In 2023, a dramatic series of events led Western observers to declare the imminent demise of the Wagner Group, Russia’s infamous paramilitary force. First, there was Wagner’s costly assault on Bakhmut in the spring, where the organization was estimated to have lost up to 20,000 fighters, many of them convicts drawn from Russian prisons. Then there was the anticlimax of the June mutiny led by Wagner’s chief curator and protagonist, Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. Finally, there was Prigozhin’s suspicious death in a plane crash in August.
Yet a year on, Wagner continues to be an important element of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and Africa: Where many saw the Wagner saga as a sign of the Kremlin’s weakness, the security services have succeeded in reaping benefits from Wagner’s rise and precipitous fall. Russia’s armed forces, particularly the Ministry of Defense and National Guard, have effectively “Wagnerized” themselves, borrowing the most effective parts of the Wagner model to seize on their competitive advantages and to create dilemmas for Ukraine and Western adversaries from Africa to Europe.
Kidal to Kursk
At the end of July, Tuareg separatists encountered Wagner Group fighters and their Malian military allies in the desert at Tinzaouaten, near Mali’s border with Algeria. The result was a disastrous defeat for Wagner, outnumbered on the separatists’ home turf. Using Starlink satellite internet, separatists recorded videos of the carnage, documenting the bodies of dozens of Russian fighters. That hasn’t stopped Wagner: At the time of writing, they are massing with Malian forces for another push into Mali’s north (though potentially beset by logistical challenges).
Just weeks later, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Russian territory in Kursk. There, they were met by an entourage of Russian irregular forces, including former members of the Wagner Group bearing its signature black emblem.
These two episodes, thousands of miles apart, are each a part of Wagner’s legacy in miniature: As an expeditionary force captive to the Russian security services abroad, and as a community of Wagner veterans integrated into the GRU’s growing panoply of irregular forces for both Africa and Ukraine. They demonstrate the innovation and inter-service competition that the demise of the original Wagner Group has accelerated, driven by a service-wide push for greater unity of command.
The resulting organizations are even more behold than their predecessor to Russian security services but still maintain a veneer of deniability at home in the event of failures like Tinzaouaten, where Russian state media has continued to refer to fighters as “Wagner” or “instructors” to avoid saddling the Ministry of Defense with responsibility. These organizations’ ability to preserve Wagner’s agility and risk appetite will be key to determining whether Russia can continue to balance its militarized support for autocrats in Africa and the Middle East with the demands of its war in Ukraine.
Revolutions in Russia’s Irregular Forces
Russia has consolidated a flexible model of regular and irregular forces that allows Moscow to overcome constraints on manpower, logistics, and bandwidth, and balance a set of demanding operations in Ukraine and Africa. This model is nothing new — since 2014, Western observers have commented on Russia’s adaptive use of formal and informal forces, popularizing terms like hybrid warfare and gray zone competition. What has changed is Moscow’s approach to managing this model, supported by new laws and a sprawling structure of semi-formal coordination.
Russia has done this before. In 2014, volunteers fought alongside Ukrainian separatist forces with clandestine Russia support. Then, as now, these forces could prove problematic. When militant forces in eastern Ukraine threatened to scuttle Russia’s efforts at a negotiated settlement (on terms favorable to Moscow), Russia employed the Wagner Group to eliminate their leadership. In extensive leaked documentation detailed in my book, Wagner recorded its operations to coerce and assassinate local militant leaders.
This led to a revolution in Russia’s use of semi-formal forces, one that saw the Wagner Group rise to the fore and deploy far beyond Russia’s near abroad. In coordination with Russia’s security services, Wagner was sent first to Syria and then to Africa. Nine years later, when Wagner itself threatened Russia’s strategic priorities through the political maneuvering of its corporate overlord Prigozhin, Moscow began a second revolution in its use of hybrid forces.
Under the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, Russia undertook an effort in the spring and summer of 2023 to subject Wagner to more direct and unified command authority. In a desperate bid to retain a degree of autonomy over his key lever of security, prosperity, and influence, Prigozhin and Wagner’s military leadership led an abortive mutiny in the summer of that year. Despite constituting a threat to President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, the effort was quashed through negotiation. A month later, Prigozhin and Wagner’s military leadership died in a fiery plane crash north of Moscow.
In the year since, Russia has executed a vision for another revolution in its use of irregular forces. It has done so both by allowing elements of the original Wagner network to persist on a shorter leash and by creating infrastructure to capture and deploy Wagner’s most notable human capital within the security services.
