2023-07-28 12:00:03
A Malian poses in front of the Russian flag during a demonstration organized by the Yerewolo association, in Bamako, in February 2022. FLORENT VERGNES / AFP
In the early hours of the Russia-Africa summit, a rumor was becoming more and more pressing: would Evgueni Prigojine be in Saint Petersburg, behind the scenes of this meeting which is being held on Thursday July 27 and Friday July 28? The questioning was made even stronger when one of the loyal lieutenants of the leader of Wagner, Dmitri Sytyi, in charge of the political and civil operations of the paramilitary group in Bangui, posted a photo of Mr. Prigojine and an official captioned: “We see familiar faces” – without however this image being able to be dated.
Present in the flesh or not, the author of a failed rebellion against the Russian general staff a month ago is an essential player in the second edition of the summit organized by Vladimir Putin, as he was one of the conductors of Russian expansion in Africa. “Africa is a region of the world where the interests of all the world powers converge. The position of a state on the international scene depends directly on the influence it exerts on the African continent.wrote the Wagner group in 2019 in an internal memo consulted by The world.
His conquest of certain African countries, Mr. Prigojine made it thanks to his mercenaries, but also with his troll factories, who obtained the first Russian victory: that of the spirits. From Niamey, where, on Thursday, demonstrators demanded the arrival of “Russians” after the coup by the military, as far as Kinshasa, where the country’s flags bloom in the streets, the continent had never seemed so Russophile and Francophobe.
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Since the first Russia-Africa summit, in Sochi in 2019, Yevgueni Prigojine has set up a sophisticated propaganda apparatus to try to restore to his country some of the diplomatic weight lost a quarter of a century earlier with the fall of the USSR. . The goal: to promote « dissemination of information on Russian and Soviet support for African countries in their struggle for independence » and the “formation of negative attitudes towards European powers and the United States”, explains the internal document of the firm cited above.
The Wagner Group has applied this strategy, to varying degrees, in all the countries in which it has sold its services. In the Central African Republic and Mali, for example, Russian propaganda has germinated on fertile ground, that of a strong pan-African feeling and a rejection of the West. Weaving a network of disinformation using companies such as Africa Politology (sanctioned by the US Treasury in January), Wagner relied on Russian influencers to relay his thought, then on African political actors, and knew how to take advantage of perilous political sequences, such as coups and elections. The world deciphered this propaganda strategy.
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