Sudan’s Secret War: How Wagner Turned Africa’s Gold Into Russia’s War Chest

By James Mercer | Geopolitics | Novarapress.net

In February 2022, a Sudanese customs inspector at Khartoum airport made a discovery that should have made global headlines. A Russian cargo plane sat on the tarmac, its manifest listing the cargo as cookies — an item Sudan doesn’t typically export in any significant quantity. When inspectors opened the hold, they found boxes of cookies, but inside them, concealed beneath the packaging, was over one metric ton of gold.

The plane was stopped. But countless others weren’t. Between February 2022 and February 2023 alone — the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Wagner Group operatives and their affiliates smuggled an estimated 32.7 metric tons of Sudanese gold out of the country, worth nearly $1.9 billion. That figure is roughly equivalent to Sudan’s entire official gold export for the same period. In other words, a shadow economy operating in plain sight had matched, almost exactly, the output of the country’s legitimate mining sector.

The gold didn’t stay in Russia. It was routed through the United Arab Emirates, laundered into global markets, and fed into the Russian war machine at precisely the moment Western sanctions were trying to starve it. Sudan, a country of 50 million people already struggling with poverty, political instability, and a legacy of conflict, had become a critical financial lifeline for the Kremlin — and almost nobody in the Western world was paying attention.

This is the full story of how that happened.

Chapter One: Bashir’s Desperate Gamble (2017)

To understand Wagner’s presence in Sudan, you have to understand the position Omar al-Bashir was in when he flew to Sochi in November 2017 to meet Vladimir Putin. Bashir had been Sudan’s president for nearly three decades, having seized power in a 1989 Islamist coup. By 2017, he was a man under siege — the International Criminal Court had indicted him for genocide over Darfur, the United States had maintained sanctions on Sudan for years, and protests were beginning to simmer across the country. He needed allies, and he needed them badly.

What Bashir offered Putin was remarkable in its candor. He reportedly described Sudan as Russia’s “gateway to Africa” — a country with vast natural resources, a strategic location on the Red Sea, and a government willing to align itself with Moscow in exchange for protection. He asked for Russian assistance to “protect” Sudan from what he characterized as aggressive US interference. The pitch worked.

Within weeks, Moscow had negotiated a series of economic and security agreements with Khartoum. The most consequential of these was a set of gold mining concessions granted to M-Invest, a Russian company with documented links to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the former convict turned Kremlin caterer who had by then built Wagner into one of the most capable private military forces in the world. A new subsidiary, Meroe Gold, was created to manage operations on the ground in Sudan. It began bringing Russian experts and equipment into the country almost immediately.

In December 2017, a video surfaced online showing Wagner contractors training members of the Sudanese military — confirming, for the first time, that the group’s presence in Sudan extended beyond mining. Analysts estimated the initial Wagner contingent at around 300 personnel, operating under the commercial cover of M-Invest. According to Sergey Sukhankin of the Jamestown Foundation, protection of mining assets was “the most essential commodity” Wagner was sent to secure — but the political dimension was never far behind.

Chapter Two: The Infrastructure of Extraction

Wagner’s mining operations in Sudan were not artisanal or improvised. They were industrial. Meroe Gold established a processing plant near Atbara, a city in Sudan’s northeastern River Nile state — one of the country’s richest gold-bearing regions. Approximately 16 kilometers from the town of Abidiya, in an area known for its gold deposits, Wagner set up a mine that became the anchor of its Sudanese operation. Geologists affiliated with the group also visited Darfur to assess its uranium potential, suggesting an interest in Sudan’s mineral wealth that went well beyond gold.

The business model was straightforward in concept, complex in execution. Wagner secured mining rights from the Sudanese government in exchange for providing political and military support to the regime. The group then extracted gold, smuggled it out of the country — primarily through Libya and Syria, using Russian military aircraft — and sold it in the UAE, where lax regulation around artisanal African gold imports made it an ideal laundering destination. The profits flowed back to Prigozhin’s network and, by extension, to the Russian state.

Between April 2018 and February 2019, two Russian Air Force aircraft made at least nine documented flights to Khartoum, providing air logistics for Wagner’s Sudan operation. In 2021, a year before the Ukraine invasion, sixteen planes loaded with Sudanese gold were recorded leaving the country for laundering in the Middle East. The scale of the operation was extraordinary — and it was operating in the open, with at least tacit awareness from Sudanese authorities who were benefiting from the security guarantees the relationship provided.

