BANGUI -- Just after noon on January 17, 2023, Privat Damabakizi, 35, and his wife were working in their farm field in a tiny Central African Republic settlement near the border with Cameroon when his brother, Alvin, called him.
Seven armed men wearing camouflage uniforms had just driven up in pickup trucks at Damabakizi's home in Bouar, a town about 7 kilometers away from the field.
The men were white-skinned, wearing balaclavas, Alvin recalled in an interview with RFE/RL. They spoke poor French, the main language in the country. They were Russians, who were a common presence in the area. They were looking for Damabakizi.
"I was worried. I called him and asked him what he had done for the Russians to come here." Alvin recalled in an interview with RFE/RL. "These people are bad people."
Damabakizi told Alvin not to worry and said he'd come to the house immediately. Alvin told him to go to the police instead.
When Damabakizi drove up a short time later, the Russians grabbed him and threw him into one of their trucks, beating him with their rifle butts and stabbing him with bayonets. Later, his wife, Nelly, cried as they drove away with Damabakizi.
The next day, after frantically calling local authorities, Alvin said, prosecutors told him that Damabakizi had been accused of buying items -- probably radios -- that had been stolen from a nearby military base used by the Russian mercenaries.
Alvin and Nelly never saw Damabakizi again. They believe he was tortured before he died. They don't know where his body is.
Rich in natural resources, wracked by ethnic conflict, gripped by extreme poverty and rampant corruption, the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) has long been a case study of a failed state. It has also become a laboratory for a dangerous political experiment: state capture by a private company. In this case, a company that pairs war-fighting and security with lucrative commercial interests, mainly extracting gold, diamonds, and timber.
The company is, or was, the Wagner Group. The creation of a profane, politically connected St. Petersburg chef more than a decade ago, Wagner evolved into one of Russia's most potent fighting forces, at the vanguard of military operations on the ground in Syria, Libya, and most prominently, Ukraine. Yevgeny Prigozhin also built parallel business networks that eventually spread into enterprises as diverse as school-lunch catering in Russia and hardwood timber export-import in Africa.
Wagner officially no longer exists, after Prigozhin was killed in an August 2023 plane crash that most experts believe was a targeted assassination, likely orchestrated at the highest levels of the Kremlin . The company's armed units were mostly split up, incorporated into the Defense Ministry and other Russian agencies.
But Prigozhin's lucrative businesses largely remain -- especially in C.A.R., where they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from diamond and gold mining, timber harvesting, weapons trafficking, and other sources.
Insecure Security
Since 2018, Wagner fighters have acted as a personal security service for the country's president, Faustin-Archange Touadera, while also serving to prop up his government.
After winning the presidency in 2015, Touadera was reelected in December 2020, though the vote was threatened by a violent challenge from Touadera's rival, Francois Bozize, who had been barred from running for reasons some observers said were dubious.
Rebranded inside C.A.R., Wagner's successor units, meanwhile, have become a paramilitary police force, operating outside the law, committing human rights and other crimes with impunity.
In C.A.R., "Wagner has perfected a blueprint for state capture, supporting a criminalized state hijacked by the Central African president and his inner circle, amassing military power, securing access to and plundering precious minerals, and subduing the population with terror," according to a 2023 report by The Sentry , a U.S.-based nongovernmental research organization that was co-founded by the actor George Clooney.
People who have been victimized by Russian mercenaries say they can attest to the fear that Russian units have instilled in parts of the population.
"Imagine what [little] power you have when people come with weapons and they don't speak your language," another man, who asked to be identified only by the name Adam, said in an interview in September. "Am I supposed to just wait until they come back again? Who knows what's going to happen if they do come back?"
Adam, a shopkeeper in a village two hours southwest of the capital, Bangui, said that his store had been ransacked and robbed by "white guys with tattoos and face masks" who spoke Russian.
"Outside of the capital…a lot of people are suffering there and no one seems to know" about it, he told RFE/RL. "It's my case but it's also the case of many more people in different places and regions."
