I was in need of some Dutch courage. As the super-strength lager trickled down my throat, I pressed the record button on my phone and looked nervously around me. The bar in downtown Bangui was doing a roaring trade, despite the heavy rain thrumming on its tin roof. People were swigging from plastic bottles plastered with the brand name Africa ti L’Or – “Africa is gold” in Sango, the lingua franca of the Central African Republic (CAR). My trepidation stemmed from the fact that the bar was owned by Russian mercenaries.

I had come to Bangui, the capital of CAR, in search of the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary army whose founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a mutiny against President Vladimir Putin in summer 2023 and died in a plane crash not long after. Since 2018 CAR has been Wagner’s flagship mission in Africa – a laboratory for its tactics of regime protection and counter-insurgency support.

After Prigozhin’s death Wagner’s operations in Bangui were widely expected to be scaled back, or even wound down entirely. Elsewhere in Africa the firm has been taken over by the Russian state and rebranded as the Africa Corps. Its fighters have suffered setbacks on the battlefield – in Mali last July a number were killed battling separatist rebels. But in CAR, where it is led by Prigozhin’s former right-hand man, Dmitri Sytyi, it is still known as Wagner – and its forces are apparently stronger than ever.

I wanted to understand what exactly Wagner wanted in CAR – and what CAR was getting in return. But I would need to watch my step. As Wagner has grown in importance, Bangui has become less welcoming to Westerners. Foreign journalists have been arrested and detained; a Russia-inspired bill targeting “foreign agents” is in the works.

Western diplomats speak of bugged hotel rooms with snooping staff. “They’ll know you’re here,” one ambassador warned me before my visit in late 2024. “It’s a small town and people are noticeable.” I was advised to leave my American passport at home, to keep my laptop on me at all times and wipe my phone of all sensitive information. The stakes were high: a few years ago, three Russian journalists investigating Wagner’s activities in CAR wound up dead.

There is something of late-colonial Léopoldville about Bangui. “A hotbed of spies” was how a young American code-officer described the capital of the Belgian Congo, where he was stationed at the tail end of the second world war. Back then, on the cusp of the nuclear age, resource-rich Congo was a prize in the global race for uranium. A sudden influx of foreigners, American spies in particular, had set the city on edge.

Bangui’s steamy riverside air courses with intrigue. The local press is replete with tales of sinister plots and thwarted coups. Bangui’s streets of shabby low-rise buildings – many barely altered since independence from France in 1960 – buzz with rumours that secret agents from the CIA are scheming to steal the country’s riches. Senior government ministers, a Western diplomat told me, see foreign conspiracies “absolutely everywhere”.

Unlike Congo 80 years ago, however, CAR has nothing so valuable to outside powers as nuclear metals. Despite its ample reserves of gold, diamonds and timber (and small deposits of difficult-to-extract uranium), this country, which is roughly the size of France, has always been a geopolitical backwater. It is landlocked, and surrounded on all sides by perennially troubled neighbours. The sleepy tributary of the Congo river on whose banks Bangui sits is navigable by boats only part of the year. Its geographical isolation meant CAR was one of the very last patches to be claimed during the “scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century.

A century ago the territory which became CAR was little more than a way station, a bend in the Ubungi river used for ferrying plunder from the continental interior to the coast. One French writer dubbed it a “phantom”, a “country which doesn’t exist”. Even Barthélemy Boganda, the first leader of the newly autonomous CAR in the late 1950s, harboured serious doubts about its prospects as an independent country.

Yet since Wagner forces arrived in 2018, officially as “military instructors” sent by Russia to help build a national army and beat back rebels, CAR has attracted more attention than ever before from the outside world. Some of this has come from journalists, lured by the prospect of encountering Prigozhin’s shadow army first-hand.

Western governments, too, are keeping an eye on goings-on here. Long after they were forced to give up their empires, many outside powers still see Africa primarily as a geopolitical chessboard. Wagner forces are constructing a base in CAR, intended to host 10,000 troops by 2030. Western diplomats worry it will be used as a launch point for projecting Russian power across the continent: in Congo, west Africa, the strategically important Sahel. CAR’s leaders are keen to exploit its newfound significance.

