Wagner's Leftover Fighters Run a $180 Million Drug and Gold Empire in Central Africa, WSJ Reports

A mercenary group the Kremlin couldn't fully absorb

Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August 2023 after his short-lived mutiny against Moscow. Russia moved fast to fold Wagner's overseas operations into state-controlled structures. But around 500 Wagner fighters stayed put in the Central African Republic, and according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, they never fully came under Kremlin control.

That holdout group is reportedly led by Pavel Prigozhin, the son of Wagner's late founder. The WSJ investigation, along with reporting from UNITED24 Media and UA.News that cited the same Journal findings, describes a criminal enterprise that has outlived its founder and kept growing.

Tramadol as a business model

The core of the operation is tramadol, a synthetic opioid painkiller. Therapeutic doses run 50 to 100 milligrams. Tablets sold across the CAR reportedly run 200 milligrams or higher, according to the WSJ.

The supply chain starts with pharmaceutical manufacturers in India, who legally export the drug to the Republic of the Congo. Smugglers then move it across the Ubangi River into the CAR, where Wagner-linked networks control distribution, the Journal reported.

Miners at Wagner-controlled gold sites use the high-dose pills to work extended hours. i24NEWS reported that fighters also take it in combat to suppress fear, and that it's locally described as "the cocaine of the poor" for its stimulant effect at high doses.

Research from Uppsala University, cited by the WSJ, found tramadol consumption has climbed alongside a nearly 20% rise in deaths tied to fighting over mining territory, reaching roughly 500 fatalities over the past year.

The gold money is bigger

Tramadol funds the operation, but gold is the real prize. The Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates Wagner-linked gold exports generate approximately $180 million a year.

i24NEWS reported additional detail from a Global Initiative report published in June 2026: Wagner-linked interests control the Ndassima mine, the country's largest, pulling out roughly five metric tons of gold annually, worth up to $500 million on international markets. Gold exports from the CAR rose from 1.7 metric tons in 2023 to as much as seven metric tons by the end of 2025, a volume the report says exceeds what artisanal miners could plausibly produce, suggesting industrial-scale extraction from Wagner's own concessions.

The same report describes a government-backed fuel monopoly generating between $17.5 million and $30 million a year in what it calls unjustified profits, plus gold laundering through UAE-linked exporters using CAR-registered military cargo aircraft.

Embedded in the government itself

This isn't an outside criminal network operating in the shadows. The Global Initiative report, as detailed by i24NEWS, found Wagner-linked and allied actors embedded in key government ministries, the security apparatus, and customs administration in the CAR. It describes a system where coercion, regulation, and resource extraction have merged into a single structure tied to the presidency.

UA.News reported that Wagner Group members effectively control CAR state institutions and serve as the military backbone of the regime, rerouting smuggling routes across the Ubangi River to a location called Kogno. Researchers cited by UA.News describe the CAR as Wagner's last stronghold in Africa, one it is reportedly using to expand influence into neighboring Sudan by coordinating with the Rapid Support Forces, an armed rebel faction there.

The human cost isn't abstract. i24NEWS reported that a Wagner-aligned militia killed roughly 130 Fulani pastoralists near the Cameroon border in February 2025, the deadliest attack on civilians in the country since March 2022.

What Moscow gets out of it

The CAR operation also functions as a logistics hub. i24NEWS reported that Wagner has used illegal transfers of military cargo aircraft to move arms and mercenaries, supporting Russia's Africa Corps deployments elsewhere in West Africa, even as this specific CAR network stays outside direct Kremlin command.

Russia absorbed Wagner's formal command structure after Prigozhin's mutiny and death, but a self-sustaining, drug- and gold-funded mercenary outfit in Central Africa kept operating independently and profitably enough that Moscow apparently hasn't forced the issue.

None of the reporting cited here indicates any CAR government official, Pavel Prigozhin, or Russian state authorities have responded on the record to the Global Initiative's specific findings about ministry infiltration or the fuel monopoly. Whether the CAR government, led by President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, disputes the characterization of state institutions as Wagner-controlled remains an open question the current reporting doesn't answer.

The unresolved question going forward is whether Moscow moves to reassert control over this network now that its independent revenue stream, and its expansion into Sudan's civil war, has been laid out in detail by Western researchers and a major U.S. newspaper.