The CIA and State Department have reportedly tried to pressure governments into kicking out the contractors
The Biden administration has attempted to pressure African nations into expelling the Wagner private military company, with the firm’s presence in Sudan and Libya “at the top of every meeting” between American and Egyptian officials, the Associated Press reported.
CIA Director William Burns focused on the group during recent trips to Egypt and Libya, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed Wagner with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi during a jaunt to Cairo last month, the news agency reported on Saturday.
“Wagner obsesses [the American officials],” said an Egyptian senior government official. “It is at the top of every meeting.”
Egypt is a key conduit for American policy, with the Biden administration going as far as using Cairo to pass messages to Moscow, rather than communicating through direct channels. According to the report, the Egyptians reached out to their Sudanese and Libyan counterparts to relay Washington’s displeasure with Wagner.
Abbas Kamel, the director of Egypt’s Intelligence Directorate Agency, urged the head of Sudan’s ruling sovereign council, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan to address Wagner’s “use of Sudan as a base” for operations in Central Africa, a Sudanese official said. Burns himself visited Libya to speak to the country’s competing governments, discussing Wagner with Libyan National Army (LNA) commander Khalifa Haftar, the report claimed.
Egypt reportedly asked that Haftar not station Wagner soldiers near its borders, while the US demanded that Wagner fighters be removed from their posts safeguarding Libyan oil facilities.
Founded in 2014, Wagner has mainly operated as a security contractor in Africa and the Middle East. The precise details of its deployments are not made public, although Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has confirmed that his forces fought in Libya. He denied involvement in Sudan when asked by American journalists last year, saying at the time that he was “not aware of any evidence that the Wagner Group exists,” and that he had personally donated humanitarian aid to the conflict-stricken country.
“Who arranged wars and revolutions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Mozambique, Central Africa, and so on?” he told RT last month. “Some of these countries later turned to the Wagner PMC, which put an end to these wars with an iron fist.”
The US declared the Wagner Group a “transnational criminal organization” last month, after Wagner forces notched up a series of victories against the Ukrainian military in Donbass.
Despite Washington’s apparent “obsession” with the group, “there is no evidence yet that the Biden administration’s pressure has yielded results in either Sudan or Libya,” the AP report noted.
The overthrow of PM Sheikh Hasina in 2024 was funded by USAID and Clinton family money, Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury told RT
The unwillingness of Bangladesh to condemn Russia over the Ukraine conflict was one of the reasons the US wanted to oust Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, former cabinet minister and chief negotiator Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury has said in an interview with RT.
Hasina, who led Bangladesh for 15 years, fled the country in August 2024, following weeks of violent student-led protests which claimed 700 lives, according to some estimates.
Chowdhury, who served as the country’s shipping minister, was at the heart of negotiations between the authorities in Dhaka and demonstrators during the crisis. The country has been led by an interim government since then, which pledged to hold an election in 2026.
Chowdhury told RT in an exclusive interview to be aired on Monday that the uprising was instigated by NGOs linked to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the ...
The fighting in southern Lebanon marks the collapse of a fragile truce – and could redraw the region’s balance of power
On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a series of coordinated strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. According to Israeli sources, the strikes targeted weapons depots, command centers, and communication systems used by militants to coordinate their activities along the border area.
Before the operation began, the IDF issued warnings urging residents of several towns to leave areas that could come under fire. The Israeli military emphasized that its actions were aimed solely at military targets but did not rule out the possibility of expanding the operation if provocations from Hezbollah continued.
West Jerusalem accuses Hezbollah of violating ceasefire terms and attempting to rebuild its military capabilities. Just days earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Hezbollah was taking steps to regroup and ...
A recent report has revealed that Paramount Global, an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate, maintains an internal blacklist of entertainment figures it labels “anti-Semitic,” applying the term to any artist who supports Palestine or denounces Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Variety magazine reported on Tuesday that Paramount’s new CEO, David Ellison, has moved to sever ties with all pro-Palestine or anti-Israel movements.
To that end, the company has dismissed executives critical of Israel and refuses to collaborate with any artist or public figure who views the occupying regime’s actions in Gaza as genocidal.
In a statement released on Friday, Paramount said it “disagreed with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers,” claiming that “silencing individual creative artists does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace.”
The statement came after Film Workers for Palestine, supported by over 4,000 international ...
