Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook
for fragile states
Tarek Megerisi
A fragile “entente roscolonial”
The story of Russia’s return to Libya begins with its post-2007 moves to reemerge as a great power after the blows of the 1990s—and more specifically its moves to dominate the south-eastern Mediterranean basin as part of that comeback.
For example, Russia tried to fill the void the US left when it froze military aid to Egypt after President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s bloody coup in 2013. Then in 2015 Russia went all-in to defend its last warm-water naval base at Tartus in Syria, invoking its “regime change” narrative about Libya to shield Assad and other Russian interests in the country from UN-led humanitarian interventions in the war there. By entrenching its power in Libya, Moscow would benefit further. It could tap the country’s vast energy potential. One UK intelligence source also claimed that Moscow explicitly wanted to trigger further waves of migration towards Europe.
In February 2022 Russia’s attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine galvanised the Kremlin’s antagonism towards the West. Unlike in Crimea in 2014 or for its crimes in Libya, this time the West held Russia accountable for its violation of international norms.
Russia’s violation was also condemned by multiple resolutions at the UN General Assembly, underlining the weakness of Moscow’s multilateral politicking compared with its Western rivals. Putin’s diplomats subsequently moved more aggressively to case Russia as the geopolitical antithesis to the West; a role in which it aims to build mutually beneficial partnerships with the “world majority” and “democratise” the world order.
According to Russian foreign policy experts, in a practical sense, this means leaders in the Kremlin currently see the world as a collection of pro-West, pro-Russia or agnostic states, seemingly based on a country’s position in the Ukraine war.[1] More generally, it gives Russia a geopolitical stature far beyond what its economic, military or cultural power might ordinarily allow. It also creates, ironically, colonialist opportunities for Russia to increase that power.
Accordingly, the Kremlin seems to have divided the world into clusters, developing bespoke tools to maximise the benefits of different groupings and countries. Although it is unspoken, Russia’s “new world” appears to be stratified into those with which it can partner to build alternative global systems (like the UAE); and those it can exploit enhance its own status (like Libya). The latter countries are usually marked by the presence of the network of shell companies formerly known as the “Wagner Group” (alongside other PMCs).
Wagner politics was a vehicle for Russian entrenchment that usually involved propping up weak strongmen in exchange for asset control. Despite its presentation as a PMC, mercenaries were always technically illegal in Russia; and there was never a single entity named “Wagner”. The label “Wagner Group” was itself an abstraction that referred to a network of companies that sprung up, often ad hoc, to provide political engineering, military assistance and resource extraction services where Russia was building its influence.
Despite their protestations, the Russian presidency and senior GRU officers always had close control over Wagner activities. Soldiers joining Wagner and related PMCs (which this paper will group under “Wagner”) sign contracts with GRU “Unit 35555”, a laboratory for socio-psychological research. Besides the GRU, the network was cohered and unified by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin as a financier and central administrative node; and characters such as the (also late) neo-Nazi Dimitry Utkin were the military link. Utkin’s nom de guerre “Wagner” gave the group its name.
Prigozhin’s mutiny in mid-2023 was a show of discontent towards Russia’s ministry of defence that span out of control. Following Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s deaths in a plane crash shortly after, the Kremlin dropped the pretence entirely and removed the layers of abstraction. It named the new body it formed to oversee this process “Africa Corps” (seemingly after the Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel’s “Afrika Korps”).
Russia benefits economically from the assets of Wagner-linked states, and from the group’s military gains by using its men as mercenaries. These fragile states are becoming increasingly interconnected, in what some analysts have dubbed the “entente roscolonial”. All the while, Moscow broadcasts a revolutionary propaganda of helping to “fix what the West broke”.
Whether by happenstance or design, in 2025 Libya is the operational hub of Russia’s Africa cluster. The military bases Wagner commandeered —at Tobruk, al-Khadim (Benghazi), Ghardabiya (Sirte), Jufra, Brak-al Shati (in Libya’s south-west) and the newly developed Maaten al-Sarra (near the border with Chad)—are the logistical hubs Russia uses to support its other African deployments.
These bases form part of an airbridge that helped arm the attempted putsch by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023 and sustain the country’s devastating civil war ever since. Troop movements and flights over 2024 indicate that Russia’s bases in Libya have become indispensable in maintaining its nascent deployments in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso as well as its prolonged presence in the Central African Republic.
Alongside this, Haftar has become a diplomatic asset, used to provide Libyan support to Russia’s African acolytes. Moscow’s proxy sent one son, Sadeeq Haftar, to Khartoum with $2m for the RSF leader on the eve of Sudan’s civil war in 2023.
Another son, Saddam Haftar, was dispatched to tour the Sahelian outposts of the entente over 2024 with a view to formalising a diplomatic alliance. These military partnerships helped the Nigerien junta under Abdourahamane Tchiani and Chad’s leader secure lucrative cross-border smuggling routes.
In early 2025 Khalifa Haftar even visited Belarus. It seems Russia is using Belarus as cover to help upgrade Tobruk’s Gamal Abdul Nasser military base—which Moscow likely aims to make its new Mediterranean naval headquarters after Assad’s fall put its Syrian base at risk. The wide range of cooperation discussed in Minsk is seemingly a channel to inject Libyan money into Belarus in exchange. This underlines how Russia can use Libyan finances and the fig leaf of Haftar’s military to strengthen its non-African Russian allies.
Underpinning Russia’s new Africa infrastructure is a smuggling network that Wagner presumably guided Saddam Haftar to build. Through this the Kremlin exploits (and exacerbates) Libya’s lawlessness to circumvent European sanctions on fuel exports. It also destabilises Europe and the US through the weaponisation of migration; smuggles fuel and arms to other African proxies; and, of course, makes plenty of money.
The rebrand from Wagner to Africa Corps does not change the fundamentals. Even the Nazi connotations of the name have remained, along with the group’s longstanding disinformation function. The biggest change is in the governing structure. The Kremlin has effectively shortened the leash between Putin and the operatives on the ground—formalising the Russian presence in Libya.
The price of this is a loss of plausible deniability. But in a post-Ukraine world where the UN Security Council is effectively frozen, and Putin has an ICC arrest warrant against him, that is no longer so important. In a post-Gaza world, in which the US president has imposed sanctions on the very same court, it matters even less; especially not to Putin’s strategic narrative that he is battling to democratise the world-order against US imperialism.
But, as the story of Russia’s re-entrenchment in Libya will show, Moscow is not in as comfortable position as it seems. The shift to Africa Corps was a consolidation. Putin will inevitably miss the initiative Prigozhin brought to enable such a rapid and creative rise in security partnerships and business relationships.
Russia is already struggling in Burkina Faso and Mali; it seems to have few ideas to stabilise Libya beyond attempting to nudge its proxies into formal positions of power (essentially, to recreate the Assad scenario). Given the predatory, extractive and fractious nature of all these proxies, that is more likely to worsen than end the chaos.
Now is the time for Europeans to extract Russia’s Libyan linchpin. The three phases through which Russia achieved its status in Libya show how the Kremlin feels out opportunities to develop proxies. They reveal how it can then entrench itself and ultimately hijack a nation to pursue its geopolitical goals. But they also show how Russia’s vacuum-filling is unsustainable and destructive. Europeans will have to learn from this to compete with Russia in the confrontation Putin has forced on them.
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Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.
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