What Wagner was building in Sudan wasn’t just a mining operation. It was a sanctions-evasion infrastructure — a system for converting African natural resources into hard currency that could circulate in global markets regardless of what Western governments decided about Russia’s behavior on the international stage. Sudan was the template. The same model, with variations, was subsequently deployed in Mali, the Central African Republic, and Libya.

Chapter Three: Surviving the Fall of Bashir

One of the most revealing aspects of Wagner’s Sudan operation is what happened when Omar al-Bashir — the man who invited them in — was overthrown in April 2019 after months of mass protests. A less adaptable organization might have found its position in Sudan fatally compromised by the removal of its primary patron. Wagner, instead, barely missed a step.

The coup that removed Bashir installed a Transitional Military Council (TMC) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, with General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — universally known as Hemedti — as his deputy. Hemedti commanded the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary organization that had grown out of the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide. Wagner had already been cultivating a relationship with Hemedti for years, having trained RSF troops in Darfur and partnered with Hemedti’s family on gold mining operations in the region.

This dual relationship — maintaining ties with both the official military leadership and the RSF commander — proved to be one of Wagner’s most valuable strategic assets in Sudan. Russia, through Wagner, agreed to uphold the existing contracts in Sudan’s defense, mining, and energy sectors under the new TMC. Mining operations continued without interruption. Military training continued. The political alignment between Moscow and Khartoum, briefly disrupted by the fall of Bashir, was quickly restored.

During the protests of late 2018 and early 2019 that preceded Bashir’s fall, Wagner operatives were reportedly deployed to help suppress demonstrations — transitioning, in the words of one analyst, from a “guardianship army” protecting mining assets to a direct actor in domestic political repression. After Bashir’s removal, the group recalibrated, pulling back from open political involvement and focusing on consolidating its economic positions while waiting to see how the transition would unfold. When the 2021 military coup — which restored full military control and ended the civilian-military power-sharing arrangement — brought a government even more aligned with Moscow’s interests, Wagner’s position in Sudan became stronger than ever.

Chapter Four: The Red Sea Ambition

Gold was one of Russia’s two primary interests in Sudan. The other was geography. Sudan sits on the western shore of the Red Sea — one of the world’s most strategically critical waterways, through which approximately 12 to 15 percent of global trade passes. A Russian naval base on the Red Sea would give Moscow a military presence in a region where it had none, providing a platform for power projection into the Indian Ocean and a supply hub for its expanding operations in Africa.

Moscow had been pursuing this goal for years. In May 2019, Russia and Sudan signed a military agreement facilitating entry of Russian warships to Sudanese ports. A more comprehensive agreement was signed in November 2020, establishing plans for a Russian naval logistics center and repair yard on Sudan’s Red Sea coast near Port Sudan — a facility that would host up to 300 personnel and four naval vessels, including nuclear-powered ships, under a 25-year agreement.

Wagner’s presence in Sudan was directly connected to this strategic objective. The M-Invest subsidiary had worked to “secure access to Sudanese facilities for the Russian Navy,” according to academic analysis of Wagner’s Sudan operations, and had helped facilitate the Sudanese parliament’s consideration of the naval facility agreement. Wagner was simultaneously a commercial operation, a military advisory mission, and a diplomatic instrument — serving Russia’s strategic interests in Sudan across all three dimensions at once.

After years of political instability delayed finalization of the deal, a formal agreement for a Russian base near Port Sudan was eventually reached in 2024 — nearly seven years after Bashir’s original pitch to Putin in Sochi. The patience with which Moscow pursued this objective, across three different Sudanese governments, is itself a testament to how central the Red Sea access was to Russian strategic planning in Africa.

Chapter Five: When Partners Became Enemies — The War of April 2023

On April 15, 2023, a series of explosions shook Khartoum. The Sudan Armed Forces and the RSF, whose commanders had been circling each other for years in an increasingly unstable power-sharing arrangement, went to war. The conflict that followed would become, by some measures, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world — displacing over 12 million people, killing hundreds of thousands, and destroying much of the country’s infrastructure.

