Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook
for fragile states
Tarek Megerisi
Finally, the network also seems to have ambitions in Libya’s neighbouring countries. In December 2020 the TBZ deployed to south-western Libya. There Haftar’s unit entered into a low-burning series of skirmishes with GNA-affiliated forces to gradually claim control of the city and region, relying on intelligence, logistical and surveillance support from Wagner operatives stationed nearby in Brak al-Shati military airbase.
The oasis city of Sebha is notable as a crossroads for smuggling routes from Chad and Niger into southern Libya, as well as gold that is mined in southern Libya and the Tibesti mountains just across the border in Chad.
In September 2021 the TBZ again deployed. This time it was against the remnants of Chadian opposition group FACT (which had previously fought alongside Haftar in 2020, based out of Jufra). Back then, Wagner distrusted the group because of its close relationship with France, and now the group was licking its wounds after a failed attempt to invade its homeland earlier that year.
The TBZ struggled, suffering significant casualties over a four-day battle. But laser-guided artillery and airstrikes of foreign origin allowed Saddam Haftar’s alliance to significantly degrade FACT’s force. The rebel group blamed France for providing this foreign support. But it is more likely that it came from Wagner. Airstrikes from Jufra would have been easier to deploy and conceal than any French activity, and Wagner had experience working with the LAAF as spotters for guided artillery during the Tripoli war.
This operation could also be read as initial alliance-building from the Emirati-Russian coalition with Chad’s new dictator, Mahamat Déby, the son of the former autocratic president Idriss Déby who had been killed by rebel forces during the recent incursion. This coalition’s relationship-building with the new president would eventually displace France in N’Djamena and lay the ground for Chadian support for the RSF in Sudan as Russia found the opportunity to pursue its “first approach” once more in Chad.
Whatever the aims, when the battle ended, the TBZ with Wagner was able to enforce greater control over the region’s smuggling routes. This bolstered its revenues from people and drug smuggling, and Libya’s gold mining. Most of all, however, it enabled fuel smuggling.
Wagner’s modus operandi was always to lever its military support for frail dictators against a nation’s assets. By 2020 this model was already well-established in Syria and the Central African Republic. But no Wagner target-state ever had quite the resources of Libya; nor quite the international congestion around it. Libya underwent Moscow’s most sophisticated example of asset hijacking, as the country became a chip in the Kremlin’s efforts to squeeze out geopolitical rivals and eventually evade international sanctions.
When Wagner then abandoned Haftar on the Tripoli front from May 2020 onwards, it did not just fall back to secure Jufra and other military bases. It pre-emptively claimed Libya’s oil installations. Wagner operatives and Syrian mercenaries (flown in by who else but Cham Wings) moved into the Ras Lanuf refinery and the oil crescent’s export terminals; seizing worker housing, large quantities of aviation fuel, and installing powerful S-300 air defence systems.
Simultaneously, other Wagner units alongside Sudanese mercenaries secured oil fields in the south, notably Libya’s largest field al-Sharara, reinforcing an oil blockade that had begun in January 2020.
This control over oil flows gave Russia the cards for its failed solution to the conflict. As the ceasefire that followed the Cairo declaration slowly fossilised, Europeans and Americans tried to transform a misshapen ceasefire of necessity into a more sustainable peace. Moscow, for its part, flexed its control over Libya’s oil. Not only did it continue enforcing the 2020 blockade to shape negotiations, but it used its position to pre-emptively move against an American initiative with the UN and the NOC that would have led to the demilitarisation of oil sites.
In September 2020 the Kremlin snuck one of its GNA assets Maitiq (the Sarraj deputy mentioned in the “Losing the war” section of this paper) to a Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. He was joined by Khaled Haftar, who had been given military responsibilities and designated the official interlocuter for Russia as part of Haftar’s post-war consolidation.
In Sochi, Russia brokered a deal that would see oil exports resume and a new committee formed to manage and distribute oil revenues between eastern and western Libya. The deal outraged the elite in western Libya. Sarraj and key financial players such as the central bank governor rejected it as opaque, illegal and favouring Haftar.
Maitiq, who had no authority to make such a deal, was blocked from going to Sirte for its signing ceremony. Despite this, the mere existence of the rejected deal now meant the GNA and NOC looked like the bad guys.
This pressure worsened as the US, UN and key European states pushed Libyans to accept the Sochi deal as an important step towards stability, a permanent ceasefire and new political process. But acquiescing to this deal represented nothing of the sort. Rather, it legitimised the divvying up of Libya’s oil wealth and was the first major chip in the NOC’s integrity.
It was also a boon for Russia’s stature in Libya and provided another stream of funding to help reconstitute Haftar in the east after his defeat. Finally, it meant the UN and the West had discarded perhaps the strongest leverage they had to expel Wagner from Libya’s oil sites.
They had also given Russia a pretext for future shutdowns—since the full administrative provisions of the deal could never have feasibly been implemented. As with the Cairo declaration, embracing the Sochi deal happened under the illusion of securing a short-term stabilising win that the UN could improve later and despite warnings from Libyans. The oil flowed once more. But Russia retained control.
In the spring of 2022, a couple of months after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, oil prices were rocketing and Europe’s energy crisis was already well under way. Meanwhile Libya’s political divisions had worsened in the wake of the 2021 electoral debacle. Dbeibeh, the internationally recognised premier, had outlasted his mandate, as the elections he was appointed to oversee failed.
This led the House of Representatives to appoint Bashagha as prime minister in a deeply flawed process (that would have installed half of the Turkish-Russian dream team for 2020 into power). But Dbeibeh exploited the procedural violations to cling on to power. Then on April 18th Libya’s oilfields, then its oil terminals, began to shut down.
This was framed by Haftar-aligned media as a popular protest against Dbeibeh’s unwillingness to cede to Bashagha. But it was an LAAF operation that could not have happened without the support of the Wagner operatives camped at these installations.
The shutdown cut off key Italian and other European refineries from a major source of energy supplies. Shortly after the oil blockade, the chair of the NOC sent a letter to Libya’s chief prosecutor asking him to take action against the fuel-smuggling tankers. But the blockade went on for three more months until the UAE negotiated a breakthrough deal between Dbeibeh and Saddam Haftar.
The terms of this deal were that Haftar would switch the oil back on, but he could appoint a new chairman of the NOC and would get additional funding from the body. This was the natural evolution of the Sochi deal: it again exploited the crisis of an oil blockade to solicit huge financial and structural concessions for Haftar at the cost of the structural integrity of both Libya and the NOC.
The new NOC chair, Farhat Bengdara, was a former central bank governor with no experience in the oil industry. According to those familiar with the deal, he was appointed as a result of his financial expertise. [20] Alongside this change, $6bn was released by the Central Bank of Libya, ostensibly as financing for the NOC.
Yet it seemingly ended up moving through a subsidiary to Saddam Haftar who then allegedly used it to pay Wagner. Within a year, Saddam’s loyalists were appointed to management positions over key subsidiaries, most notably the Brega Company that was responsible for all of Libya’s fuel imports.
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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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