In June 2023, Russian President Putin made his first explicit announcement regarding the financial ties that exist between the Russian government and the Wagner Group, thus removing the veil from what had until then been an open secret. According to Putin, between May 2022 and May 2023, the Kremlin has provided financial support to the Wagner Group of approximately $940 million USD. Though much of this budget was necessary to finance Wagner’s involvement in Ukraine, a large portion was also allocated towards the group’s lucrative operations in Africa. Indeed, Russia’s investment in Wagner’s Group operations in Africa yielded considerable economic and diplomatic dividends. While Russia received harsh diplomatic chiding from western powers and faced strict economic sanctions, Africa became an important reserve for diplomatic support as well as a continued source of revenue. During the day of the UN vote on the resolution on Russia and the Ukraine that followed the Russian invasion, most African countries either abstained or refrained from voting. This was an unprecedented diplomatic triumph for Russia, which at the time was considered a pariah by the rest of the world. Since then Russia doubled down on Africa and further expanded its involvement in the western Sahel region, where it now enjoys considerable power.

The Western Sahel region has been an arena of geopolitical unrest for over two decades now, with a marked presence of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have destabilised the entire region. Over the past three years, the region experienced the withdrawal of western companies and the replacement of international (predominately French) peacekeeping forces with that of the Wagner Group mercenary forces. Following the death of their charismatic leader Yevgeny Prigozhin after a botched coup attempt that he orchestrated in Russia in 2023, many Wagner mercenaries were withdrawn from the Ukrainian battlefront and sent to Africa under a new moniker—“the Africa Corps”.

Wagner mercenaries have been active for many years in the Central African Republic, Libya, and Chad but in recent years they have extended their reach as far as Mauritania, Mozambique, and even Madagascar. However, Wagner’s main area of operation today is in the Sahel region where they enjoyed considerable financial rewards and political success, despite suffering many casualties. It is estimated that Wagner receives a monthly fee of $10.8 million USD as well as lucrative mining concessions of natural resources in exchange for their military services. According to a report written by a specialized NGO (Blood Gold Report), over the past decade Russia was able to extract an estimated $2.5 Billion USD worth of gold from the Sahel region, mainly from mines located in Mali, Central African Republic, and Sudan. In western Sahel, the three main states where the presence of Wagner has been mostly felt in recent years are Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which have all experienced political takeovers by military juntas over the last two years. These three countries have since announced their withdrawal from the regional bloc Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the creation of their own “Alliance of Sahel States”. This withdrawal from the greater African community did not, however, contribute to regional stability. According to a recent report, violence in those three countries accounted for 51% of global terrorism deaths in 2024.

The rise of military Juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in recent years needs to be situated in a broader historical context, namely, as a response to the growing influence of fundamentalist Islamic organizations in the region, but also to the peacekeeping interventions by western powers to fight Jihad movements in the region, that equally vie for control of gold ,mines in the region to finance their operations.

The spread of Islamic Jihad movements in the region goes back to the post-9.11 period when local Muslim factions pledged their allegiance to Al Qaida, which was the dominant force in international Jihad at the time, and, in the past decade, to ISIS. Currently, there are two predominate Salafi-Jihadi groups in the western Sahel vying for control of the region. The first is the Islamic State’s Sahel Province (ISSP), which is an affiliate of ISIS that absorbed members of Boko Haram into its fold. It is mainly active in the tri-border region of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, with smaller offshoots reaching as far east as Chad. The second group, “Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wa al Muslimeen” (JNIM), an affiliate of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is the dominant Jihadi power in the western Sahel. The group is active in most of Mali and Burkina Faso but has also made recent encroaches into western Niger and is now expanding into the northern Gulf of Guinea. The two factions have continually clashed in the tri-border region, but their battles in the region have somewhat decreased since 2022 and appear to have reached an equilibrium (see map below).

