On August 21, 2023, two days before he died when his jet crashed, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who hadn't been heard from since his aborted rebellion against the Kremlin two months earlier, posted a video on social media. "All is well. I'm in Africa. We're recruiting real heroes and continue to carry out the tasks that have been set," said the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, seen stony-faced, standing in a desert landscape. Dressed in fatigues and a bulletproof vest and holding an automatic weapon, Prigozhin called on volunteers to join Wagner to "make Africa more free."

The message also seemed to be addressed to his former ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as if to signal to the man who now called him a "traitor" that his disrepute stopped at Russia's borders. In Africa, his military, commercial and media empire, built up since 2017 in four countries – Sudan in the east, Libya in the north, Mali in the west and the Central African Republic – was firmly entrenched. Little did he know that this trip to Africa would be his last.

The Kremlin waited just two days after Prigozhin's funeral to claim ownership of his most valuable legacy. On August 31, 2023, a military aircraft took off from Moscow bound for the African continent. On board were Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov and General Andrei Averianov, a commander in the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service. Both men had been commissioned by Putin.

The instructions they had been given took past mistakes into account. "In order not to lose operational control over an armed formation (...), the Russian authorities decided to clearly separate structurally the business, propaganda and military components of the former 'Prigozhin empire,'" wrote researchers Filip Bryjka and Jedrzej Czerep, co-authors of a report on Russia's African strategy at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

Under the Russian Ministry of Defense's aegis, three intelligence services were tasked with recovering and developing Wagner's various branches: the GRU for the paramilitary, the FSB security services for the propaganda network, and the SVR exterior intelligence service for cultural influence.

Burkina Faso was high on the Kremlin's agenda. On August 31, Yevkurov and Averianov landed at Ouagadougou airport. At the presidential palace, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, a coup leader in power since September 2022, was waiting for them. The two delegations held an amiable meeting in one of the VIP lounges.

Saving private "IB" – as he is known in Burkina Faso – had become crucial. This African ally pushed to the fore by Moscow at the Russia-Africa summit held in Saint Petersburg at the end of July 2023 was in a tight spot. He had narrowly escaped several coup attempts. Yevkurov and Averianov proposed to the captain an offer consisting of deploying Russian paramilitaries to protect him, while assuring him of the support of propagandists who would be tasked with selling his popularity.

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