Then, there are “several Russian private military companies which have had ex-members of these services”, Osborn added. Wagner was one such company.
Wagner first made its presence known as a violent paramilitary operating under Russian oversight in Kremlin-occupied Donbas, before expanding its operations into Africa, and then Syria. Wagner played a significant role in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, only for its self-proclaimed founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to fall out spectacularly with President Putin in 2023. Progizhin died in a plane crash soon after, and most of the group’s structure was subsequently taken over by Russian military intelligence.
“The big shift came after Prigozhin’s death, with a deeper involvement from security services in what the Wagner Group had created,” Osborn said.
What is left of the Wagner Group, she added, “especially in the Central African Republic and information operations, was rumoured to have been taken over by the SVR for years, and now these leaked documents are proving it”.
The documents contain strategies, workplans, budgets, accounting reports, staff biographies, profiles of targeted public figures, and briefings of media operations relating to Russian influence campaigns executed between January and November 2024 in at least 30 countries in Africa and Latin America, including in Bolivia and Argentina.
openDemocracy and a consortium including The Continent, Dossier Center and iStories (Russia), All Eyes on Wagner and Forbidden Stories (France) and two independent Russian-speaking journalists, have examined and fact-checked the documents and are publishing a series of stories on many of these activities.
A key document in this trove is a 54-page report titled “Strategy for increasing Russia's influence in Africa”, and likely dated in August 2023, which makes clear that these documents were prepared by operators linked to the Wagner group for internal use. In several places, the document calls for joint strategies of cooperation with the SVR. At least 17 of the more than 60 operatives deployed by 2024 and mentioned in these documents have previous links to Wagner.
Finally, openDemocracy was able to confirm that an interaction described in the documents – between the Russian operatives and a senior advisor to the Arce administration – did indeed take place.
“Defenders of the Peace”
The Bolivian operation was led from Russia by a man named Sergei Sergeyevich Klyukin, described in the documents as the “curator” of the mission. An internal biographical document analysed by openDemocracy states that Klyukin had joined ‘the Company’, as the group called itself in the documents, in 2018 after working as a political consultant in Russia...
You can read the rest of this investigation here.