Early one morning, I showed up unannounced at the home of Fidèle Gouandjika, a businessman and government adviser known for his unusually personal bond with Prigozhin. Tracking him down had proved unexpectedly straightforward. The Palais de Gouandjika, a sprawling, ramshackle complex, loomed several storeys high over the city. Its name, written in giant bright letters above the entrance, was visible from more than a kilometre away. And despite the building’s location in a shanty district, its front gate was wide open and unguarded. I drove my car right in.

Gouandjika, who was about to turn 70, was sitting alone on a plastic chair, surrounded by rubble and piles of unmixed cement. The palace is a work in progress, and Gouandjika directs much of the construction himself, shouting orders at the workers on the scaffolding high above. Wearing trainers, a baseball cap and bright red shorts, he looked like a professional basketball player, if one past his prime. On his T-shirt was the slogan, “Je suis Wagner”.

He sprung up from his seat as I approached. Within moments he was cracking jokes, and pointing proudly towards some of the highlights of his grand and eccentric home: classical sculptures in the front garden; a limousine at the back. Behind him, on the ground floor of the main building, was an assortment of gym machinery: bench presses and a treadmill. A nude female bust stared out at us through a window.

Nicknamed the “Billionaire of Boy-Rabe”, after the poor neighbourhood of Bangui in which he grew up, Gouandjika’s colourful career mirrors his country’s tumultuous recent history. As a young man in the 1970s he was an opponent of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, CAR’s first, and most flamboyant, dictator. A self-declared emperor, Bokassa had a fearsome reputation. He tortured and killed his rivals and in 1979 ordered the arrest, and later execution, of scores of schoolchildren. (He also played a part in the downfall of a French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, after it emerged that Bokassa had bribed him with diamonds.) During Bokassa’s reign, Gouandjika spent three months in prison. After his release he fled to Romania, married a local woman and became a national martial-arts champion.

He returned to CAR in the mid-1980s and served in several government posts until 2013, when a coalition of anti-government rebels overran Bangui. Coups and rebellions – many of them carried out with the connivance of France – were a familiar occurrence in CAR. Since at least the 1980s, the country has been tugged apart by an array of transnational armed groups, many from the neglected borderlands, all locked in a desperate struggle for power and resources. This time the rebel alliance was mostly made up of marginalised groups from the north of the country, some from over the border in Chad.

Once again Gouandjika fled. He returned after a brief French intervention cleared the capital, and he later joined the embattled government of CAR’s current president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra – a softly spoken university lecturer with a knack for playing foreign powers off against each other.

Though both politicians were adept at tapping into popular anti-colonial sentiment, Gouandjika was considerably less diplomatic than his boss. Few Central African politicians are more widely known, or more notorious. In 2021 Gouandjika declared on Facebook that CAR was prepared to offer its women to satisfy the sexual needs of Russia’s troops. In another Facebook post he accused France of mounting a coup, and seemed to threaten retaliatory violence against “whites” if the coup succeeded.

From the moment Wagner Group forces touched down in 2018, Gouandjika was full of enthusiasm for them. Since independence, and the cycle of coups, dictatorships and insurgencies which followed, CAR has hosted a rotating cast of foreign troops: French (seven times), South African, Chadian, Gabonese, Congolese, Sudanese, Rwandan. For more than a decade, several thousand UN peacekeepers have shored up the central government in the face of perennial rebellions in the provinces.

For Gouandjika, like many other Central Africans, there was never much to distinguish the Russians from any other occupying army. What was more, he seemed untroubled by the fact that they were private mercenaries rather than official Russian troops. “It was only later that we found out that they were Wagner,” he told me. “But for us, they’re all Russians. Whether they’re Wagnerians, Mozartians, Beethovenians – that’s not our problem. They’re Russians.”

