The Kremlin’s relationship with Hemedti developed rapidly after his forces took control of gold mines in Sudan’s Darfur district in November 2017.
When two military super-egos clash in a country, the outcome is rarely good for its citizens. So it is in Sudan, the North African nation which has contended with numerous coups and periods of civil strife since becoming independent from Great Britain in 1956. The latest revolves around a power struggle between two rival groups: the Sudanese army, led by Sudan’s de facto ruler, General Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) consisting of more than 100,000 soldiers, led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, generally known by the name Hemedti.
More than 400 civilians have died in the conflict so far and thousands of expats have been rescued. Operation Kaveri, conducted by India’s government, last week evacuated by air and sea close to 3,000 Indian citizens stranded in Sudan. Tens of thousands of Sudan’s citizens are fleeing to the border for safety.
It’s now four years since Sudan’s former President, Omar al-Bashir, a ruthless military dictator who ruled for almost 30 years, was deposed by the army after months of popular protest against his regime. For two tense years after the 2019 revolution, both Burhan and Hemedti shared power with civilian partners under a civilian Prime Minister, an arrangement that was supposed to pave the way for democratic elections.
Then in 2021 it all came to an end when the two generals jointly carried out yet another coup, the sixth since Sudan’s independence, which ejected all civilians from the transitional government. By February this year people were growing increasingly afraid that Burhan, the country’s leader, and Hemedti, his deputy, who increasingly viewed each other with suspicion, might come to blows and plunge the country into armed conflict. They were right to be concerned as it happened quickly on the morning of 15 April when people awoke to the sound of gunfire. Shortly after the attacks began, as citizens cowered in shock, an angry Hemedti gave an interview on Al Jazeera claiming that Burhan was a criminal who wanted to destroy the country and that he would be arrested and brought to justice or “die like a dog”. Sudan’s army under Burhan now found itself in conflict with a large paramilitary force that it cannot dominate, under a leader it cannot control. The super-egos were at war.
But how do Hemedti and his RSF obtain weapons for their fight against Sudan’s army?
The answer came last week in a CNN report that claimed that the Russian mercenary group, Wagner, has been providing the RSF with missiles and major shipments of arms, significantly buttressing Hemedti’s fighters in their battle against Burhan’s troops. According to the Sudanese lawyer, Yaser Abdulrehman, Hemedti and Wagner “are like Siamese twins”. He also shed some light on the possible trigger for the current conflict, suggesting that the Wagner Group was deeply angered by the Burhan regime when they arrested a number of Wagner personnel for gold smuggling, an event that could well have been the spark that started the push by Hemedti against Burhan.
The world is now witnessing what is essentially a mobster shoot-out between two generals, each head of their own kleptocratic network consisting of vast militarised and commercialised outfits, engaged in a wide range of illicit and corrupt activities who fundamentally want to run Sudan for their own personal and factional benefit.
In addition to Wagner, Hemedti is exploiting his links with Libya. Sudan borders Libya, where a Wagner-backed rogue general, Khalifa Haftar, controls swathes of land. Haftar’s relationship with Hemedti goes back long before the fall of Omar al-Bashir and has become extremely close in recent years. By way of mutual cooperation, Hemedti sent more than 1,000 mercenaries to Libya to fight alongside Haftar’s military force, the self-styled Libyan National Army. Last week, CNN reported that the open-source group “All Eyes on Wagner” had analysed satellite images that appeared to show a Russian transport plane shuttling between two key Libyan bases controlled by Haftar, and that it was this plane that air-dropped the missiles and weapons cache to Hemedti’s troops.
The Kremlin’s relationship with Hemedti developed rapidly after his forces took control of gold mines in Sudan’s Darfur district, the country’s largest source of export revenue, in November 2017. Five months later on 24 April 2018, according to Novaya Gazeta, the founder and owner of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, flew from Moscow to Khartoum, accompanied by two security guards. According to C4ADS, a Washington-based research organisation, it was from this time that Prigozhin’s company won access to Sudan’s lucrative gold mines. Mikhail Potepkin, who at the time was employed by Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, the organisation based in St Petersburg known as Russia’s troll factory, was named head of Prigozhin’s operation in Sudan, and a former top-ranking Wagner commander, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, was then put in charge of Prigozhin’s gold-mining operations in the country.
In February 2022, Hemedti flew to Moscow to meet President Putin. Shortly after, at exactly the time Russia’s tanks were attempting to encircle Kyiv, an aircraft loaded with gold flew from Sudan to Russia’s military base at Latakia. CNN estimated that around 90% of Sudan’s gold production worth approximately $13.4 billion was allegedly smuggled out that way. The aim was simple: Russia was desperate to strengthen its reserves against increasingly punitive Western sanctions, and Prigozhin had found a way of obtaining from Hemedti a licence to fly weapons in and gold out, all without being officially declared or detected.
Wagner needs the protection of Sudanese power and influence because it’s also smuggling gold from the neighbouring Central African Republic. Prigozhin was contracted to use Wagner mercenaries to guard the Ndassima gold mines in that small land-locked country, bordering Sudan. In reality, the mercenaries melted the gold into bars, which were then discretely shipped through Khartoum, using Prigozhin’s Sudan company, Meroe Gold. Wagner uses an old, established smuggling route that sees both CAR and Sudanese gold end up in Dubai, where there are few regulations controlling its trade. The gold then either goes to Moscow or is sold for dollars that finance its war in Ukraine.
In 2020, the US Treasury Department sanctioned several Prigozhin companies and their employees, including Meroe Gold and Mikhail Potepkin, for their work in Sudan. “Prigozhin’s role in Sudan highlights the interplay between Russia’s paramilitary operations, support for preserving authoritarian regimes, and exploitation of natural resources”, said the Department in a statement. The companies targeted “have directly facilitated Prigozhin’s global operation and attempted to suppress protestors seeking democratic reforms in Sudan”. Prigozhin, of course, refutes all charges and even denies that his mercenaries are in Sudan, despite copious evidence that thousands are in the country.
Wagner’s presence in Sudan is strategically important to Moscow as the war in Ukraine continues without any sign of a resolution. When the West responded to Putin’s invasion with punishing sanctions, the Kremlin’s network of shady operators under Prigozhin began tapping resources they control in order to fuel the war. Hemedti is the Kremlin’s golden boy in Sudan and is key to the continuation of Russia’s track record of grabbing natural resources in the region. The scheme to plunder Sudanese gold, with the full cooperation of Hemedti, has emerged as an important way to bolster the Russian economy and build a war chest necessary to continue its war in Ukraine.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.