AL-IBEDIYYA, Sudan – In a burning, gold-rich area 200 miles north of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes rise from rock cut in the desert, a mysterious foreign trader dominates the business.
Locals call it “The Russian Company,” a well-guarded plant with gleaming towers in the desert that processes piles of powdered ore into semi-refined gold bars.
“The Russians pay better,” said Ammar al-Amir, a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a difficult mining town 10 miles from the plant. “Otherwise, we don’t know much about them.”
In fact, records from the Sudanese company and the government show that the gold mine is an outpost of the Wagner Group, an opaque network of Russian mercenaries, mining companies and politically influential operations – controlled by a close ally of the Wagner Group. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — which is expanding aggressively across a strip of Africa.
Better known as a rental weapon supplier, Wagner has in recent years become a much broader and more sophisticated tool of Kremlin power, according to Western experts and officials following its expansion. Instead of a single entity, Wagner has come to describe interrelated warfare operations, earning money, and low-cost, negative trade in influence that serve Mr. Putin on a continent where support for Russia is relatively high.
Wagner emerged in 2014 as a band of Kremlin-backed mercenaries who supported Mr. Wagner’s first raid. Putin in eastern Ukraine, and then deployed to Syria. In recent months, at least 1,000 of its fighters have resurfaced in Ukraine, according to British intelligence.
The focus of Wagner’s operations, according to Western officials, is Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” who was accused in the United States of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In 2017, Wagner expanded into Africa, where his mercenaries have become a major, sometimes critical, factor in a number of countries affected by the conflict: Libya, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, and more recently Mali. where, as elsewhere, Wagner has been accused of atrocities. against civilians.
But Wagner is much more than a war machine in Africa, and a look at his activities in Sudan, the continent’s third-largest gold producer, reveals his scope.
Wagner has obtained lucrative Sudanese mining concessions that produce a gold stream, records show, a potential boost for the Kremlin’s $ 130 billion gold that US officials fear will be used to mitigate the effect. of economic sanctions on the war in Ukraine, supporting the ruble.
In eastern Sudan, Wagner supports the Kremlin’s push to build a naval base in the Red Sea to house its nuclear-powered warships. In western Sudan, it has found a launch pad for its mercenary operations in neighboring countries and a possible source of uranium.
And since the Sudanese army took power in a coup in October, Wagner has intensified his association with a power-hungry commander, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, who visited Moscow in the early days of the war. war in Ukraine, which began in February. Wagner has given military aid to General Hamdan and helped Sudan’s security forces crack down on a fragile pro-democracy grassroots movement, Western officials say.
“Russia feeds on kleptocracy, civil wars and internal strife in Africa, filling gaps where the West is not committed or uninterested,” said Samuel Ramani of the Royal United Services Institute, a group of defense research in London, and author of a forthcoming article. book on Russia in Africa.
Sudan, Mr. added. Ramani, characterizes the type of country where Wagner thrives.
The Kremlin and Mr. Prigozhin denies any connection to Wagner, who is said to be named after Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, by a founding commander who was fascinated by Nazi symbolism and history.
Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian tycoon known as “Putin’s Chef”, in 2016. Credit … Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images
Mr. Prigozhin secretly engages in his activities, tries to mask his links with Wagner through a network of fictitious companies, and travels across the African continent on a private jet to meet with military presidents and commanders. But the U.S. Treasury Department and experts monitoring Mr. Prigozhin is said to own or control most, if not all, of the companies that make up Wagner.
And as their operations in Sudan show, these companies have left a trail of paper.
Russian and Sudanese corporate and customs records obtained through the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a non-profit organization in Washington, as well as mining documents, flight records, and interviews with Western and Sudanese officials, reveal the scope of the its business empire in Sudan, and the particular importance of gold.
The Wagner Group has “spread a trail of lies and human rights abuses” across Africa, and Mr. Prigozhin is his “manager and financier,” the State Department said in a statement on May 24.
