In July of 2018, three Russian journalists ventured into the war-torn nation of the Central African Republic
to film a documentary.
They were planning to stay there for two weeks.
Three days later, they were dead.
Russian and Central African authorities said that they were randomly killed
by a band of robbers while traveling on an unsafe road at night.
But a lot of the details of the official accounts don’t seem to add up.
And what’s even fishier is that attempts by outside investigators to look into the killings
have been met with mysterious violence and intimidation.
Experts and colleagues of the murdered journalists believe that Russia may be behind the killings.
The reason?
It turns out the journalists were trying to dig up info
on Russia’s secretive use of private military contractors
in the Central African Republic — or CAR
Those contractors are reportedly backed by a very influential Russian oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin,
who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin
and has been charged by the US government with meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
He and the rest of Putin’s inner circle have an interest in keeping Russia’s work in CAR —
where Russia is seeking to mine minerals like uranium and gold —
as hidden from public view as possible.
Nobody knows exactly what happened that night in July.
What we do know is that Russia’s growing activities in Africa looks pretty shady.
On July 28, three Russian journalists landed in Bangui,
the capital of CAR.
They were: prominent investigative reporter Orkhan Dzhemal,
filmmaker Alexander Rastorguyev,
and cameraman Kirill Radchenko.
They were working for the Investigation Control Center, a private media outlet funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
an exiled Russian oil tycoon critical of Putin.
And they had come to CAR as part of an investigation for their documentary
about the Wagner Group, a shadowy private military contractor which is reportedly linked to the Kremlin.
They hired a driver and started working immediately,
but they had trouble getting access to the military facilities they needed for their footage.
On their third day working in CAR,
they were killed.
It happened while traveling at night down a road near the town of Sibut,
which is about 115 miles north of the capital.
Russian and Central African authorities blamed the murder on a robbery,
saying that, according to eyewitness testimony,
a group of men emerged from the bush, ambushed them and shot them dead.
But journalists, human rights advocates, and political analysts say there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of that explanation.
They think it’s possible that that the Russian journalists were assassinated.
One big reason is that the attack seemed highly targeted.
While Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko were all killed,
the driver they hired was the only one to survive the attack.
The car contained three canisters of gasoline — which are extremely valuable in CAR
and would’ve been natural targets for robbers —
but they were untouched.
The Investigation Control Center, the sponsor of the trip,
said the journalists were driving along side another car, yet the other one was never attacked.
And human rights experts who know the area say that the road they were traveling down
has a reputation for being safe.
But it gets weirder.
Central African soldiers reportedly told locals in the area where the murder happened
that they couldn’t talk to the press.
And local authorities made it hard for the driver who survived the attack to talk to outside investigators.
On top of that, the Russian government’s public messaging about the whole episode was pretty odd.
Moscow almost seemed to blame Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko themselves for their own murder
by pointing out in public statements how they hadn’t followed official media accreditation rules when entering CAR.
And state-controlled Russian media outlets politicized the event in an unexpected way —
they criticised Khodorkovsky, the exiled oligarch who backed Wagner documentary, in their coverage of the murder.
Then when outsiders started poking around to get some questions answered,
things got even shadier.
In September a prominent member of the anti-Kremlin Russian activist group Pussy Riot
collapsed a day after acquiring critical evidence related to the murders —
and German medics say he was likely poisoned.
A couple weeks later, a freelance journalist in CAR who was investigating the murders was beaten up,
had his laptop and phone stolen,
and was told that they were taken because they were being used to “create problems for some people.”
None of this definitively proves that Russia is behind the murders.
CAR is an unstable country plagued by violence,
so a random robbery that went wrong technically could’ve happened.
But there are many reasons to distrust what Russian and CAR authorities are saying about what went down.
Russia kills dissidents all the time,
from journalists to ex-spies to activists to whistleblowers.
And in this case, there’s good reason to think Moscow would want to get rid of Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko,
because they wanted to learn about something that the Kremlin probably wants to keep secret:
The Wagner Group.
The Wagner Group is an organization that’s run almost entirely off the books,
but experts say that it’s overseen by the powerful Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Prigozhin is often referred to as “Putin’s chef,”
because of the extremely lucrative contracts between his catering company and the Kremlin.
But he’s also a fixer who runs big schemes on behalf the Kremlin.
One of them is the internet troll farm that interfered in the 2016 US elections.
But the Wagner Group is probably just as controversial.
The reason the Wagner Group is so shadowy is because private military organizations are technically illegal in Russia.
Experts say that Moscow uses the Wagner Group to send mercenaries on riskier or more politically sensitive operations.
That way they can keep official body counts down
and maintain plausible deniability when engaging in controversial international operations.
The Wagner Group has been used to project Russian power in Ukraine and Syria,
and experts believe it’s been deployed in CAR as well.
Here’s why: In October 2017, Russia and CAR signed a series of agreements —
Russia agreed to provide arms to CAR and train its army,
and CAR agreed to allow Russia to explore mining opportunities within its mineral-rich borders.
CAR has big deposits of diamonds, gold and uranium,
and Russia is eager to capitalize on that.
While Russia’s doing nothing illegal by sending instructors to CAR,
it’s widely suspected that they’re using Wagner mercenaries instead of conventional soldiers.
That’s raised eyebrows around the international community: What exactly are they hiding?
Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko wanted to figure out an answer to that question.
It might’ve cost them their lives.
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