The New Wagner
The Wagner Group persists in Africa and Belarus, though now without a well-connected security guarantor and corporate overlord in the form of Prigozhin. This current iteration of the Wagner Group provides the Russian state benefit through its willingness to undertake high-risk missions and commercial operations that establish diplomatic cache with Russia’s allies in the global south. It retains some of the organization’s human capital, conducts training for forces in Belarus, and continues both military and commercial operations in Mali and the Central African Republic in close coordination with Russia’s security services. In both areas, the Wagner Group challenges the institutionally driven Western security model in the Sahel and Central Africa, asserting Russia as a new mode of security partner that is tougher on insurgents and less restrictive for its customers than France, the United States, or the United Nations.
Russia allows the Wagner Group to survive because it no longer enjoys the benefit of a membrane to insulate it from the fickleness of the Russian security services. While Prigozhin and Wagner’s military leader, Dmitriy Utkin, purportedly appointed heirs in the form of Prigozhin’s son Pavel and an experienced Wagner commander named Anton “Lotus” Elizarov, neither can lay a true claim to legitimate leadership of the organization.
What the Loss of Prigozhin Means for Wagner
While there is ample evidence demonstrating that the Russian state supported and directed a large share of Wagner’s operations, relatively less analysis has been dedicated to the unique advantages that the leadership of Prigozhin and Utkin brought to the organization, in the form of security guarantees, risk appetite, and entrepreneurial efforts to establish influence at the peripheries of Russia’s geostrategic interests. Prigozhin brought with him connections to influential figures in Moscow and an agile corporate network that allowed Wagner to build financial relationships and move men and materiel across Africa and the Middle East. His organization was incentivized to take on risks and build influence in spheres where Russia’s security agencies were less likely to meaningfully invest in terms of both money and fighting men. Most uniquely, he could provide protection from prosecution under Russia’s anti-mercenary laws and, while acting at the behest of the state, use his stature to exercise a degree of autonomy in his affairs abroad.
This freedom of action was key to Wagner’s growth since its earliest missions in eastern Ukraine in 2014. It accounts for Wagner’s aggressive counter-insurgency in the Central African Republic, a country of tertiary geostrategic priority for Russia, and in its disastrous effort to seize Conoco Fields in Syria that culminated in its forces being routed by American special operations forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces. It was also what allowed Prigozhin to implement strategies inaccessible to other security entrepreneurs, including the recruitment of thousands of Russian convicts into his structures for deployment to Ukraine. Like Prigozhin, Utkin carried a legendary status and the respect of Wagner’s most experienced fighting men, drawn from his battlefield experience in Ukraine and Syria and his contribution to Wagner’s agile doctrine
Wagner’s new putative leaders — Pavel and Elizarov — carry little of Prigozhin’s influence or Utkin’s reputation. Pavel is a 26-year-old son of an oligarch with few other distinctions. In closed Wagner Telegram channels and conversations with Wagner veterans, current and former fighters indicate that Elizarov is held in low regard as a result of operational decisions that cost the lives of many of their compatriots. The resulting organization, sans Prigozhin and Utkin, is even more captive than its predecessor to Russia’s security services, particularly the GRU military intelligence agency, but it still provides benefits in Africa. They are now more immediately beholden to the oversight of GRU military intelligence and lacked the security that had allowed Prigozhin freedom to exercise initiative in specific quarters.
The Wagner Group still undertakes higher-risk missions than organizations formally under the Ministry of Defense. In November 2023, the Wagner Group took the northern Malian town of Kidal from Tuareg separatists, previously outside of Bamako’s control for almost a decade. They flew their black flag from the town’s crumbling French colonial fort. On the coattails of this success, Wagner (or its Malian partners) may have become overly confident. Their push on Tinzaouaten in July brought them far outside the territory controlled by Malian forces, and threatened key local channels of logistics that guaranteed an overwhelming response by local militants. Wagner’s defeat led to the death of dozens of its men, including an assault detachment commander, as well as a significant number of Malian forces.
The impacts on Wagner’s relations with Mali’s government and their other clients in places like the Central African Republic are complex and unclear. Wagner and its Malian allies appear to now be bracing for another offensive into the country’s north. Conversely, rumors circulate among Russian sources that Wagner may be withdrawn from the country or replaced by the Defense Ministry’s Africa Corps. Both indicators point to the fact that Wagner needs to prove its utility in Mali to Russia’s security elites as well as those in Bamako — both in absolute terms and vis-a-vis more formalized, less risk-tolerant efforts like the Africa Corps. The military government of Mali is likely pleased with the commitment demonstrated by the risks that Wagner is willing to take, but they are paying Wagner to win, not to die.