JNIM became a dominant force in the region in 2017, when four Salafi-Jihadi groups merged and to which a fifth faction from Burkina Faso later joined. JNIM initially fought against the French task force that was first stationed in Mali to counter the 2012 Tuareg uprising in northern Mali. Though the French forces managed to push the Jihadi rebels to the north of the country, Mali continued to be in a fragile state of civil war for over a decade as it experienced multiple terrorist attacks throughout the country during this period. Though the presence of French military forces in Mali (which also included UN and American members) was initially tolerated in the region, after a decade of failed peacekeeping efforts local sentiments began to wane. What’s more, the French military presence brought back memories from the region’s dark colonial past that also contributed to the corrosion in the legitimacy of local leaders. Between 2021-2022, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have all experienced regime changes in a rapid series of coups led by military juntas. One of the first actions of those young military leaders who seized power was to immediately cut ties with western powers and western companies, ultimately leading to the complete withdrawal of the international forces. Into this economical and military void that the foreign forces left in their wake entered the Wagner Group which came to the aid of the newly installed junta leaders in their war against the Jihadi movements.

In contrast to French intervention in the region that was justified by invoking France’s historical ties to the region but in effect only reminded local populations of the atrocities committed during the period of French colonial rule, the Wagner Group harped on a more positive nostalgic sentiment going back to the years of Soviet support of the region during the era of decolonization. What is more, Wagner took on a more pragmatic approach whereby Wagner’s mercenaries offered their security services and military training programs in exchange for rights to exploit the country’s natural resources and to promote Russian business interests. This model has worked to great effect, with Wagner Group currently supporting the young military junta leaders in Mali; Burkina Faso’s 36-year-old current leader, Ibrahim Traoré; and Niger’s leader, General Salifou Modi. To finance Wagner the Junta leaders voided existing contracts signed with international mining firms. In November 2024, the CEO and two other employees of Australian gold mining company Resolute Mining were detained in Mali’s capital, Bamako, until they agreed to pay a $160 million fine to Mali’s military government.

As international firms lost their foothold in the region, Wagner quickly rushed in to seize control of Mali’s Intahaka gold mine and expanded the local military Junta’s control of country’s natural resources. Wagner followed a similar course of action in Burkina Faso and Niger, where they also effectively displaced French and other western companies’ access to the region’s rich lithium and uranium deposits before handing them over to Russian companies. Blocking French access to uranium in the region has had a significant impact on France’s energy sector, which relies on nuclear reactors to generate nearly two-thirds of its electricity. A fifth of all the uranium France imports, and on which its nuclear reactors depend, comes directly from Niger.

Though Wagner’s rapid expansion in the Sahel can be framed as a Russian success story, their impact on the region has certainly not been a pacifying one. According to data provided by ACLED, since the death of Prigozhin in 2023 the number of violent incidents associated with the Wagner Group in the region has actually considerably risen (see graph below).

There is no doubt that the Wagner Group textbook approach to infiltrate Africa has been extremely efficient. In a matter of a few years, the Wagner Group was able to extract incredible sums of money from the entire Sahel region while concurrently promoting the long-term political and economic interests of an otherwise internationally isolated Russia. But at what cost? Can we say that this quid-pro-quo model of foreign intervention, wherein weapons and mercenaries are swapped for precious metals, is actually better than the previous, postcolonial western mode of exploitation of which the local populations are rightfully suspect? Under closer examination we can plainly see that the living conditions in the Sahel have hardly improved over the past decade. If anything they have gotten worse. As the image below shows, the Wagner Group thrives precisely in those areas where political instability reigns, and it therefore has no interest in ensuring political stability and economic prosperity where it operates. Furthermore, the Russian military aid and technical support in the western Sahel has done very little in helping local regimes mitigate the threat of Jihadi extremists. Meanwhile, ordinary people suffer even more from everyday violence as the frustrated military regimes lash out in every direction, forcing mass population displacements and emigration. According to the 2024 UN Migration Report, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso continue to rank as some of world’s most susceptible countries to experience population displacement (see map 4 below).

Given the disastrous effects that gold has had in the Sahel, is it possible to envision a different scenario, namely, one in which Gold appears as a conduit of local prosperity rather than the harbinger of war? Not necessarily. 

In the final part of this article series we will turn to another African country, Ghana, to examine how recent reforms of the country’s gold sector have had positive results for the country’s economy, pointing towards a path that other countries on the continent may potentially follow.