The Russian mission for military training of local personnel in the Central African Republic (CAR) was the subject of study by a group of UN experts, who described it in great detail in a report sent on July 23, 2018 to the President of the UN Security Council. The document was published on the website of the American NGO Security Council Report.

On July 30, near the town of Sibut north of Bangui (the capital of the Central African Republic), Russian journalists Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko and Alexander Rastorguev, who were filming a film about “Russian mercenaries” for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Investigation Management Center, were killed. As reported by The Bell, the Russians wanted to remove a gold deposit in the vicinity of the town of Ndashima, which the Lobaye Invest company was going to develop under the protection of Sewa Security Service. Both companies are related to entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin, with whom the “private military company (PMC) Wagner” operating in the Donbass and Syria is associated.

The experts’ goal was to study the situation in the CAR in the context of the implementation of Security Council resolutions on an arms embargo to this country after the devastating civil war. Moscow, as the Russian Foreign Ministry reported in March 2018, obtained from the Security Council sanctions committee on December 26, 2017, permission for the free supply of light weapons for the security forces of the Central African Republic, as well as for training with the help of five military and 170 civilian instructors of local security forces within of the year. The European Union also implements training programs for local army personnel.

As the report says, from January 26 to February 7, 2018, eight Russian aircraft delivered weapons to Bangui - they were unloaded in the presence of military personnel of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), and the Russian side provided UN experts with a detailed report on the distribution of weapons between security forces structures and the number of training courses. At the end of March, the training of soldiers of the CAR armed forces and the presidential guard began at the training facility in the town of Berenga (Lobaye Prefecture); by this time, the first batch of military personnel who had trained at a training base in Sudan, where they were also trained by Russian instructors, had also returned to the CAR. The leader of the Russians, in a conversation with UN experts, denied information about plans to staff the inner circle of the security of CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadera with Russian personnel.

As of the end of June, Russian instructors were also based in Sibut and Bangassou, where they supported the CAR army units they trained. In addition, 24 instructors guarded a hospital donated by Russia in the town of Bria, and another 20 in Kuada. Convoys with equipment for hospitals were also accompanied by Russian instructors. UN experts also received information about the clash in which the instructors were involved. On June 10, a convoy in Bangassou was attacked by UPC militants, wounding two CAR soldiers and one Russian. With the help of MINUSCA military personnel (with whom Russian instructors often jointly guard convoys), an agreement was reached with the militants on the safe passage of the convoys.

Obtaining concessions for fields to pay for security services is a common practice in Africa and other countries where there are local conflicts, says Andrei Frolov, an expert at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.

UN experts described the work of Russian military instructors in Central Africa