The New York Times reports:

In a scorched, gold-rich area 200 miles north of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes spring from desert-hewn rock, a mysterious foreign operator dominates the business.

Locals call it “The Russian Company” — a tightly guarded plant with shining towers, deep in the desert, that processes mounds of dusty ore into bars of semirefined gold.

“The Russians pay the best,” said Ammar al-Amir, a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a hardscrabble mining town 10 miles from the plant. “Otherwise, we don’t know much about them.”

In fact, Sudanese company and government records show, the gold mine is one outpost of the Wagner Group, an opaque network of Russian mercenaries, mining companies and political influence operations — controlled by a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that is expanding aggressively across a swath of Africa.

Best known as a supplier of hired guns, Wagner has in recent years evolved into a far broader and more sophisticated tool of Kremlin power, according to experts and Western officials tracking its expansion. Rather than a single entity, Wagner has come to describe interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations, low-cost and deniable, that serve Mr. Putin’s ambitions on a continent where support for Russia is relatively high.

Wagner emerged in 2014 as a band of Kremlin-backed mercenaries that supported Mr. Putin’s first foray into eastern Ukraine, and that later deployed to Syria. In recent months, at least 1,000 of its fighters have re-emerged in Ukraine, British intelligence has said. [Continue reading…]