Planned for the Serpukhov district south of Moscow, it is to be a home for Western expatriates who are tired of the “radical values” of their supposed democracies. “Today, they have 70 genders — and who knows what will come next,” Beslangurov reportedly told a conference in St Petersburg. He claims they have identified around 200 “normal people” to move there, mainly Christians fearing the end of their faith in the West.

There is already a small community of Westerners in Russia: some, such as Australian John Helmer, have been there since the Cold War, while others have emigrated more recently, including ex-cop and fugitive Floridian John Mark Dougan, who skipped town just as the FBI was about to arrest him on hacking charges. Even more have arrived in the past year, firmly picking a side in the war against Ukraine, as ex-US soldier John McIntyre did. This rump of foreigners is more critical to upholding President Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy than it is given credit for.

The Russian-based Canadian Eva Bartlett, for example, uses her social media channels to advance the idea that the fighting in Ukraine is a “US proxy war against Russia”, and that Western media and US intelligence agencies are covering up “the fact that Ukraine is committing genocide”. She vents to her 150,000 followers on Twitter, and another 32,000 on her Telegram channel, and is still promoted by far-Left groups in Canada. Meanwhile, Thomas Röper, the German-Russian editor of a pro-Russian blog, whose YouTube channel has 120,000 subscribers, has travelled throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine at the invitation of Moscow, even serving as an “international observer” for sham referendums held in the Donbas region.

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McIntyre, for his part, was initially fighting alongside the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the unit defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Then, earlier this year, he deserted, only to pop up in Moscow not long after. He claims to have been spying for Russia from the very beginning.

Russia has been only too happy to give these figures a home and a platform. Bartlett and Röper are both frequent contributors to the RT propaganda network, and were also invited, alongside Dougan and several other Westerners, to testify before the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine: a series of hearings, run by a Russian government body in Moscow, that have accused Ukraine of war crimes and developing biological weapons.

In some cases, these influencers reinforce Russian foreign policy. Bartlett, for example, has toured Syria at the invitation of Bashar al-Assad, and helped peddle the idea that rebels and internationally respected medics launched chemical weapons attacks inside Syria, rather than the Syrian military. It’s a thoroughly debunked allegation that aligns closely with the obfuscation pushed by the Russian government and its client, al-Assad.

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In other cases, they reinforce the idea of Putin as a benevolent actor. Over the past year, the President’s personal future and the longevity of his kleptocratic regime have been shaken to the core: beset by a stalled invasion; destabilised by an aborted coup; and frustrated by the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens fleeing his partial mobilisation. Throughout it all, Moscow has tried to project not just strength and stability, but the idea that Russia is a guiding beacon for the rest of the world, a symbol of traditional values.

This certainly works in Africa and the Middle East, where Moscow’s social values, particularly around religion and sexuality, better reflect the cultural norms than does Western decadence. It also aligns well with the American and European Right. Tucker Carlson has frequently held up Putin as an antidote to America’s wokeness. In France, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have both, at various times, hailed Russian values. And Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has styled himself after the Russian dictator, lamenting that his nation is under assault by Western liberalism.

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All of this is to Putin’s benefit. The idea that Westerners themselves are validating Putin’s warnings about the moral decay and irreligious apostasy of Nato countries is useful to the Kremlin. The idea that some of those Westerners would come to Russia to fight, even die, for Putin’s political project is even more compelling.

Take Dougan. He told me last year that he planned to help train the Russian-backed separatists. “The Donetsk People’s Republic have captured a bunch of the Javelin missiles sent to them by the American government,” he told me on a video call from Moscow. “When I was in the United States Marine Corps, I happened to be an anti-tank assault man. And my goal is to teach them how to use these missiles to defend themselves… I’m going to give them a way to fight back.” While he declined to confirm if he ever actually went to train them, he did say that, more recently, he had trained with Chechen fighters. (“Those guys are awesome shooters,” he told me this week.)

