On the run, the paramilitary chief crisscrossed his global business empire, desperate to show he was still in control; ‘I need more gold’

Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future.

Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent.

In the riverside presidential palace in Bangui, the capital, Prigozhin told President Faustin-Archange Touadera that his aborted June mutiny in Russia wouldn’t stop him from bringing new fighters and investments to his business partners in Central Africa, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

Shortly after, a Wagner helicopter landed nearby carrying five commanders from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group reliant on the mercenary group to wage war against their country’s government. The delegation had traveled to Bangui from the restive Darfur province bearing a gift for Prigozhin, who had provided them surface-to-air missiles: gold bars from the mines his mercenaries helped secure in Sudan’s war-torn west.

On the other side of the Sahara, Prigozhin’s rivals in Russia’s defense ministry were delivering a competing message to Wagner’s clients in Libya. The Kremlin was taking formal control of a sprawling corporate network whose ambitions had outgrown President Vladimir Putin’s comfort. Prigozhin flew back to Russia around the same time, stopping over in Mali, and weaving through the airspace of client states he was trying to salvage from Kremlin control.

It was a farewell tour that the 62-year-old paramilitary chief didn’t realize he was making.

When the Embraer Legacy 600 jet carrying Prigozhin and his most senior lieutenants fell from the sky on Wednesday just 40 miles from one of Putin’s lakeside residences, it cut short an international contest that had been quietly playing out for two months as both the Kremlin and the self-styled military oligarch vied for influence in the countries that once sourced their mercenaries from Wagner.

For years, Prigozhin had been increasingly living on the run, changing between wigs to impersonate bearded Arab military officers while refueling his jet in the dwindling number of airports that would grant him permission to land.

His Wagner group and the hundred-some shell companies it was linked to were mostly known for their mercenary operations, but by the end of his life had also expanded into finance, construction, supply and logistics, mining and natural resources—and even a thoroughbred racing firm, Sporthorses Management, controlled by his daughter, Polina. Its income derived from exports of Sudanese gold to Russia, and diamonds and wood from the Central African Republic to United Arab Emirates and China, Western and African officials said.

His death leaves the future of those businesses uncertain. The Kremlin now seeks to nationalize an opaque network centralized around Prigozhin’s personal authority. On Thursday, Putin expressed his condolences for those who died on the doomed jet, calling Prigozhin someone with a “complicated life story,” who had greatly contributed to the Russian cause.

“He made some serious mistakes in life,” Putin said of the man he once awarded the country’s highest military honor, the medal of the Hero of Russia. “As far as I know, he returned from Africa only yesterday.”

“Different factions linked to the Russian military will probably try to take over these lucrative business contracts and create new proxy forces,” said David Lewis, from the U.K.’s Exeter University. “Prigozhin was particularly skilled at managing these transnational networks, but he is not indispensable.”

Countries from Mali to Syria had come to depend on Prigozhin’s hired guns, and just days ago, he was offering his services to the new military government of Niger, which seized power last month.

Yet new mercenary companies, run by Russia’s GRU military-intelligence agency, were competing to take over Wagner’s contracts. Putin had personally told Touadera, the Central African Republic president, that the time had come to distance himself from Prigozhin. When Touadera visited Prigozhin’s hometown of St. Petersburg for a conference last month, he abstained from taking a selfie with the Russian warlord.

For his part, the sardonic ex-convict shrugged off the possibility of his impending demise.

“We will all go to hell,” Prigozhin said in an undated video, released Wednesday by the Grey Zone Telegram channel, which frequently publishes official Wagner statements. “But in hell, we will be the best.”

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen African government, military and intelligence officials, Wagner defectors, activist groups and reviews of encrypted conversations and flight data, as well as corporate organizational charts reviewed by the Journal. His flights between Russia and Africa were confirmed by Gleb Irisov, a former Russia air force officer who spoke to airport crew.

Much of Prigozhin’s dealings were shrouded in scores of heavily sanctioned shell companies that banked in opaque jurisdictions. It was a veil of obfuscation that helped the Kremlin claim deniability as the Wagner group helped Russia amass influence, fan protests in Africa against pro-Western governments and swerve around sanctions.

Many of the deals he struck with foreign governments were conducted on a handshake basis, with the details unknown beyond a tiny circle of Wagner officials handpicked by Prigozhin. One was Dmitry Utkin, the former GRU officer whose Nazi tattoos can be seen in photographs, who also died in Wednesday’s plane crash.

