WWO Editorial
The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023 and the subsequent restructuring of Russia’s private military operations in Africa did not reduce Russian military presence on the continent. It reorganised and, in several respects, deepened it. The successor formations — operating under the Africa Corps banner and more directly integrated into Russian state military structures — have continued operations in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya, and the Central African Republic with less of the freelance autonomy that made Wagner occasionally unpredictable and more of the direct Kremlin accountability that makes the current arrangement strategically coherent.
The implications for African sovereignty are serious. In Mali, the transitional government’s relationship with Russian military personnel has come with a documented displacement of French forces and a parallel reduction in the space available to civil society, independent media, and political opposition. In Burkina Faso, similar dynamics are observable. Security partnerships that trade governance accountability for military muscle have a consistent historical pattern: they tend to secure regimes, not populations.
This is not an argument for Western military presence, which has its own documented failures across the Sahel. The French Barkhane operation spent a decade and considerable treasure without producing lasting security gains. American counter-terrorism partnerships in the region produced intelligence relationships but rarely the sustainable state capacity that genuine security requires.
The honest analysis is that neither Russia nor the West has a strategy for the Sahel that prioritises African lives. Both have strategies that prioritise their own positioning. African governments that play these powers against each other are making rational short-term choices with potentially serious long-term costs to the populations they govern.
— Worldwide Observer Geopolitics Desk