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The West has, for now, opted to ignore this small cohort of Putin propagandists, probably just a few hundred strong. But even that small cohort wields outsize influence. And if it wanted to, could the West act against them? Western states do carry a legal prohibition of sorts on joining a foreign conflict, absent a declaration of war — these laws, however, are selectively and rarely enforced.

In March 2022, American law professor Dakota Rudesill called on the US government to offer some clarity as to who may, or not may not, run afoul of the Neutrality Act in Ukraine. That clarity never came. Rudesill tells me that it is still unclear whether it is legal to travel to Russia to join the fight. Given how much evidence has been posted on social media about these foreign volunteers, he says: “I am confident that a fair number of Americans who have joined the fight on both sides could be charged if the Justice Department as a matter of prosecutorial discretion decided to do so.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is unlikely to target anyone fighting alongside Ukraine. But, Rudesill says, a future administration could break with Biden’s pro-Ukraine stance. Without clarity on the law, he says, the Department of Justice could “start prosecuting Americans who have been resisting the invasion”.

Congress could modernise the law — both by updating the Neutrality Act to reflect modern realities, and by expressly forbidding Americans from joining foreign wars, while also specifically exempting those fighting for Ukraine. (Such a bill, to provide legal cover for the Ukrainian volunteers, has already been introduced in the House of Representatives.) The UK’s Foreign Enlistment Act, and similar legislation in its former colonies, is equally antiquated and selectively enforced, but still in effect.

There are other legal mechanisms to draw on. Western sanction laws are probably the most practical: many of those living and working in Russia are, almost certainly, in violation of them. The European Union has classified the Russian government as a state sponsor of terrorism, and there is a movement afoot to have the US follow suit. Such a designation would come with a spate of legal prohibitions. The United Kingdom is getting ready to classify Wagner Group as a terrorist entity, and other countries are considering following suit. That could mean anyone fighting alongside them could be prosecuted much like those who joined the Islamic State.

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Ukraine may also insist on trying some of the fighters for war crimes, even if they are American, Canadian or European. There is also some precedent in the country for prosecuting propagandists if they are found guilty of inciting genocide.

When the West was called upon to repatriate its citizens who had joined Islamic State and wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, it — by and large — shirked its responsibility. As a result, tens of thousands of foreigners have been left to rot in the Middle East. Some are former combatants, whom, even years later, Western governments are still disinterested in prosecuting. Others are women and children who had no hand in the fighting or brutal violence, and yet many states still refuse to take them back.

With this in mind, Western countries ought to clarify the situations in which their citizens could face prosecution for their participation in Putin’s war. This may, in some cases, be purely academic: they may simply never leave Russia again. But as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow showed, the Russian state may be less stable than we thought. And if the President were to fall, what would become of his useful idiots. Suddenly, that brand new Potemkin village might not look quite so appealing.

In the process, Prigozhin has become the state-sanctioned tip of Russia’s foreign policy spear — a position that is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite recent reports suggesting that there is a growing rift between him and Vladimir Putin. The footprint of the Wagner Group has become indispensable, both for Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and for its longer-term stability. And Prigozhin is something of an enigma: he both represents the will and the policies of the Kremlin, while also being one of the few — and certainly the most prominent — voices inside Russia that can effectively challenge Putin’s state. While Kremlinology is a difficult art, it appears very possible that Prigozhin serves as controlled opposition for Putin: a hawk who can appeal both to domestic ultra-nationalists upset with the course of the war in Ukraine and to security-obsessed regimes abroad. In that sense, we should see Prigozhin more as a shadow defence minister than an entirely independent actor.

When asked about growing calls from within the House of Commons to declare his force a terrorist organisation — which the British government now plans to do within weeks — Prigozhin wrote on his Telegram channel: “The Wagner PMC has been fighting ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organisations everywhere, and very successfully.” If Wagner is a terror group, Prigozhin sarcastically wrote in Russian, then perhaps al-Qaeda and the Islamic State should become humanitarian charities, they could even hold meetings inside Westminster. “I’m all for such an arrangement,” he wrote.

