What Wagner’s Mutiny Means For Its Sprawling Business Empire
The two men, rifles strapped to their backs, huddle together in the grass. Bright flashes appear in their hands — Molotov cocktails, which they hurl high over a barbed wire fence toward stacked red crates of beer. Plumes of smoke fill the air.
The fire that ensued destroyed some 50,000 beer bottles at a brewery owned by French alcohol giant Castel in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Officials from two Western governments that have reviewed the closed-circuit footage, obtained by Bloomberg News, believe that the perpetrators belong to the Wagner Group, according to people familiar with the situation. The notorious Russian paramilitary organization — whose founder Yevgeny Prigozhin had close ties to the Kremlin until last weekend, when he mounted a mutiny against President Vladimir Putin — has committed a wide range of alleged human rights abuses, from grisly murders of civilians in Ukraine, where it has played a key role, to the rape and execution of villagers in CAR and Mali. For more than half a decade, it has been the leading actor in the Kremlin’s efforts to grow its sphere of influence on the continent, gaining friends — along with security-services contracts and lucrative mining licenses — in half a dozen African countries.