By clara @Shutterstock
Scott Detrow, Emma Klein, and Tinbete Ermyas of NPR.org are reporting that the Russian Wagner Group has laundered some $2.5 billion to Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year to support its war effort. They write:
A new report details how the Wagner mercenary group uses gold mining in Africa to funnel money to the Kremlin.
According to The Blood Gold Report, Wagner has laundered some $2.5 billion to Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year in an effort to support its war effort.
This is in spite of global sanctions that have shut off the Russian economy from much of the world. […]
This means not just going after Wagner on the supply side, but going after the regimes who are contracting them on the demand side. So if governments in Africa and elsewhere in the world, for that matter, if they know that doing business with Wagner is going to cost them personally, both financially, both also in terms of their and their families’ abilities to travel, they might think twice about signing that contract.
And this is a way to quite simply make it unviable, less attractive and less profitable for these states to engage in business with Wagner in the first place.
Read more here.
