestine movement of resources. The part of the Wagner Group that was most visible—the fighters in Ukraine—was only one element of an immense, ramifying network of companies that controlled billions of dollars in resources.

As analyst Julian Rademeyer told Deutsche Welle in February, “Wagner itself has developed over time as an organization that’s gone from being a purely private military contracting entity into a multiplicity of business alliances and relations, and a network of companies. Some of them front companies across the countries in which they operate on the African continent.” Wagner’s organizations function like a shadow fiscal-military state.

The Wagner Group funded its activities in Africa with another early modern strategy: contributions. Contributions are a form of taxation set up by an army in an occupied territory. Military historians have referred to this practice as the “tax of violence.” Although the costs of the tax of violence are high, they are also consistent. Unlike simple plundering, contributions are ideally collected in a regular manner—essentially an extortion racket imposed on the local populace. Contributions can fund an army’s operations; more broadly, they can fund an entire state. During the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, the Swedish army funded the Swedish state in this way. According to one historian, the Holy Roman Empire lost that war because it could no longer do this.

Wagner’s African operations were much greater in global extent, and more sophisticated, but they operated on the same principle. In Sudan, the Russian firm M-Invest, which was under the control of oligarchs including Prigozhin, owns gold mines; Sudan’s mineral assets include manganese, silicon, and uranium. Wagner subsidiaries own gold mines and logging rights in the Central African Republic. In Syria, Wagner shell companies were paid in oil.

Relative to the size of the Russian state budget, the African resources that Wagner controlled were not particularly lucrative. However, like Swedish contributions during the Thirty Years’ War, they allowed Wagner to self-finance its operations. Although relatively little African gold flowed back into Russia itself, African resources enabled Russia to act in Africa under the cover of Wagner’s independence because those resources were not restricted by sanctions.

One option for the Russian government is to bring this sprawling assemblage directly under state control, including absorbing Wagner’s fighters into the Defense Ministry. Another option is to do what older mercenary companies called “reforming” a company or regiment: dissolve Wagner and parcel its soldiers out to other units.

The mercenary armies Redut and Convoy were deliberately shaped or created as government-controlled alternatives to Wagner. Redut was founded in 2008, but it had already been reorganized in 2022 by the deputy head of Russia’s military intelligence agency, who placed a relative of his at its head; after heavy losses, it was taken over by the Defense Ministry. Convoy, on the other hand, is relatively new and smells blatantly of AstroTurf: It was founded in Crimea in 2022 and is funded by a largely state-owned bank as well as an oligarch who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s deputy defense minister, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, looks as though he will take over Prigozhin’s relationships with African leaders, this time on behalf of the state.

Yet these groups and people lack Prigozhin’s established personal relationships and African experience, as well as his charisma, his populist appeal, and his ability to command loyalty among his men. Ordinary Wagner fighters did not see service in Wagner as opposed to service in a more government-aligned army. On the contrary, many of them are veterans of the Russian army or switch between service in it and in Wagner. For these men, Wagner was another way to serve Russia.

The convicts in Wagner saw Prigozhin as the man willing to work to restore their honor to them by making them soldiers. Despite its cruelty, or because of it, the Wagner Group had a strong appeal to some people. The Russian government’s attempts to discredit Prigozhin by depicting him as a wealthy man who was motivated by “gold and bling” show a clumsy ignorance of what is likely to appeal to an ordinary soldier. The type of man who is likely to enlist in Wagner, like his counterparts in 17th-century Europe, is more likely to see a showy display of bling as proof that a man is powerful, strong, and successful—not immoral.

However, if organizations within the Russian government itself succeed in taking over the Wagner Group’s assets in Africa, this could represent a strengthening of Russian state power. In a July article for Foreign Policy, I compared Prigozhin to the famous mercenary general Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634). Like Wallenstein, before his death Prigozhin had become uncomfortably independent from the head of state he supposedly served, including holding foreign negotiations on his own. Although I was correct in my belief that Putin would have Prigozhin killed, in hindsight I was wrong to overlook the central importance of the Wagner Group’s African operations to the maneuvers probably being carried out within the Russian government. Like Wallenstein’s assassination, Prigozhin’s has strengthened the central government’s control over the armed forces.

If Russian state organizations can obtain Wagner’s African assets, this may be a partial reversal of the conditions I described in my earlier article. At that time, I interpreted the Russian state as weakening, since so many state functions were co-opted by nonstate agents. In an opinion article for Al Jazeera, Russia expert Gulnaz Sharafutdinova noticed something similar: “Under Putin, the political system in Russia has been further infiltrated by patronage networks that have increasingly undermined state institutions and taken over their functions. It is on the basis of this informal power system … that Prigozhin accumulated his vast wealth” and power.

In this context, the timing of Prigozhin’s death is interesting. Prigozhin was killed two months to the day after his aborted putsch—long enough to make Putin look weak but too short to realistically look as if he was lulling Prigozhin into a false sense of security. However, Prigozhin’s death also came a month after he made a speech telling his men to prepare for something large in Africa. (Several Russian government figures, including Yevkurov, traveled to Africa before Prigozhin’s death.) Prigozhin may well have been killed not just as punishment for treason but also to bring the Wagner Group’s lucrative African operations under direct state control—and as rewards to stay loyal.