From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   ‘From Russia With Love’: A Putin Ally Mines Gold and Plays Favorites in   
   Sudan   
   By Declan Walsh, June 5, 2022, NY Times   
      
   AL-IBEDIYYA, Sudan — In a scorched, gold-rich area 200 miles north    
   of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes spring from desert-hewn rock,    
   a mysterious foreign operator dominates the business. Locals call it    
   “The Russian Company” — a tightly guarded plant with shining towers,    
   deep in the desert, that processes mounds of dusty ore into bars of    
   semirefined gold.  “The Russians pay the best,” said Ammar al-Amir,    
   a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a hardscrabble mining    
   town 10 miles from the plant. “Otherwise, we don’t know much about them.”   
      
   In fact, Sudanese company and government records show, the gold mine    
   is one outpost of the Wagner Group, an opaque network of Russian    
   mercenaries, mining companies and political influence operations —    
   controlled by a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia —    
   that is expanding aggressively across a swath of Africa.  Best known as    
   a supplier of hired guns, Wagner has in recent years evolved into a    
   far broader and more sophisticated tool of Kremlin power, according    
   to experts and Western officials tracking its expansion. Rather than    
   a single entity, Wagner has come to describe interlinked war-fighting,    
   moneymaking and influence-peddling operations, low-cost and deniable,    
   that serve Mr. Putin’s ambitions on a continent where support for    
   Russia is relatively high.   
      
   Wagner emerged in 2014 as a band of Kremlin-backed mercenaries that    
   supported Mr. Putin’s first foray into eastern Ukraine, and that    
   later deployed to Syria. In recent months, at least 1,000 of its    
   fighters have re-emerged in Ukraine, British intelligence has said.   
   The linchpin of Wagner’s operations, according to Western officials,    
   is Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef”    
   who was indicted in the United States on charges of meddling in the    
   2016 presidential election.  In 2017, Wagner expanded into Africa,    
   where its mercenaries have become a significant, sometimes pivotal    
   factor in a string of conflict-hit countries: Libya, Mozambique,    
   Central African Republic and most recently Mali where, as elsewhere,    
   Wagner has been accused of atrocities against civilians.   
      
   But Wagner is far more than a war machine in Africa, and a close    
   look at its activities in Sudan, the continent’s third largest gold    
   producer, reveals its reach.  Wagner has obtained lucrative Sudanese    
   mining concessions that produce a stream of gold, records show — a    
   potential boost to the Kremlin’s $130 billion gold stash that American    
   officials worry is being used to blunt the effect of economic sanctions    
   over the Ukraine war, by propping up the ruble.  In eastern Sudan,    
   Wagner is supporting the Kremlin’s push to build a naval base on the    
   Red Sea to host its nuclear-powered warships. In western Sudan, it has    
   found a launchpad for its mercenary operations in neighboring countries    
   — and a possible source of uranium.   
      
   And since Sudan’s military seized power in a coup in October, Wagner    
   has intensified its partnership with a power-hungry commander, Lt. Gen.    
   Mohamed Hamdan, who visited Moscow in the early days of the Ukraine war,    
   which began in February. Wagner has given military aid to General Hamdan    
   and helped Sudan’s security forces to suppress a fragile grass-roots,    
   pro-democracy movement, Western officials say.  “Russia feeds off    
   kleptocracy, civil wars and internecine conflicts in Africa, filling    
   vacuums where the West is not engaged or not interested,” said Samuel    
   Ramani of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense research group    
   in London, and the author of a forthcoming book on Russia in Africa.   
   Sudan, Mr. Ramani added, typifies the kind of country where Wagner thrives.   
      
   The Kremlin and Mr. Prigozhin deny any links to Wagner, which is said    
   to be named after Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, by a    
   founding commander who was fascinated by Nazi symbolism and history.   
   Mr. Prigozhin shrouds his activities in secrecy, trying to mask his    
   ties to Wagner through a web of shell companies and traveling the    
   African continent by private jet for meetings with presidents and    
   military commanders. But the U.S. Treasury Department and experts who    
   track Mr. Prigozhin’s activities say that he owns or controls most, if    
   not all, of the companies that make up Wagner.  And as his operations    
   in Sudan show, those companies have left a paper trail.   
      
   Russian and Sudanese customs and corporate records, obtained through    
   the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a nonprofit in Washington,    
   as well as mining documents, flight records and interviews with Western    
   and Sudanese officials, reveal the extent of his business empire in Sudan    
   — and the particular importance of gold.  The Wagner Group has “spread a    
   trail of lies and human rights abuses” across Africa, and Mr. Prigozhin    
   is its “manager and financier,” the State Department said in a statement    
   on May 24.  Most officials spoke about Mr. Prigozhin and Wagner on the    
   condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of their work or, in    
   some cases, fears for their safety. General Hamdan and Mubarak Ardol,    
   Sudan’s state regulator for mining, declined to be interviewed.   
      
   In a lengthy written response to questions, Mr. Prigozhin denied any    
   mining interests in Sudan, denounced American sanctions against him and    
   rejected, with a hint of a wink, the very existence of the group he is    
   famously associated with.  “I, unfortunately, have never had gold mining    
   companies,” he said. “And I am not a Russian military man.  “The Wagner    
   legend,” he added, “is just a legend.”   
      
   The ‘Key to Africa’   
   ------------------   
   Wagner’s operations in Sudan began in 2017 after a meeting in the    
   Russian coastal resort of Sochi.  After nearly 3 decades of autocratic    
   rule, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan was losing his grip on    
   power. At a meeting with Mr. Putin in Sochi, he sought a new alliance,    
   proposing Sudan as Russia’s “key to Africa” in return for help,   
   according    
   to the Kremlin’s transcript of their remarks.  Mr. Putin snapped up the   
   offer.   
   Within weeks, Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold,    
      
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