Wood for war: the Wagner deal that sanctions could not break

Since 2024 the sawmill in Boda, a small town in the south-west of the Central African Republic (CAR), has stood empty. It is tempting to read this as a Western success. Investigators exposed a logging company working for the Wagner Group, Washington and London sanctioned it, and its exports dried up.

I think this reading is mistaken. The timber business was never mainly about timber. It was one part of a political bargain in which a weak government pays for its survival with the country’s natural wealth. That bargain still stands, and the Kremlin is now fighting over who gets to control it. Western policy, which relies on naming companies and freezing their assets, misses this.

A concession as a war invoice

In February 2021 government troops and Russian mercenaries were pushing rebels back from Bangui. That month the government granted a little-known company, Bois Rouge, a logging concession of about 1,800 square kilometres of tropical forest, more than the area of Greater London. The company had never felled a tree. According to the US Treasury, the concession was payment for services Wagner had provided to the CAR. The same fighters had only just retaken the land. The company was exempted from fees and export duties that should have gone to the state and to local communities. Its logs were later collected at a military base in Bangui and trucked to the port of Douala in Cameroon.

This is why the case is different from ordinary illegal logging. The wood was not smuggled out of a forest nobody controlled. The state licensed it, as payment for a war. The CAR’s leadership did not lose its resources to outsiders. It spent them, and with them a piece of the country’s sovereignty.

From Bangui the logic is easy to follow. President Faustin-Archange Touadéra faced an armed rebellion. He did not trust the UN peacekeeping mission to protect him, and Western partners were not willing to fight. Moscow offered fighters and accepted payment in kind. For a government that is short of cash, rich in resources and under military pressure, such a deal makes sense. The CAR is far from the only country in this position.

Why sanctions hit the wrong target

The Western response followed the usual pattern. Researchers and journalists traced the company, its Russian managers and its buyers. Some of the wood reached Europe. According to Earthsight, a Danish importer received Wagner-linked sapele in 2022, although EU rules were supposed to keep illegal timber out. The company changed its name. The United States sanctioned it in 2023 and the United Kingdom in 2024. By the end of 2023 it had stopped exporting.

The money involved was small. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) estimates the profit at between one and five million dollars. That is far below early projections and hardly significant for a network that also traded in gold and diamonds. A second Wagner-linked forestry concession, granted in 2023, never produced anything. So sanctions closed a small business that was not doing well. The arrangement behind it was left untouched.

This is the main weakness of relying on sanctions. They deal with a political relationship as if it were a compliance issue. A company can be renamed in a few weeks, or replaced by a new one with a local director on paper. Sanctions cannot take away the power of the country’s leaders to give forests and mines to whoever keeps them in office. As long as that power is used this way, new shell companies will keep appearing.

The fight over who owns the deal

The strongest evidence that the model has survived comes from Moscow. After Yevgeny Prigozhin died in August 2023, the Kremlin began moving Wagner’s African operations into the Africa Corps, which reports to the Ministry of Defence and to military intelligence, the GRU. In Mali the handover is complete. In the CAR it is not. According to ISPI and Inkstick, Touadéra and former Wagner commanders are resisting two demands from Moscow: to be paid in cash instead of concessions, and to come under direct GRU command. Commanders such as Andrei Ivanov, call sign “Kep”, are afraid of losing the assets they have built up and of being prosecuted back in Russia.

Neither side in this dispute questions the idea that resources should pay for security. They disagree about who controls the flow. The Russian state is adapting the model rather than ending it. The “Russian House” network in Bangui, headed by Dmitry Syty, has reportedly been directing Defence Ministry resources to the Africa Corps’ needs in the CAR instead of sending them back to Russia. This is happening with the approval of Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who oversees the Corps. A structure that started as a private business is being taken over by the Russian state, while it continues to finance itself locally.

This matters. A mercenary group paid in logging rights could be presented as a rogue actor. A regular military presence paid for in the same way is part of Russian foreign policy. Touadéra was re-elected in December 2025 in a disputed vote and went to Moscow in March 2026 to confirm security cooperation. GI-TOC now calls the CAR the Africa Corps’ key logistics hub on the continent.

What Europe should take from this

Europe should first stop counting closed companies as success. An empty sawmill means little if the concession system behind it is still open to the next armed patron. What matters is whether the CAR’s resources are allocated lawfully and transparently. Existing tools such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, whose reports helped to document this case, need political support. They should not be treated as purely technical exercises.

Europe also needs to close its own market. Wagner-linked wood entered the EU despite due-diligence rules. Timber and deforestation rules should be enforced most strictly for supply chains from conflict zones.

The most difficult task is to respond to the need for protection that makes Russia’s offer attractive. While Western partners attach governance conditions to their support and Moscow sends fighters, governments like Touadéra’s will go on paying in forests, gold and diamonds. The only thing that can compete with that deal is credible security support, delivered through African and multilateral frameworks and linked to transparent management of natural resources.

The sawmill at Boda stands empty. The machinery that built it is still running, and it is increasingly run from the Russian Ministry of Defence.