He quickly befriended Prigozhin, inviting him to stay at the palace, where the men shared lavish meals together. (Gouandjika told the Wall Street Journal that he liked to serve his Russian guests Stolichnaya vodka alongside local delicacies such as sautéed caterpillar, cow tripe in cassava leaf, plantain and Nile perch.) In return Prigozhin gave him gifts: an expensive watch, a gun. “He’s a hero,” Gouandjika said, chuckling as he waved a Wagner flag bearing the group’s skull-and-crossbones insignia. He claimed Prigozhin had given it to him during the Russian’s final trip to CAR, two weeks before he died.

Soon after they arrived, Prigozhin’s troops had set up base in Bokassa’s ruined palace, 80 kilometres from Bangui. They began training the national army, equipping it with the kind of weapons which the West, to the frustration of many Central Africans, had long refused to send. They provided round-the-clock protection to President Touadéra, and took control of the country’s only industrial gold mine, valued at $1bn, which had been abandoned by its Canadian owners at the peak of the civil war in 2013.

The Russian mercenaries, in balaclavas and body-armour, became a familiar sight in Bangui, dining in its ritziest restaurants and drinking late into the night in bars along the banks of the river. But it was not until January 2021, when a new alliance of rebels opposed to Touadéra’s re-election threatened to storm the capital, that Wagner really made its mark on CAR.

In just a few bloody days its forces sent the rebels scattering, allowing the army – backed by Rwandan soldiers and UN peacekeepers – to secure the city. Over the following months, Wagner helped the government bring most of the country’s territory under its control for the first time in years.

For many Central Africans, Russia had saved not just Touadéra, but the country. “We had nothing. We were cut off from everything. Even the French had abandoned us,” a young soldier in the national army told me. “But the Russians…they have strong fighters. They are the ones who helped us.”

For Gouandjika, this was the moment the Russians proved they were different from all the foreign armies that had come before. Prigozhin, he told me, was a “national hero”. Thanks to Wagner, “the country escaped genocide. The rebels were exterminated – completely neutralised.”

As a sign of gratitude, CAR adopted Russian as its third language, after French and Sango (university students have compulsory Russian lessons, and there are plans to teach the language in primary and secondary schools). A monument to dead Wagner troops was erected in the centre of Bangui. At the time of my visit, it was adorned with bouquets of flowers in memory of Prigozhin. The first anniversary of his death had been marked by a parade down the capital’s main avenue, Russian fighter jets roaring overhead.

Not everyone was so grateful for Wagner’s services. Ali Ousmane, a sheikh from a predominantly Muslim area in eastern Bangui, likened its presence to French colonialism and its methods to the Gestapo. When I visited his mosque, he told me the mercenaries had joined forces with state security forces to raid Muslim communities perceived as hostile to the regime. He acknowledged they had brought some stability to the city, “but at what price?”

In the countryside, far out of sight of international observers, many felt the same. Between 2020 and 2023, according to conflict monitors and human-rights groups, hundreds of people were killed in Wagner raids. Entire villages were razed; homes with women and children trapped inside were set on fire. Young girls in areas where the Russians operated were reported saying they were too afraid to leave their homes alone, for fear of being raped by “white soldiers”. Meanwhile several thousand local fighters, some of them ex-rebels, joined the mercenaries’ ranks. They became known as “Black Russians”.

Touadéra and his allies brook little criticism of the mercenaries’ methods. In an interview with the BBC in 2023 the president credited the return of 80% of CAR’s territory to government control to his “co-operation” with them. Indeed, some government officials flaunt their connections to the Russian mercenaries. When I met one of Touadéra’s advisers, a book about Wagner had been placed upright in the centre of the desk, clearly on display for visitors. A cabinet minister spoke to me while swigging tea from a mug with Putin’s face on it.

Gouandjika was no different. Inviting Wagner into the country had not been an act of desperation, he insisted, but an act of anti-colonial defiance, breaking out of the orbit of France and the West. “It didn’t please the Europeans. It didn’t please the West,” he said. “But in Central Africa, the Wagners are heroes.”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, competition between Russia and Western powers for influence in Africa soon reached new heights. Prigozhin stepped up Wagner’s activities in CAR. Russian advisers were seconded to the top echelons of government; influence operations and disinformation campaigns devised in CAR were sowed across the region. The following year, the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, a think-tank within America’s Department of Defence, warned that Russia was seeking to undermine democracy in more than two dozen African countries.