For Wagner, the war created an acute dilemma. The group had cultivated relationships with both al-Burhan’s SAF and Hemedti’s RSF over the preceding six years. Now the two were fighting each other, and Wagner had to choose — or find a way not to choose while still protecting its mining operations, which were spread across territory controlled by both factions.

The initial evidence suggested Wagner tilted toward the RSF. CNN documented satellite imagery of Russian transport planes — Ilyushin-76s — flying from Wagner’s base at al-Jufra in southern Libya to RSF-controlled bases in northwestern Sudan. Sudanese and regional diplomatic sources told the network that Wagner was supplying the RSF with surface-to-air missiles known as MANPADS, among other weapons. The weapons were delivered through a Libya-based logistics chain, with Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar — himself a Wagner partner — reportedly facilitating the transfers.

The strategic logic was clear. Hemedti’s RSF controlled much of the territory where Wagner’s gold mining operations were located, particularly in Darfur and the western regions. Supporting the RSF protected those operations. The relationship was transactional in both directions: Wagner provided weapons, training, and political backing; Hemedti provided security for the mines and access to the gold they produced. A month after fighting broke out, a Sudanese gold trader in Dubai associated with the RSF received 50 kilograms of gold — and shortly after, RSF fighters began receiving shipments of heavy weapons through Libya.

Prigozhin publicly denied any involvement. “Wagner PMC is in no way involved in the Sudanese conflict,” he stated on Telegram. The evidence told a different story. Videos obtained by Semafor appeared to show Wagner operatives training Sudanese fighters. The Darfur Bar Association had already documented testimonies from people whose relatives were allegedly killed by Wagner mercenaries near artisanal gold mines close to the CAR border. In June 2022, a full year before the civil war began, Wagner had already been driving out artisanal miners on both sides of the Sudan-CAR border to consolidate control over mining territories.

Chapter Six: The Gold-for-Weapons Loop

What emerged from the chaos of Sudan’s civil war was a self-sustaining financial loop of remarkable cynicism. Gold flowed out of Sudan — extracted from mines in RSF-controlled territory, often with Wagner’s direct involvement — and into the UAE, where it entered the global market. Money from those sales went back into the RSF’s coffers, funding salaries, weapons purchases, and the political lobbying that Hemedti was conducting across African capitals. Some of those weapons — particularly surface-to-air missiles and other advanced military equipment — were supplied by Wagner itself, creating a circular arrangement in which the gold funded the weapons that protected the gold.

At the same time, the gold flowing to Russia — through Syria’s Latakia airbase and into Russian reserves — was serving a critical function for the Kremlin. Western sanctions imposed after the 2022 Ukraine invasion had cut Russia off from significant portions of the global financial system. African gold, particularly Sudanese gold, provided a mechanism for generating hard currency that could circulate in global markets without triggering sanctions. The British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded, based on expert testimony, that Wagner’s gold-smuggling operations from Sudan were “critical to Russia’s ability to withstand the significant sanctions deployed against it for its illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

The numbers are staggering. Transparency International Russia‘s 2025 investigation estimated that Wagner-linked companies had smuggled over $1.9 billion in gold out of Sudan alone. The broader Blood Gold Report estimated that Russia had earned over $2.5 billion from African gold since February 2022. Industry experts estimated that between 50 and 80 percent of Sudan’s real gold production was being smuggled out of the country — with the UAE receiving over 99 percent of Sudan’s declared gold exports in 2023, and the undeclared volume believed to be significantly higher.

Meanwhile, as both the SAF and RSF secured their respective gold revenues, the civilian population was left to bear the consequences. In El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, the UN estimated that up to 15,000 civilians had died since the conflict erupted. Reports documented mass sexual violence, the systematic burning of villages, and the deliberate destruction of hospitals and infrastructure. Sudan’s official death toll, which former US envoy Tom Perriello suggested could be as high as 400,000, may never be fully known.

Chapter Seven: Wagner Becomes Africa Corps — And the Relationship Shifts

In 2024, the Wagner Group underwent a structural transformation that had been in motion since Prigozhin’s brief mutiny against the Russian Defense Ministry in June 2023 — and his subsequent death in a suspicious plane crash two months later. Wagner’s Africa operations were consolidated under a new entity called Africa Corps, placed under the direct control of Russia’s Ministry of Defense. The rebranding represented a shift from Prigozhin’s freewheeling, entrepreneurial model to a more formally state-controlled operation — though the personnel, the methods, and the strategic objectives remained largely unchanged.