Diversification, Defection, and Doctrine
Beginning long before August 2023, Russian security services began diversifying away from Wagner as their primary paramilitary provider of choice and opening their options to recruit fighting men while bypassing unpopular mobilization. They have accelerated this process with a variety of novel structures like Redut and the Africa Corps that create and field semi-formal units that can recruit from key sectors of society less likely to enter conventional contract service. Like the burgeoning of “volunteer” units that appeared in Ukraine in 2014 and led to the rise of Wagner, the growth in the number of these irregular units is the result of not just coordination by Russia’s military intelligence, but also of incentives for the security services and “curators” — political officials and businesses — to create and field these units. New laws provide the infrastructure and legal justification to undertake these efforts.
In this context, and with the death of Prigozhin and Utkin last year, Russia’s security services engaged in a bidding war for their men. Elements of the Russian military were particularly interested in capturing Wagner’s assault detachment commanders, the group’s operational leadership who were credited with its effectiveness and who Prigozhin had elevated to public awareness during Wagner’s Bakhmut campaign. With their stature in Russia’s military communities, claim to a Wagner commander afforded access to unique recruitment channels and institutional support.
Over the past year, Wagner’s commanders have made their choices. The two most notable are Aleksandr “Ratibor” Kuznetsov and Boris “Zombie” Nizhevenok. Both are experienced and served with Wagner since its earliest days in Ukraine. They have chosen different paths: Kuznetsov has joined Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s Akhmat Spetsnaz and Nizhevenok leads a unit under the Defense Ministry’s “volunteer” infrastructure linked to Redut.
While Redut is frequently referred to as a private military company and compared to Wagner, it is in practice an umbrella by which a variety of semi-formal structures are connected to Defense Ministry command and logistics. These connections are managed through institutional channels like Military Unit 35555, a GRU conduit that was previously used to service Wagner, demonstrating the degrees of continuity between the pre-existing and new structures that Russia uses to field these forces. The scale and effectiveness of units under Redut are inconsistent, and membership in the structure runs from units cobbled together by Russia’s energy giant Gazprom to Nizhevenok’s Vostok-V Brigade, which has frequently solicited donations of money and equipment on Russian social media.
Kadyrov has also outfitted his own Akhmat structure to accept semi-formal units and Wagner veterans. Kuznetsov’s First Assault Detachment, retaining the name of his old Wagner unit, is one such force. Along with the Aida Battalion, another Akhmat unit partly comprised of former Wagner fighters, the First Assault Detachment has been fighting the Ukrainian units that have launched an incursion into Russian territory in Kursk Oblast for two months. Ukrainian units report that they have recovered Wagner patches and insignia on the battlefield.
Wagner and the Africa Corps
Neither of these units conduct operations in Africa. For these missions, the security services rely on both Wagner and another umbrella organization, the Africa Corps. In contrast to observations that the Wagner Group has been subsumed within the Africa Corps, recruiters and current and former fighters indicate that Wagner continues to operate in parallel with Africa Corps, which itself deploys units that include those in the Redut structure under the command of the Ministry of Defense.
One such unit is the 81st Volunteer Spetsnaz Brigade or “Bears,” based out of Crimea. Bears, also affiliated with Military Unit 35555, deployed alongside the Africa Corps to Burkina Faso earlier this year, where it appears to have primarily taken on lower risk duties, such as training local forces. Other deployments of Africa Corps personnel to Niger, Mali, and Libya are likely comprised of a mixture of units like Bears and formal Defense Ministry personnel — many of whom were redeployed to Ukraine in May and again in August, before being documented in Syria in October.
As in the case of Bears, the Africa Corps has thus far not taken on responsibilities associated with the same level of risk as the legacy Wagner Group organization. Instead, they have focused on security and training for local forces. Along with their public emphasis on their role in Ukraine, this has allowed the Africa Corps to insulate itself from the worst of Wagner’s failures in Africa, like those in Mali. However artificial the distinction between the more formalized Africa Corps and new iteration of Wagner, both organizations nonetheless brand themselves distinctly and emphasize their differences for the purposes of recruitment and messaging, primarily for the benefit of a Russian elite audience.
Wagnerization
Russia has not only replicated Wagner’s success through the infrastructure that allows for the coordination and fielding of semi-formal units, but also through borrowing the distinctive elements of its operations, a trend that Michael Kofman has identified as the Wagnerization of Russian forces. In broad terms, this refers to replicating the infantry-centric assault detachment structure that was the organizing principal of Wagner’s forces since 2017.