It’s remarkable smugness from the head of a fighting force responsible not just for brutal torture, executions, even possible war crimes — but for filming and broadcasting the atrocities to serve as propaganda. He presides over a group, staffed with special forces veterans and conscripted prisoners, that has helped Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad regain his grip on power in Syria and delivered some of Russia’s only recent territorial gains in Ukraine. And now, thanks to him, Russia is being venerated as an anti-colonialist, anti-terrorist power by governments and citizens in Burkina Faso, Mali, the Central African Republic, and further afield. As Jonathan Batenguene, a Cameroonian political analyst, explained to me, there is a rising perception in Africa that Russia is a “reliable partner in the struggle against terrorism”.

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Prigozhin’s play in the Sahel should be a wakeup call to the United States and France in particular. Their decades of counter-terrorism operations in the region have not brought security: self-interested efforts have, in some cases, only fomented more militancy and violence.

If the West hopes to both stabilise central Africa and deny Russia new trading partners, it will need to get serious about solving the region’s substantial security challenges — and acknowledge its own role in creating them. One problem has been that the West has spent far too much time pursuing its own counter-terrorism objectives — that is, denying groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda a base from which to launch attacks on Europe and North America — and far too little considering how best to foster long-term stability. Even when state-building has been part of a counter-terrorist strategy, it has often not gone to plan: the United States’ long-running investment in Iraq or France’s long-suffering relationship with the Malian government are prime examples.

But those investments have grown deeply unpopular. Resolve to provide security to nations in the Global South has fallen, particularly as the threat of terrorism in the West has declined significantly. In some cases, the consequences of these open-ended interventions, which inevitably lead to civilian casualties, have worsened the situation in a fundamental way.

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The ousting of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, for example, unravelled Tripoli’s security state and unleashed a flood of weapons and fighters into the region. That domino toppled a series of others, and understanding how that Western action led to calamity in Mali and Burkina Faso can help explain why these countries have welcomed Wagner with open arms.

In Northern Mali, Gaddafi’s fall prompted Tuareg militias, which once counted Gaddafi as a benefactor, to push for long-sought independence; they even briefly declared the creation of the Azawad republic in 2012. During the period of instability, Islamist groups rushed in and seized territory. Some have organised under the Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin umbrella group, affiliated with al-Qaeda; while others have joined The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Mali has been locked in a brutal war ever since.

Militancy was on the march, but Western appetite for another Libya-style intervention was low, so the West, America in particular, wildly expanded its drone programme instead. France’s approach has been more hands on, but not by much. Operation Serval was launched in 2013 to eliminate the threat posed by these trans-national jihadist groups. The multi-national coalition was designed to help Mali’s government in Bamako regain control of the region, but as the European Council on Foreign Relations says it “dislodged the jihadist groups from Mali’s cities, but did not eliminate them”. After the operation ended in 2014, “they slipped away and reorganised”.

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The fighting soon spilled over into Burkina Faso. Following two military coups in 2022, France launched a second mission, Operation Barkhane. But it proved even less successful than Operation Serval. In a taxonomical look at how the effort floundered, analyst Nathaniel Powell writes that “broadly speaking, the answer boils down to a combination of unalterable structural features of France’s intervention, a misunderstanding of local conflict dynamics, serious political mistakes, and operational errors”. The situation worsened so severely that even Canada abandoned the parallel United Nations peacekeeping mission, to cheers from Islamist factions.

It is in this context that the Wagner Group arrived in the region. One of its first orders of business when it landed in Mali in 2021 was to go after France as a neo-colonial power which had no concern for civilian lives. According to Paris, the Russian mercenaries went so far as to stage bodies near a Malian military base in order to accuse France of a massacre. (The murders were, in fact, likely conducted by Wagner themselves.)

The citizens and decision-makers in West and Central Africa don’t need to be helped to the conclusion that Western aid and intervention has utterly failed to address the mounting security concerns in the region. But Russia is still keen to make the point.