His thousands of workers, mercenaries, line cooks, mining geologists and social-media trolls were often paid in cash, at times from a plastic bag by Prigozhin himself—who in turn often billed governments by sending his private jets to collect his arrears in cash.

Since June, the Kremlin had been trying to assert control over that shadowy web of murky arrangements. The Defense Ministry—led by Prigozhin’s chief rival, Sergei Shoigu —had been dispatching delegations to inform foreign governments that they would henceforth do business directly with the Russian state. After the mutiny, Prigozhin struck a deal with Putin and moved his forces in Russia to seek shelter in Belarus.

But Prigozhin refused to retire quietly, crisscrossing the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa in a bid to keep his business links alive. He posted audio messages, offering mercenaries to the military regime that had recently taken power in Niger, and a video of himself in Mali posing with a sniper rifle and four magazines strapped to a bulletproof vest, vowing to “make Russia even greater…and Africa even more free.”

On the run

The warlord, who was sanctioned by more than 30 governments, was accustomed to living on the run.

He flew in planes that regularly turned their transponders off and avoided airspace where Western-allied governments could claim a $10 million State Department reward for information on the man alleged to be responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He had been forced to make at least one emergency landing in the middle of the Sahara after running out of fuel and frequently conducted meetings on runways in his jet in case he had to make a swift exit.

He traveled on fake passports and dispatched advance parties of Wagner cybersecurity experts to sweep for bugs. He preferred to brief social media followers over audio messages—impossible to geolocate—or through videos in locations that were difficult to identify.

Last October, Prigozhin arrived at an air base in eastern Libya to meet the Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar. Prigozhin dressed in a military uniform with oversize epaulets and peaked cap, sporting dark sunglasses and a bushy fake beard. He was surrounded by a retinue of six heavily armed henchmen, and locals thought he was a follower of the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement.

“Everyone who saw him thought he was Salafist,” said a Libyan who witnessed his arrival.

Photos from the meeting, reviewed by people present, show Prigozhin smiling through his beard. Shortly after it was taken, he shouted at Haftar through a translator, demanding some $200 million for Wagner’s help securing the Libyan warlord’s territory, including its oil wells. Prigozhin later sent another private jet the next month to pick up the cash.

Prigozhin was convinced Haftar’s regime was infiltrated by French intelligence and the CIA. Even the Libyan uniform he would wear on trips to Libya was made in Syria and brought from there—ensuring no bugs or tracking devices could be inserted.

This year, his attempted Russian mutiny left him with enemies on his own side.

Putin seemed resolved to kill Prigozhin, during the hours when his convoy of disgruntled mercenaries approached Moscow, the autocratic ruler Alexander Lukashenko of neighboring Belarus later recalled. Lukashenko claimed he had phoned the Russian president and talked him out of that decision, offering Belarus instead as a place where Wagner could find safety. Prigozhin arrived in a private jet three days later.

“Having betrayed their country and their people, the leaders of this mutiny also betrayed those whom they drew into their crime,” Putin said in a speech that month, glaring into a camera. “They lied to them, pushed them to their death, putting them under attack, forcing them to shoot their people.”

The Kremlin began asserting control over the business network Prigozhin had founded. Agents from the Federal Security Service, or FSB, raided Wagner’s glass office tower headquarters in St. Petersburg for evidence against Prigozhin; across town, Russian law enforcement seized computers and servers at his Patriot Media Group, the social media troll factory blamed for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. Pro-Wagner social media channels were blocked within Russia, and some of his subsidiaries were raided by Russian security services, which claimed to have found pistols, fake passports and the equivalent of $48 million in cash and gold bars in his properties.

Prigozhin still hoped to salvage the mercenary outposts he had built in Africa and the Middle East.

A new detachment of Wagner mercenaries was set to rotate into Central African Republic to secure the country ahead of an August referendum that would allow the president to serve without term limits. Another contingent was in place, training the local defense forces. The new deployments also expanded the mercenaries’ foothold along the border with Congo, to protect from a cross-border rebel attack, say Western security officials.

“We are not drawing down, and more than that, we are ready to go further and increase our various contingents,” Prigozhin told Cameroon-based Afrique Media in a July interview. “For the moment all our obligations are fulfilled, and they will be, no matter what comes our way.”

