A screen grab captured from a video shows Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin making a speech in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24, 2023. (Wagner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Hudson recommended giving Ukraine cluster munitions earlier this year, but the Biden administration only recently announced it will provide them. The White House has consistently lagged behind battleground developments, harming Ukraine's counteroffensive and enabling Russian victories like the Wagner Group’s brutal capture of Bakhmut.

Long before Yevgeny Prigozhins’s rise to public prominence at Bakhmut, mutiny against Moscow, and alleged but unconfirmed exile to Belarus, Hudson experts analyzed Wagner’s importance as a tool to project Kremlin influence across Africa and the Middle East.

Read their insights below, and follow our new Threads account to stay up to date with Hudson’s work.

Key Insights

1. Wagner is most active in Africa.

The money funding Wagner comes from its notoriously smart game on the African continent. In this part of the world, especially the Sahel region of Africa, governments face Islamist insurgencies and terrorism risks. Their ability to tackle those threats is limited. Wagner offers a few hundred or a few thousand fighters, and these guys change the game there because they are professional. They play it very smart: instead of getting paid millions of dollars, in some extreme cases, they want mining deals like diamond fields and diamond mines. They want critical infrastructure deals like ports and airports.

Watch Hudson Senior Fellow Can Kasapoğlu’s full appearance on Scripps News.

2. Wagner is like a Russian Hezbollah.

With its political agenda, independent combat operations edge, burgeoning warfighting arsenal, and quasi-military ventures, perhaps the closest geopolitical analog to Prigozhin’s private army is Hezbollah. The role Wagner might play in the postwar Russian Federation—particularly if the war comes to a conclusion following a decisive Ukrainian counteroffensive—could be very important to determining the future of the post-Soviet sphere.

Read Kasapoğlu’s full analysis of Wagner from the May 10 issue of Re: Ukraine.

3. Wagner is not finished.

Those who claim that the thwarted mutiny has ended the Wagner saga have little, if any, understanding of Wagner’s geopolitical worldview. Above all, Wagner runs on revenues that do not predominantly stem from Ukraine, and the group does not live solely on Putin’s generous turf. Although the bulk of the Western strategic community associates Prigozhin’s forces with Bakhmut, the key to understanding Wagner is Africa. Contrary to mainstream Russian affairs research by most Western think tanks, Prigozhin’s footprint is not confined to the former Soviet space. Wagner’s warlord has a much larger vision.

Read Kasapoğlu’s coverage of the Wagner revolt.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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