Wagner’s propaganda campaign in Africa is a serious and well-financed affair, as revealed in those leaked American intelligence memos. “The campaign’s primary objective was to promote Russian foreign policy in a manner that would shape public opinion towards African nations pulling back from Western pressure and realigning with Russia in mutually beneficial cooperation,” the leaked intelligence reads. That includes propaganda which “highlight US and French interference in African internal affairs and conducting activities to shape a negative attitude toward the armed forces of Western countries against a backdrop of crimes committed by their military members, particularly in Burkina Faso and Mali”.

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As a result, Wagner’s footprint in the region has grown quickly. It is believed that Prigozhin’s forces are now present, at least to some degree, in the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Madagascar, Botswana, Comoros, Rwanda, and Lesotho. That presence ranges from fairly minimal, as in their single office in Lesotho, to quite substantial — US Signals Intelligence reports that 1,645 Wagner fighters were present in Mali earlier this year.

There is little doubt about Wagner’s impure intentions: there is ample evidence that Prigozhin hopes to pilfer diamonds and other natural resources while using these countries to launder weapons and goods for Russians. Yet the perception is that France and the United States are equally greedy and self-interested, if not more so — and there are certainly data points to back up that belief.

“One of the reasons that these guys are popular is because they actually die,” says John Lechner, a freelance journalist who spends considerable time in the Central African Republic. That is: Wagner fighters are on the ground, battling militants. They appear to be risking their own lives to bring security to these states. One official from an unnamed Sahel country, speaking to the US Institute of Peace, remarked: “When your house is burning you don’t judge the quality of the water you spray to stop the flames.”

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Wagner’s support also means weapons. Whereas the West has been apprehensive about selling weapons to some of these regimes, Russia has had no such qualms. Look no further than Sudan, where evidence has emerged of Wagner arming the rebellious Rapid Support Forces with missiles as they fight a deadly conflict against the ruling military regime.

Russian-backed weapons deals serve as a quid pro quo — a way for African countries to source military hardware without jumping through America’s and Europe’s hoops, while also helping Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine. The leaked US intelligence documents state that: “According to Prigozhin affiliates, Malian Transition President Assimi Goita was involved in efforts to acquire weapons from Turkey for Vagner’s interests.”

The question of how to frustrate Russia’s Scramble for Africa is painfully simple. The West needs to work with the United Nations, African Union, and local governments to become a reliable partner in the region, not just to strike militant groups, but to bring about long-term stability and security. It also needs to look back on its past decade of involvement in the region and ask why it has failed. But a strategy that targets Wagner first and foremost is not strategy at all. Forcing the Wagner Group out of the Central African Republic in short order, Lechner argued, “could be very negative from a civilian protection standpoint”. “You better be coming with something better to replace it.”

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If the West is to supplant Russia in Africa, it must prioritise ending the human suffering caused by these interlocking crises. But it must also put a stop to Russia’s attempt to forge an international illiberal alliance. Like a new Warsaw Pact, Moscow hopes it can — using Prigozhin as its conduit — win over long-term partners to trade with and launder resources through. This will be Putin’s only hope at remaining in power as sanctions continue. Even if Prigozhin loses his favour with Moscow or, even more unlikely, if he winds up outmanoeuvring Putin and replacing the strongman as leader, these tactics are likely to continue, or even intensify.

Russia has no shortage of possible partners, especially in countries where the state has proved itself incapable of maintaining order, and where the international community has talked a good game but not delivered: Haiti is a prime example. The leaked US intelligence reports that Prigozhin has plans to approach the Haitian government with an offer to help their fight against gangs that have taken over swathes of the country. This comes as traditional Haitian partners — France, the United States, Canada — have proved unable to help Port-au-Prince restore order.

Continued violence in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya presents another opportunity for Russia to pick winners and install client states. And there are signs that Wagner is planning to foment unrest elsewhere, like Côte D’Ivoire, so it can swoop in and offer security solutions. This is just colonialism, cloaked in bilateral aid. China has perfected this strategy with its Belt-and-Road Initiative. Whereas Beijing is keen to hook developing countries up to debt bondage, Russia wants to help them outsource their domestic security to a paramilitary force with no concern for human rights.