At the end of that month, five weeks after his rebellion, he set out to network with African leaders at St. Petersburg’s Trezzini Palace hotel, one of the accommodations for a Russia-Africa summit attended by 17 African heads of state and Putin. They included Touadera, the Central African Republic president whose government credited Wagner with saving the country after years of armed rebellion.

Touadera, told by Putin to avoid Prigozhin, sidestepped the warlord. Prigozhin managed to meet up with Touadera’s chief of protocol, then headed to meet a Cameroonian journalist. None of the African leaders attending was seen with Prigozhin.

Instead, the African presidents were ushered into a gilded Kremlin conference room, across from Putin and a man Prigozhin was coming to see as a rival: Gen. Andrey Averyanov, the head of GRU’s covert offensive operations unit.

Viktor Bout—the arms dealer who once supplied weapons to warlords in Liberia, recently returned to Russia from a U.S. prison in an exchange for U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner—also appeared on a panel, while Prigozhin languished outside.

Prigozhin had become concerned that his operations in Africa were being shifted to the GRU, Russian Telegram channel VchK-OGPU said, known for leaks from FSB, reported. The same week as the summit, the presidential guard in Niger kidnapped their pro-American president Mohamed Bazoum, and installed themselves as the country’s new military leadership.

Prigozhin released a voice memo offering to send mercenaries to help shore up the junta. His allies in Mali also met with the new Nigerien leadership.

So far, Niger appears to have passed on the offer, West African and U.S. officials have said. Crowds of young men—some waving Russian flags and pro-Putin placards—however, have marched through the capital, demanding Niger break from the West. Neighboring Nigeria, worried about a band of Russian-backed military governments expanding across West and Central Africa, has threatened to use military force to reverse the coup.

Prigozhin’s death “doesn’t change anything,” a Nigerian intelligence official said. “Russia is still there. When the Wagner leader is gone, they are still active in Africa…Maybe now the Kremlin’s hands will be more strengthened.”

Final campaign

Prigozhin’s last trip began in Bangui, where Touadera and his intelligence chief Wanzet Linguissara agreed to meet him in the Presidential Palace, a whitewashed riverside complex.

A spokesman for Touadera didn’t respond to a request for comment. Linguissara declined to comment. A spokesman for the Officers Union, a corps of Russian military instructors in Bangui that backs Prigozhin, said it had “no precise information on whether he was in Bangui.”

At the meeting, Prigozhin said Wagner would reinforce its presence to ensure security and facilitate new investments in agriculture, according to a person briefed on the meeting.

The following day, Prigozhin was welcoming the Rapid Support Forces commanders from Sudan. As they handed over the gold, packed in wooden crates from Darfur’s Songo mine, the warlord said he needed more.

“I need more gold,” Prigozhin said, according to a Sudanese official familiar with the conversation.

Wagner supplies had helped the paramilitary group score a series of battlefield victories against Sudan’s Islamist military government, including the recent capture of a weapons factory and the largest police base in Khartoum. “I am going to make sure you defeat them,” he added.

Leaving Bangui, Prigozhin flew to Bamako, Mali, based on flight records of a private jet he frequently used to crisscross the continent, posing in front of local army pickups in a video, before heading back to Moscow.

On Tuesday, a delegation from the Russian Defense Ministry landed in Libya at the invitation of Haftar, the Libyan warlord who had paid Wagner for securing its oil wells and territory. Prigozhin’s mutiny had left Haftar’s close circle nervous about Wagner’s presence in Libya, said Mohamed Eljarh, a managing director at security consulting firm Libya Desk with connections in Haftar’s camp.

“They felt that if they do it in Russia, they can do it in Benghazi,” said Eljarh, who said the two sides discussed a formal defense partnership with the Russian government.

Russian intelligence officers would now be stationed in Benghazi, the head of the Russian contractors will be replaced with a new mercenary firm set up in Wagner’s place. But the same fighters would remain in place. Haftar asked for spare parts, maintenance and training for its aging aircraft fleet and even requested that Russia help supply it with Iranian drones it is using in Ukraine.

“Russia wanted to send the message that it’s now a partnership between two armies,” a Libyan security official said, as a state-to-state relationship.

“Putin told me Libya is very important for us,” Russian deputy defense minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov told Haftar. “It’s the first Wagner country we are visiting.”