CAR’s government suddenly had leverage. As Wagner continued to expand through west and central Africa from its base in Bangui, America, France and the EU jockeyed with Russia to curry Touadéra’s favour. In 2023, in a failed attempt to push Wagner out of CAR, America proposed that one of its own private security firms, Bancroft Global Development, set up shop as an alternative. (Ultimately the deal did not go ahead, reportedly because of furious objections from Wagner.)

A year later, in Paris, Touadéra and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, agreed on a new “road map” for warmer bilateral relations. Touadéra extracted a commitment from Macron to restore aid for CAR’s finances, a promise for which he apparently needed to offer France next to nothing in return. In 2023 Touadéra rigged a constitutional referendum in order to extend his time in office – again with Wagner’s help.

“We are in the middle of a geopolitical war,” Maxime Balalou, the minister of communication, explained to me. But this new conflict was not one in which his country, he believed, needed to take sides. By refusing to play “the great powers’ games”, CAR could reap the rewards.

On my final day in Bangui I attended a theatrical performance of the “Frog Princess”, a famous Russian folk tale. The venue was the Maison Russe, a Russian cultural centre by the river, which was established in 2022 in order to compete with the Alliance Française, France’s vehicle for spreading culture. The Maison Russe hosts Russian-language classes and has a room with a projector for screening Russian films with titles like “AK47”. In the garden is a sign reading “I ? Russia” in giant letters. Around the back are the offices of Africa ti L’Or, the Wagner-owned brewery.

It had been a week since my furtive beer. Though I had spotted Wagner members in a popular Lebanese-owned mall, and glimpsed their pick-up trucks speeding around corners, I had come no closer to encountering any mercenaries in person. I had searched fruitlessly on the terrace of the Oubangui hotel, a Wagner watering hole, and in the lobby of the Ledger Plaza Hotel, where some of its men were reputed to stay. Several text messages to the Russian embassy in Bangui had gone unanswered.

But then, as the “Frog Princess” drew to a close, I saw Dmitri Sytyi. A slight, gangly man in his mid-30s, Sytyi has a boyish face and a long mane of tangled black hair. I had seen photos of him online, and read profiles of him in the Western press which typically portrayed him as menacing. At the Maison Russe that day, however, Sytyi seemed the image of a bohemian art student – camera in hand, Converse trainers on his feet. Indeed, it was only after several minutes that I realised who he was.

Once the play was over I introduced myself. Sytyi, a high-flying graduate of a French business school, had enlisted in Prigozhin’s empire through the Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg-based “troll farm”. He arrived in CAR as a Russian-French translator in 2017 and swiftly climbed the ranks to become the head of Wagner’s civilian operations, overseeing cultural outreach, propaganda and beer production.

These days Sytyi is reputed to be even more influential. He is known to come and go freely from the president’s office. Despite his apparent lack of military training, he has appeared in  fatigues at Wagner events around the country. He is a partner in Midas Resources, the Wagner-owned company that has taken over much of CAR’s gold industry, which means he is under American and EU sanctions.

On his right arm is a prosthetic hand. His real one was blown off by a letter bomb in 2022 – an incident Russia blamed on French intelligence (which France denies). As Sytyi underwent emergency medical care back home in Russia, T-shirts appeared on the streets of Bangui with his face on them. They had, it was reported, been distributed by the Maison Russe.

In person Sytyi cuts a strikingly diminutive figure. As we spoke briefly in the garden of the Maison Russe, to the sound of children’s laughter and a fairground carousel, he enthused about creating a space for Central Africans to study and perform. He noted, somewhat earnestly, that the country had “actors but no theatre”, and told me he was in the process of writing the very first Russian-Sango dictionary. He seemed, if anything, awkward – even a little goofy. I began to wonder if, like Russia’s Africa project, he might be more powerful in the imagination than in the flesh.