Wagner originally adopted this structure to allow for greater flexibility in the field. In Ukraine, they applied the assault detachment structure to leverage convict recruits in dismounted infantry platoons of 12–15 soldiers to identify and soften Ukrainian positions in urban settings like Bakhmut and Soledar. Russia has borrowed this approach, drawn from roots in Soviet military doctrine, for both regular and irregular forces.
The battlefield impact of this adaptation is difficult to assess, but it challenges preconceptions about Ukraine and Russia’s doctrinal flexibility. Since the early days of the war, Western observers have tended to emphasize Ukraine’s incorporation of elements of NATO doctrine, particularly decentralization of command authority, and to contrast this with a view of Russian doctrine that is centralized and rigid — a bias that David E. Johnson called out in a 2022 piece for War on the Rocks. In practice, Ukraine’s military has struggled with the same ossified operational thinking that constrained Russia in the early days of the war, while innovations like the assault detachment structure illustrate that Russia’s military is adaptable in ways that are often underestimated from afar.
Russia’s Future in Africa
While it is tempting to see a broad conspiracy in these efforts, there is no unified Russian plan for Africa. Instead, Russia leverages a parallel set of often overlapping and sometimes competing efforts through Wagner, the Africa Corps, and Russian commercial interests that pursue broadly aligned geopolitical aims. All these interests must balance the priority of continued investment in Africa with the more pressing needs of the war in Ukraine — exemplified by the Africa Corps’ increasing focus on operations in Ukraine and the withdrawal of the Bears unit from Africa following Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory.
Local factors will play at least as important a role in determining whether Russia can maintain the mode of security-driven influence that it has preserved in Africa since Prigozhin’s death. No form of Russian security assistance to its partners in the Sahel is likely to meaningfully degrade militants’ ability to threaten local government authority in the long run: Long-term security prospects are dependent on local militaries and local policy.
Russia can maintain these relationships so long as the local governments view them as beneficial, but we should be under no illusions that these are vassal states. Should Russia’s Sahelian partners feel that their latitude to pick and choose security partners is limited by Russia, or that Russia’s commercial interests are counter to those of their elite networks, these countries can revert to more conventional forms of partnership. Niger has expelled the United States to welcome Russia but maintains partnerships with semi-state security providers like Turkey’s SADAT. Even around Russia’s most consolidated presence in Africa, in the Central African Republic, different government actors maintain a variety of security relationships, whether it is with the Rwandan military or even the U.S. private military company Bancroft.
Wagner’s model is appreciated by Russia’s adversaries too: Ukraine has fielded unconventional forces in Africa to oppose Russia’s allies on the continent and has practiced Wagner’s tradition of claiming their involvement in their enemies’ defeats abroad. Alongside the Russian security service interests that have adapted to the post-Prigozhin security space, the African governments that benefit from Russia’s cast of security providers, and the African militant groups that Russia fights, the Ukrainians’ actions in Africa show that Wagner has impacted their thinking on domestic and foreign operations.
Wagner’s Legacy
During Wagner’s assault on Bakhmut, Prigozhin declared the need for the Russian military to learn from what made Wagner effective. A year after his death, Russian military leadership have in many ways accomplished exactly that, taming the diffuse and agile elements of the Wagner Group to deploy them to lethal effect. Russia has achieved this by wielding the competitive “adhocracy” inherent to Putin’s system of rule, the same dynamics that encouraged the growth of Wagner.
Neither the use of volunteer units and pseudo private military companies leveraging Wagner’s brand for recruitment, nor the adoption of Wagner’s operational approaches, are a panacea. Informal mobilization, including through organizations like Wagner’s successors, can help Russia to avoid mass mobilization but, as we have seen at Kursk, the Russian military must still walk a fine line in what forces it deploys. While the assault detachment structure may allow Russian forces greater flexibility in the field, it cannot compensate for poor officer quality, and Russia remains reliant on the use of overwhelming fires to be effective in large scale operations.
Russia’s rogue’s gallery of volunteer units, Combat Army Reserves, and private military companies nonetheless play to Russia’s relative strengths in manpower. They allow for recruitment efforts to reach and more effectively leverage those fighters with experience who are less likely to be drawn to conventional contract service. Whether units like Espanola that draw on football ultras or like Rusich that draw on fascist militant circles, these groups leverage Wagner symbols and personalities to proclaim their effectiveness, experience, and distinction from the worst tendencies of the Russian military, appealing to the type of disaffected but valuable recruit that once formed the backbone of the Wagner Group.
Jack Margolin is an independent expert on international crime and conflict and the author of The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024). His work focuses on the use of emerging technology and novel methodologies to expose the drivers of political violence.
Image: Информационное агентство БелТА via Wikimedia Commons
