After Prigozhin’s presumed death, the Kremlin, internal Wagner factions and outside paramilitary forces are jockeying for control of a lucrative global empire.
People place a flag with an image of the owner of private military company Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin at an informal memorial next to the former 'PMC Wagner Centre' in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, Aug. 25, 2023. A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment has found that the plane crash presumed to have killed Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was intentionally caused by an explosion.
Yet one high-ranking Wagner insider, Andrei Troshev, has emerged as a potential contender to step in and run what’s left of the group. A former lieutenant colonel in Russia’s ministry of internal affairs, Troshev is believed to have been the main liaison between Prigozhin and the Defense Ministry during the war in Ukraine.
When Prigozhin rejected his offer, Putin accused him of contradicting the wishes of his fighters, who he claimed were “nodding” in agreement during the meeting. Wagner is Russia’s most well-known private military company, but it is hardly the only one. Similar companies have sprouted with the backing of Russian oligarchs, giving Putin an array of proxy forces to do his bidding while affording him plausible deniability. For at least five years, these companies have been recruiting from veterans associations, security teams at state enterprises, fight clubs and local gyms.
Its leader, Konstantin Pikalov, once worked for Wagner in Africa and told Russian investigative outlet Important Stories, “Unprecedented measures have been developed to liberate African countries from colonial dependence . . . We will give African soldiers new weapons and teach them how to use them.”
“It is clear that the backbone of Wagner will not be happy with the decision to mix the ranks, but they have no choice,” he said. “So the death of Prigozhin is a great loss for us because he helped save democracy in the CAR,” Gouandjika said in an interview Friday. “But nothing will change. Russia can decide on another leader for Wagner.”
Even before the mutiny, Hifter was growing disillusioned with Prigozhin, according to Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute, a Tripoli-based think tank. The relationship between the two men had “broken down significantly over the past year,” he said, in part because Hifter withheld payments from Wagner in an effort to secure military equipment.
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