'Unbridled Brutality'
When Wagner mercenaries first deployed to C.A.R. in 2018, they arrived ostensibly for a training and instruction mission, and to provide security services to Touadera's government . Wagner incorporated a company called Sewa Security Services to serve as the local entity overseeing Russian fighters in the country. A larger force of ex-Wagner fighters was incorporated by the Russian Defense Ministry under the name "Africa Corps."
Up to 2,300 fighters may have been deployed at the height of the Wagner presence, by some estimates. As recently as September, a former top Wagner assault commander was appointed Touadera's top security adviser.
Many people also credited Russian forces with tamping down a yearslong conflict fueled by religious and ethnic differences and the struggle for control over the country's wealth.
Over the years that followed, however, activists, reporters, and experts -- even the United Nations -- accumulated a mountain of evidence pointing to crimes -- murder, torture, execution, abductions, rape, theft -- credibly linked to Wagner forces and their successor entities.
Between 2018 and 2024, Russian troops were involved in more than 100 gun battles, and committed more than 362 incidents of violence against civilians, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project , a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks violent events around the world. The violence resulted in at least 786 fatalities.
In 2021, a coalition of rebel groups launched an abortive coup targeting Touadera, following a contested presidential election. Wagner troops helped government forces repel the effort. In its wake, Russia's ambassador to the country, Vladimir Titorenko, declared that "the Russian soldiers will remain until the [opposition] rebels and the bandits of the armed groups are completely wiped out."
In a 2022 report, Human Rights Watch quoted more than three dozen people who had been victims of various crimes between February 2019 and November 2021. All said the abuses were committed by men with white skin speaking Russian, a language the witnesses recognized.
A UN working group that researched the use of mercenaries in C.A.R. and elsewhere reported witness statements describing Russian officers committing rape and sexual violence against women, men, and young girls. Many survivors are reluctant to file formal complaints with authorities because of fear of retribution, the group found.
Reports of torture are rampant; one common method, the UN monitoring group found, involves connecting a person's genitals to electric cables and then electrocuting them.
"The welcome contribution of Russian bilateral forces to improving the security situation contrasts with the denunciation of the human rights violations they commit," a UN-appointed official, Yao Agbetse, said separately in an August 2022 report. Testimonies from witnesses point to "unbridled brutality" on the part of Russian forces.
"By speaking to you, I also tell myself that they will react and I'm afraid because saying that I'm not afraid is not true," Alvin said in an interview with RFE/RL last November. "I don't know what might happen to me tomorrow or the day after."
On the morning of August 9, 2024, Adam was manning his small food-and-goods shop in the village of Mbaiki when he noticed two pickup trucks, and a number of motorcycles, roaring into town. A group of heavily armed men started barking orders to local men and boys, demanding identification.
Some appeared to be personnel from the Central African Armed Forces, known by the acronym FACA. They beat Adam and some of the other men with their guns, demanding to know if they had stored weapons, and, if so, where.
They were followed, Adam said, by "white guys with tattoos and face masks" who spoke Russian.
The Russians broke into his store and filled their vehicles with stolen goods, he said: "They took shoes, tents, cooking stoves, rice, cooking oil, even veterinary medicines. They emptied my store."
The convoy then headed to another village, where they continued looting stores, asking local men to show IDs. Adam said his cousin, who tried to escape, was shot and thrown into the truck with the group of other men.
The Russians drove the truck about 2 kilometers away, Adam said, then they cut his cousin's neck.
"They left him near the main road, like 10 minutes' walk into the bush, then tied a rope around his belly and hung him in a nearby tree," he said. Sometime later, Adam and others found his cousin's body in the tree, he said. They cut his body down, then buried him.
'Who Am I Supposed To Complain To?'
Igor Ngaisse said that, in December 2020, his aunt Albertine was gunned down by Russian soldiers, possibly as a bystander to a shootout with rebel fighters.
On January 25, 2021, he said, he was lying down in his small house in Sibut, a village north of Bangui, when he suddenly heard gunfire outside. He waited until the shooting subsided, then peeked out of his room to see a Russian soldier walking down the hallway. Igor said he bolted out of the building, then listened as the soldier proceeded to fire his rifle into each room, and then rake the main living room with gunfire.
