Who will succeed Wagner’s Prigozhin?
African leaders allied with Russia had grown used to dealing with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the swaggering, profane mercenary leader who traveled the continent by private jet, offering to prop up shaky regimes with guns and propaganda in return for gold and diamonds.
But the Russian delegation that toured three African countries last week was led by a very different figure, the starchy deputy defense minister, Yunus-bek Yevkurov. Dressed in a khaki uniform and a “telnyashka” — the horizontally-striped undergarment of Russian armed forces — he signaled conformity and restraint, giving assurances wrapped in polite language.
“We will do our best to help you,” he said at a news conference in Burkina Faso.
The contrast with the flamboyant Prigozhin could not have been sharper, and it aligned with the message the Kremlin was delivering: After Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash last month, Russia’s operations in Africa were coming under new management.
It was a glimpse of a shadowy battle now playing out on three continents: the fight for a lucrative paramilitary and propaganda empire that enriched Prigozhin and served Russia’s military and diplomatic ambitions — until the Wagner leader staged a failed mutiny against the Kremlin in June.
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials in Washington, Europe, Africa and Russia — as well as four Russians who worked for Prigozhin — portray a tug of war over his assets among major players in Russia’s power structure, including two different intelligence agencies. Many of those interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity, to discuss sensitive diplomatic and intelligence issues.
The fight is complicated, people said, by the lingering allegiance to Prigozhin in his private army, where some are bridling at being subsumed within Russia’s Defense Ministry and instead backing a transfer of power to Prigozhin’s son.
“Wagner is not just about the money — it’s a kind of religion,” said Maksim Shugalei, a political consultant for Prigozhin, adding that he was proud to be part of the mercenary force. “It’s unlikely that this structure will totally disappear. For me, this is impossible.”
The interviews also revealed more about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to discredit Prigozhin after the rebellion, including his declaration to a group of media figures that the Wagner leader was a profiteer who had made billions from “gold and bling.”
The accounts suggest that even in death, Prigozhin remains a defining figure of Putin’s Russia — encapsulating the secrecy, infighting and contradictory tactics of the Kremlin as it wages war against Ukraine.