For a man whose disdain for Nazis is avowedly so deep that he invaded his country’s neighbour to ostensibly de-nazify it, and whose claim to a thorough familiarity with history is so self-assured that he often holds forth at length on the subject, Vladimir Putin’s recent decision to rename the Wagner Group in Africa as the Africa Corps seems a tad ironic.

It was a Nazi military outfit, after all, that first bore that title. During World War II, Nazi Germany’s Afrika Korps, whose most famous commander was Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, helped fascist Italy hold onto its colonial possessions in North Africa, until it was eventually routed, at great cost, by Allied forces in 1943.

I find Mr Putin’s mind inscrutable, and so can’t decide whether the irony is lost on him, or whether he was aware of this not-so-subtle similarity when approving the not-so-new name for the paramilitary group, and went ahead anyway merely to confuse his enemies. In any case, the move, which accompanied a restructuring of the group to bring it explicitly under the Kremlin’s direct command, says a lot.

Russian strength

For one, it is obvious that Mr Putin has, unexpectedly, shaken off his erstwhile reluctance to admit that Wagner in Africa was really just a front for the Kremlin. The claim (with which he’s tried to obfuscate the narrative in the past) that Wagner is an independent operator contracted by some African governments always rang hollow, and now the Kremlin is discarding it.

It is also clear now that Mr Putin considers the roots the mercenary group has sunk into Africa too valuable to lose. He is doubling down on them, making good on the assurances he made last summer, as his government defused Wagner’s mutiny, that the group’s engagement with its African client governments – particularly Mali and the Central African Republic – would continue.

Back then, I questioned the extent to which these assurances would translate into action, given that the group had just defied its own government. The months since have shown that the Kremlin meant every word. Not only did Wagner mercenaries stay in Mali and the Central African Republic, they now have a footprint in Burkina Faso, are reeling in Niger (where the military overthrew the government in July), and seem keen on bringing Chad into the fold as well.

Given that the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is fighting the Sudanese military for control of Sudan, and seems to have the upper hand as the war nears its first anniversary, is also affiliated with Wagner, it is quite possible that Mr Putin’s Africa Corps will soon straddle the entire Sahel. He’s effectively displaced France as the most important foreign power in the region.

And he’s done this while fighting a full-scale war in Ukraine (at one point against the combined industrial might of the West), steeling the Russian economy to thrive in the face of withering Western sanctions, keeping the main non-Western powers close, ruthlessly eliminating domestic dissent, and running for a new presidential term which he is guaranteed to win, among other things.