Most officials talked about Mr. Prigozhin and Wagner on condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of their work or, in some cases, fear for their safety. General Hamdan and Mubarak Ardol, Sudan’s state mining regulator, declined to be interviewed.
In a lengthy written answer to the questions, Mr. Prigozhin denied any interest in mining in Sudan, denounced US sanctions against him and, with a nod, rejected the very existence of the group with which he is associated.
“I, unfortunately, have never owned gold mining companies,” he said. “And I am not a Russian soldier.
“Wagner’s legend,” he added, “is just a legend.”
The “key to Africa”
Wagner’s operations in Sudan began in 2017 after a meeting in the Russian coastal town of Sochi.
After nearly three decades of autocratic rule, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was losing control of power. In a meeting with Mr. Putin in Sochi sought a new alliance, proposing Sudan as Russia’s “key to Africa” in exchange for aid, according to the Kremlin’s transcript of his statements.
Mr Putin accepted the offer.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on the left and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin at a meeting in the Russian coastal town of Sochi in November 2017. Credit … Kremlin Press Office / Agency Anadolu, via Getty Images
Within weeks, Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began arriving in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based research body, and verified by researchers. of the Center for Advanced. Defense Studies.
The Treasury Department says Meroe Gold is controlled by Mr. Prigozhin and imposed sanctions on the company in 2020 as part of a series of measures aimed at Wagner in Sudan. Meroe’s director in Sudan, Mikhail Potepkin, was previously hired by the Internet Research Agency, Prigozhin-funded troll factory accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. election, the Department said. of the Treasury.
Meroe Gold geologists were followed by Russian defense officers, who opened talks on a possible Russian naval base in the Red Sea, a strategic prize for the Kremlin, suddenly within reach.
Over the next 18 months, Meroe Gold imported 131 shipments to Sudan, according to Russian customs records: mining and construction equipment, but also military trucks, amphibious vehicles and two transport helicopters. One of the helicopters was photographed a year later in the Central African Republic, where Wagner’s fighters were protecting the country’s president and where Mr. Prigozhin had acquired lucrative diamond mining concessions.
Inconsistently, the shipments also included an old American car: a 1956 Cadillac Series Sixty-two, according to documents.
A Russian warship docked in Port Sudan last year. Credit … Associated Press
But the Russians soon found themselves advising Mr. al-Bashir on how to save his skin. As a popular uprising erupted in late 2018, threatening to overthrow his government, Wagner’s advisers sent an instant memorandum to the Sudanese government to campaign on social media to discredit protesters. The note even advised Mr. al-Bashir who publicly executed several protesters as a warning to others.
This memorandum and other documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, which is funded by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil oligarch and a longtime enemy of Mr. Putin. Through interviews with officials and business leaders in Sudan, The New York Times confirmed key information in the documents, which the Dossier Center said were provided by sources in the Prigozhin organization.
When Mr al-Bashir was ousted by his own generals and placed under house arrest in April 2019, the Russians quickly changed course.
One week later, Mr. Prigozhin arrived in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, with a delegation of senior Russian military officials. He returned to Moscow with senior Sudanese defense officials, including a brother of General Hamdan, who was then emerging as a power agent, according to flight data obtained by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Six weeks later, on June 3, 2019, General Hamdan’s troops launched a bloody operation to disperse pro-democracy protesters in central Khartoum in which at least 120 people were killed over the next two weeks. On June 5, Mr. Prigozhin, Meroe Gold, imported 13 tons of riot shields, as well as helmets and batons for a company controlled by General Hamdan’s family, according to customs and company documents.
Around that time, a Russian disinformation campaign using fake social media accounts attempted to exacerbate political divisions in Sudan, a technique similar to that used by the Internet Research Agency to intervene in the northern elections. 2016 Facebook closed 172 of these accounts in October 2019 and May 2021, linking them directly to Mr. Prigozhin.
But neither these measures nor US sanctions deterred the Wagner Group from its …