Ngaisse said his 25-year-old younger sister remained hidden inside the house, frightened but unharmed.
After the incident, which was covered by local media, Ngaisse sought help from the local police commissioner, he said, and they confronted what appeared to be a senior Russian officer, who then offered him 5,000 Central African francs (about $8), which seemed to be simply spare change in his pocket. Insulted, Ngaisse refused it.
"If I have to complain, who am I supposed to complain to?" he told RFE/RL. "I don't know exactly what's happening in this country."
"The number of victims of Wagner human rights abuses continues to increase," Jelena Aparac, who used to head the UN working group on mercenaries, told RFE/RL in a text message. "[Regrettably] there are no coordinated investigations and [no] effective accountability."
And Russian soldiers have gained notoriety for the brutal tactics they've employed to intimidate people -- even those they have trained themselves.
Like with Jose Befio, who had previously been recruited by government forces and trained by Wagner soldiers to command a local unit of a nationwide militia known as the Anti-balaka.
Befio, who UN monitors said had been implicated in past violent crimes of his own, later backed away from supporting the government and its Russian allies. He spoke out against some of the crimes that Russian soldiers committed in the region, his uncle, Bachir Itoumandji, and two of his wives told RFE/RL.
On July 23, 2024, Befio was sleeping in his home before dawn in the central town of Bouca when Russian soldiers burst in to kidnap him, and a close aide.
Itoumandji said he and other relatives woke early to the sound of gunfire and explosions. When it ended at dawn, he drove to a local cotton gin facility, where the shooting had taken place.
When he found the bodies of Befio and his aide, Itoumandji said, the Russians had beheaded the two and swapped their heads, putting Befio's head in the aide's arms, and vice versa. Photographs of the bodies circulated widely in the country, and the UN monitoring mission also recorded the incident.
The bystanders who were already there told Itoumandji that Russian soldiers were responsible.
"We brought him inside and put his head back in its place, and his comrade's," he said. "We washed the bodies before burying them."
They also kidnapped three of Befio's young children and held them for days, Itoumandji said. When they were returned to the family, all three children had had their teeth pulled out.
Befio's beheading was part of a pattern of atrocities and public executions committed by both Russian soldiers and FACA, said Charles Bouessel, a country expert with the International Crisis Group, a Belgian-based think tank.
"Terror is used as a weapon because Wagner and FACA may not have enough forces to be present everywhere on the ground," Bouessel told RFE/RL. "They use fear, which can be an efficient way to get people to tell information, and sell information" to the Russians.
Befio's beheading, and the photographs that circulated, also probably served as a public warning, he said.
"It could be a message to other warlords, a way to pacify the country," Bouessel said. "It's possible this was a message: If you violate your promises to Wagner, this is what is waiting for you."
Despite substantial evidence complied by rights activists, plus UN experts, Russian officials in Moscow and in Bangui have repeatedly denied accusations of Russians committing crimes in the country.
"Russian military advisers could not participate and did not participate in murders or robberies. This is another lie," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to a 2021 United Nations report.
RFE/RL sought comment from the C.A.R. Foreign Ministry about the reports of Russian crimes, but received no response. A spokesman for Touadera's office also refused to answer questions, saying only that "cooperation with Russia is excellent and this [fact] disturbs the Westerners who want to demonize the Central African Republic."
Despite the fear and intimidation inflicted -- with government blessing, experts say -- there's no indication that Russia's security presence is going anywhere anytime soon.
If anything, Touadera and his administration have moved to deepen ties. Last month, Touadera traveled to Moscow, where he received a red-carpet welcome and a small honor guard parade just outside the Kremlin walls.
A month earlier, meanwhile, a new monument appeared in the C.A.R. capital: a pair of statues dedicated to the late Prigozhin, and Dmitry Utkin, the ex-soldier credited with being Wagner's first commander, who was also killed in the 2023 plane crash.