In Sudan, the transition from Wagner to Africa Corps coincided with a notable shift in Russian positioning. Having initially backed the RSF, Moscow began recalibrating toward the SAF — partly because the naval base deal it had spent years negotiating was contingent on the SAF government’s cooperation, and partly because the SAF was increasingly in control of the territory around Port Sudan, where Russia’s strategic interest was concentrated. By late 2024, as the SAF launched coordinated offensives and began recapturing significant territory around Khartoum, Russian support appeared to be hedging toward the government forces.

The relationship between Africa Corps and the RSF was also showing signs of strain. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, allegations emerged in early 2025 that the mercenary group was making cross-border incursions from the CAR into Darfur — territory the RSF considered its own operational zone. The tensions highlighted a recurring theme in Wagner’s Africa operations: the group’s interests were never fully aligned with those of its local partners, and when those interests diverged, the relationship could sour quickly.

In October 2025, the RSF captured El Fasher — the last SAF stronghold in western Sudan and the capital of North Darfur. Hemedti had by then declared a parallel government in Nyala, effectively partitioning the country along east-west lines. The fall of El Fasher marked a catastrophic milestone in the conflict’s trajectory, with tens of thousands of civilians fleeing and thousands reportedly killed in the assault. Sudan’s east-west split was, for the moment, almost complete.

Chapter Eight: The Architecture No One Wants to Dismantle

What makes Wagner’s Sudan operation so durable — and so difficult to counter — is that almost every actor with the power to stop it has a reason not to. The UAE, which serves as the primary laundering destination for Sudanese gold, has denied involvement while its markets continue to absorb the continent’s illicit gold production. The RSF’s gold-for-weapons arrangement with various external actors has made Hemedti one of Sudan’s richest men, giving him both the resources to continue fighting and the financial networks to insulate himself from international pressure. Russia has a functioning sanctions-evasion mechanism that helps fund a war in Europe. None of these actors benefit from the loop being broken.

Western governments, meanwhile, have struggled to develop effective responses. Sanctions on M-Invest and Meroe Gold, imposed by the US Treasury in 2020, prompted Wagner to simply rebrand its operations under a new entity called Al-Solag Mining — purchasing Meroe Gold’s assets through Sudanese corporate structures and continuing operations with minimal interruption. Publicizing the evidence, as CNN, the Blood Gold Report, and Transparency International Russia have done, raises awareness but has not translated into the kind of coordinated international pressure that might actually disrupt the financial infrastructure.

The fundamental problem is structural. Wagner — now Africa Corps — built its Sudan operation not as a simple extractive enterprise, but as a multi-layered system embedding Russian interests into the political, military, and economic fabric of the country. It has relationships with both sides of Sudan’s civil war. It controls mining territory. It has a naval base agreement with the surviving government. It has smuggling routes through three neighboring countries. Dismantling any one piece of this system leaves the others intact. And as long as Sudan remains in conflict — as long as the state is too weak and too fragmented to enforce its own laws — the conditions that Wagner exploits will persist.

The Price of Gold

In the sandy hills of North Darfur, in the areas around Atbara, in the artisanal mining communities that have proliferated across Sudan since the civil war began, men and women dig for gold using mercury and cyanide. The toxins seep into water supplies and farmland. Children are poisoned. After floods, the chemicals reach the Nile itself. Sudan’s officially declared gold production nearly doubled in the years after the war began — to 65 tons of bullion last year — as both warring factions and their external partners competed to extract as much as possible from a country that was simultaneously experiencing a catastrophic famine.

The gold that leaves Sudan funds Hemedti’s army. It funds Russia’s war in Ukraine. It funds Wagner’s operations across the continent. What it does not fund is any meaningful improvement in the lives of the people on whose land it sits.

In Sochi in 2017, Omar al-Bashir told Vladimir Putin that Sudan could be Russia’s gateway to Africa. He was right, in ways he probably didn’t fully anticipate. Russia has used that gateway to extract billions in resources, to build military infrastructure, to position itself as an indispensable actor in the continent’s most troubled states, and to construct a sanctions-evasion apparatus that has materially helped sustain a war in Europe.

The cookies, it turns out, were never really cookies.

James Mercer is a geopolitical analyst covering great power competition, conflict economies, and emerging security threats for Novarapress.net.