The hybrid war of Prigozhin's heirs

A group of US Congressmen is pushing for the inclusion of members of the disbanded Wagner company, which has reorganised into smaller groups under the control of the Moscow Ministry of Defence, among foreign terrorist organisations. Among the countries where they are most active are Mali and the Central African Republic.

Washington (AsiaNews) - A group of US Congressmen has proposed increasing legal and financial sanctions against Russia's global network of mercenaries, with a bill that defines militarised groups acting in the interests of the Kremlin as ‘foreign terrorist organisations’ (Foreign Terrorist Organizations).

Among the many forms of Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ are the members of Evgeny Prigozhin's disbanded Wagner company, the commander of many private wars, who died in a mysterious accident in August 2023.

According to Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, “Russian militarised formations spread chaos everywhere and pose a serious threat to US national security, so we must ensure their identification and elimination”. Russian mercenaries are also thriving under the current sanctions regime, expanding their global presence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Last October, Ukrainian intelligence warned that more than 120 Russian military personnel were active in Venezuela, training local soldiers in infantry tactics, special operations and drone warfare, and in previous years there had already been reports of their presence in the country of former dictator Maduro.

Now, Washington lawmakers intend to overcome the structural shortcomings of current laws, which defined the Wagner company as a terrorist organisation but did not take into account its reorganisation after the death of its founder, becoming a set of initiatives under the control of the Moscow Ministry of Defence, such as the Afrikanskij Korpus and the Čvk Redut.

According to members of Congress, this restructuring has allowed Moscow to circumvent sanctions and accusations of terrorism by simply renaming and dividing the brigades of former “musicians”, as they were called in honour of the German composer Richard Wagner, while maintaining full operational capacity.

The task now is to identify Prigozhin's “heirs” and conduct regular checks on their actions to prevent new forms of grouping in order to escape all international pressure and cut off the flow of funding to mercenaries.

According to the bill, Russia's use of private military companies “is not an anomaly, but a constant manoeuvre of its foreign policy instrumentation”. According to Glen Howard, president of the Saratoga Fund and a leading expert on Russia, adequate responses to “modernised forms of side warfare” are needed.

In his view, Wagner has ushered in the new “terrorism for hire” of the 21st century, where the state transfers various violent actions to “quasi-state” entities whose activities and even existence can be quietly denied in official statements, without losing strategic control over their operations.

Among the countries where former musicians are most active are Mali and the Central African Republic, where they participate more or less directly in government structures, providing security services and control of rare mineral extraction.

As a year ago Radio Svoboda reported, there were 2,300 mercenaries in the Central African Republic, and the commander of the local brigade had been appointed chief adviser to President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.

Between 2018 and 2024, Russian mercenaries participated in over 100 armed clashes, committing more than 360 acts of violence against peaceful citizens, according to data from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, resulting in the deaths of 786 people.

Members of the Afrikanskij Korpus have recruited large numbers of Africans to fight in the war in Ukraine, mainly in collaboration with the government of the Russian republic of Tatarstan and the Ministry of Defence, which offers high salaries, at least on paper, and the Tatar barracks have excellent facilities for training “volunteers” from other countries to fight in the Russian war. For this reason, it is important for the American bill to find ways to limit Moscow's access to resources in Africa and other regions of the world, which could limit the chain of attacks of all kinds on global security.