Mercenaries from the Wagner group in the Central African Republic, Dec. 27, 2020. (Credit: AFP /File photo)
Have the regional leaders supported by Wagner, a Russian paramilitary group, been trembling silently since Friday evening? Does the weekend’s sequence of events signal the end of the Russian private militia’s activities in the Middle East?
As the world held its breath in the face of the paramilitary group’s unexpected rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the internet speculated on all sorts of outcomes. These speculations did not spare the Middle East, given the presence of Wagner’s fighters in Syria in 2015, Sudan in 2017 and Libya in 2019.
“[President] Bashar al-Assad in Syria, [head of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army] Khalifa Haftar in Libya, [General of the Rapid Support Forces Mohammed Hamdan] Dagalo in Sudan, and all the other dictators and warlords who relied on Wagner for their military muscle will be nervously wondering what this [sequence] means for them,” wrote Saudi Arabia’s Arab News in an editorial piece on Monday. “Distracted as he is with a losing war in Ukraine, would Putin even desire to retain fingers in so many pies in these unstable and problematic locations?”
While the repercussions of the aborted coup by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin — who led a march towards Moscow on Friday evening before retreating 24 hours later — in the region are still unknown, one can not rule out the possibility that they will contribute to reshaping the balance of power in several countries.
“At this stage, it is too early to be fully aware of this,” said Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, to L’Orient Today. “But this crisis is not over, there is a possibility that Russia will be more consumed by an internal conflict which would require Moscow to lessen its involvement in the Middle East and North Africa.”
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that the militia would continue to operate in Mali and the Central African Republic, while no statement was made regarding Syria, Libya or Sudan.
Void to be exploited
There are areas where the shadowy Russian mercenary group has left its mark. Kidnappings, torture, gruesome executions captured on video: for the Middle Eastern civilian population, the militia is associated with the worst.
The mercenaries honed their skills and were later mobilized in the war the Kremlin declared against Ukraine in February 2022. As recently as last month, Wagner fighters enabled Russia to take control of the town of Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine.
As a tool to project Russian power in the Middle East, the private militia, which operates through front companies outside the country to finance its operations, has defended the Kremlin’s interests while absolving the latter of any responsibility.
“Moscow has invested too much in Wagner, using it to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Consequently, in case Wagner leaves the region, there will be major consequences,” Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on Russia's policy toward the Middle East, told L’Orient Today.
“Even if Moscow will try to bring in another company instead, this will take time and, in the meantime, there will be a vacuum that others will try to exploit. So this is a key issue to watch,” she added.
This scenario would prove less problematic for the Kremlin in Syria, where it has had a military presence since its intervention in the country in 2015 in support of the Damascus regime, than in Libya or elsewhere in Africa, where the mercenary group deals directly with the local leaders it supports.
What’s more, “while Wagner may be operationally autonomous in Syria or elsewhere, it is not strategically autonomous,” Karam Shaar, a researcher at the Middle East Institute, said to L’Orient Today.
“In other words, it can simply determine how to approach a battle or when to start it depending on the situation on the ground,” Shaar added. He ruled out the risk of major strategic shifts in the country in case the group demises.
Russia seen differently?
Few experts are betting on such a scenario. “The militia could simply continue to operate under a different name,” said Borshchevskaya.
Closely linked to the history of Wagner, Syria saw the emergence of the militia’s ancestor in 2013.
In Palmyra, a former officer of the general intelligence directorate of the Russian General Staff — who founded Wagner a year later, along with Prigozhin — mobilized hundreds of volunteers around oil fields before suffering defeat at the hands of the Islamic State organization.
The group, which deployed its mercenaries in Syria alongside Russian military forces again in 2015, lost nearly 300 men in 2018 in a retaliatory attack led by Washington after an American military outpost was targeted in the east of the country.
Since then, there have been several reports of energy concessions granted by the regime in Damascus to a Wagner front company in exchange for capturing oil fields that once belonged to IS.
Syria is a crucial country for the militia, which recruited fighters from Syria to relocate them in several regional countries, such as Libya. Enabling Moscow to expand into Africa, the paramilitary group deployed its mercenaries there to support Haftar, the head of the Libyan National Army (LNA).
This intervention dates back to 2019, when Haftar launched an offensive on Tripoli against the UN-recognized government chaired, at the time, by Fayez al-Sarraj.
It is also in this context that the mercenaries cooperated closely with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, supporters of Haftar, seen as a bulwark against the Muslim Brotherhood.
While the militia’s survival seems threatened and Putin appears weaker than ever, the question remains: What will become of these alliances?
“Will the region now perceive Russia differently? Will it change the way it deals with Moscow? At this stage, it seems too early to tell, but any change takes time,” said Borshchevskaya.
Whatever the extent of the repercussions in the Middle East, there is no doubt that the regimes in the region will draw lessons from it.
“One [such lesson] is that the creation of state-backed mercenary organizations can be dangerous,” said Cafiero. “When these entities become extremely powerful, they can challenge the official state institutions in a way that leads to chaos.”
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translation by Joelle El Khoury.