An aide to the Central African Republic’s president has stated that Wagner PMC is guarding him.
The Central African Republic (CAR) has a defence contract with the Wagner private military business, which is helping to improve the country’s security, according to Fidele Gouandjika, special minister and presidential adviser.
Members of the Russian PMC are training local forces and defending President Faustin-Archange Touadera, according to the adviser in an interview with Al-Arabiya on Saturday.
NATO and the West are striving to destabilise Africa, but the Central African Republic, according to Gouandjika, is no longer terrified of coups because of the security help it receives from Moscow.
According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Defence Ministry also sent “several hundred” military instructors to CAR.
According to the aide, the government resorted to Russia because France, which maintained a military presence in the country until 2022, refused to assist it with weaponry to fight terrorism.
Cooperation between Bangui and Moscow is mutually beneficial, he claimed, but Paris considered CAR as “private property” and attempted to exploit the country’s resources.
Wagner PMC members were reported to be departing the Central African Republic in early July, following a failed mutiny in Russia on June 23 and 24.
At the time, Gouandjika refuted the charges and accused the French press agency of circulating fake information.
In an earlier interview, the aide stated that CAR was eager to maintain security cooperation with Russia in whatever shape it proposed. “We will have them if Moscow decides to withdraw them [Wagner PMC] and send us Beethovens or Mozarts instead of Wagners,” Gouandjika remarked.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, stated late in June that Russian authorities “enjoy” security cooperation with CAR and that it would be maintained despite Wagner’s mutiny.
Lavrov confirmed a few days later that Moscow will not insist that the PMC halt its activities in CAR or elsewhere in Africa.
According to the foreign minister, PMC soldiers were deployed in African countries in accordance with agreements established directly between their governments and Wagner.
“The fate of those agreements… must first and foremost be decided by the relevant governments based on their interest in continuing this form of cooperation to ensure the security of their state bodies,” he explained.
As part of the arrangement that ended the Wagner mutiny, members of the PMC were given the option of retiring, signing contracts with the Russian military, or relocating to Belarus with the group’s leader, Evgeny Prigozhin.
