The head of the Wagner group, Yevgueni Prigozhin, met during the Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg with representatives of Niger, a country where the military has staged a coup, according to the online newspaper Fontanka.ru. The meeting took place in a St. Petersburg hotel on the sidelines of the summit, to which Prigozhin would not have been officially invited, the source says. Along with the cereal, a likely item on the agenda is the fate of the mercenary group.
Wagner’s future will be a pressing issue for countries like Sudan, Mali and others that hire the mercenary group in exchange for natural resources like gold. Russian officials and Prigozhin have already said that Wagner will remain in Africa, at least in the Central African Republic. A peace proposal for Ukraine that African leaders have tried to follow through on will also be discussed at the summit.
Prigozhin, who led a failed armed rebellion against the Kremlin on June 23-24, also held meetings with representatives of those countries. The news is accompanied by a photo in which Prigozhin poses with an African delegate at a hotel he owns where many of the guests stay. The image was posted by the head of the Russian House in the Central African Republic, Dmitry Syty, during the Russia-Africa forum.
Hundreds of Wagner mercenaries have arrived in the CAR in recent days to guarantee security during the constitutional referendum on Sunday. As for Mali, human rights organizations denounced last week atrocities committed by the Malian army and presumably by Wagner mercenaries.
Media close to Wagner report that members of the African delegations highlighted the great effectiveness of the Russian mercenaries.
Prigozhin recently assured at Wagner’s new base in Belarus that the mercenaries will soon return to their natural space, Africa, although he did not rule out a future return to the front in Ukraine.
