“There’s a little Russia growing inside Burkina Faso,” a Burkinabe official told me. “First you put down one settlement, somewhere you can speak safely, where you don’t have any Americans or French. Then you multiply, like mushrooms.”
In the seven months since Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “unclarified” plane crash, a shadowy battle has been playing out to determine the fate of the Wagner Group in Africa. Junta leaders in Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic (CAR) are becoming alarmed about the mercenary group’s atrophy in their countries, not to mention the unclear future of Prigozhin’s commercial empire.
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