UK targets Russian-backed mercenaries, defense industry in major sanctions package

The U.K. government on Nov. 7 announced its largest package of sanctions against Russia since May 2023, focusing on the Russian defense industry and mercenary groups.

The new 56 listings include the Moscow-backed mercenary group Africa Corps, private companies linked to the Wagner Group, and suppliers feeding Russia's war through arms and dual-use goods.

Russia has long been using private military groups, most notoriously Wagner, to back friendly regimes in Africa and loot natural resources. Their activities have been accompanied by widespread human rights violations.

The Russian Defense Ministry launched the Africa Corps in 2024 to replace Wagner after the group's brief rebellion in June 2023 and the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash in August of that year. The U.K. is now the first G7 country to sanction Africa Corps, a group bearing the same name as Nazi forces in Africa in World War II.

Africa Corps, two other private mercenary groups, and 11 Kremlin-linked individuals have been sanctioned over human rights abuses and threatening peace and security in Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic, the U.K. Foreign Office said in a statement.

"Today's measures will continue to push back on the Kremlin's corrosive foreign policy, undermining Russia's attempts to foster instability across Africa and disrupting the supply of vital equipment for Putin’s war machine," U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy said.

"And smashing the illicit international networks that Russia has worked so hard to forge."

The list further includes 28 entities based in China, Central Asia, and Turkey that provide "machine tools, microelectronics, components for drones, ball bearings or other goods to the Russian military-industrial complex."

The U.K. sanctioned Russian military intelligence (GRU) Denis Sergeev, also going by the name "Sergej Fedotov," who was linked by British authorities to the Novichok poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018 in Salisbury, U.K.

Opinion: A Russian victory in Ukraine would be bad for Africans

Nineteen-thirty-eight is an apposite metaphor for 2024, of a world poised on the brink of a devastating war. The pieces are all there: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. increasingly divided and isolated, the Middle East divided along sectarian and tribal lines…

The Kyiv IndependentRay Hartley