A front company for the Russian mercenary group Wagner acquired tens of thousands of protective helmets from China late last year, at the same time that group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was amassing a massive army of POWs to attack Ukraine.
The Financial Times has found that the entities the warlord used to outfit his operations in Africa continued to freely export and import items across international markets despite a barrage of Western sanctions aimed at stopping a private army designated a “transnational criminal organization” by the US.
Wagner’s Russia-based Broker Expert bought 20,000 polymer-based helmets from a small Chinese company called Hangzhou Shinerain Import And Export Co in November and December last year, according to customs declarations analyzed by the FT and interviews. The Chinese group claimed they were for “gaming use”.
The purchase of the helmets, which was divided into four shipments with a declared value of just over $2 million, came as Prigozhin was recruiting tens of thousands of Russian convicts to send to the front line in Ukraine.
Since then, so many of Wagner’s forces have died in a brutal war of attrition for control of the city of Bakhmut, with the US recently estimating that more than 20,000 Russian fighters have been killed in Ukraine since December.
The FT also found that Broker Expert continued to ship items to Wagner’s operations in Africa through the port of Douala in Cameroon during the invasion. This underscores the apparent inability of Western sanctions – which include measures such as asset freezes and blocking access to funds – to stifle the mercenary group’s ability to fund itself from Prigozhin’s offshore natural resource operations.
According to Russian customs declarations, last August Broker Expert shipped power generators, welding electrodes and fireproof insulation materials to a logging company controlled by Prigozhin in the Central African Republic. The US said in January that Wagner fighters in CAR had engaged in crimes including “mass summary executions, rape, arbitrary detention, torture, and displacement of civilians”.
“Prigozhin still manages to hire armed contractors in Ukraine and at least three African countries, buy equipment from China, and smuggling resources demonstrate the resilience of the network he created,” said Marcel Plechta, research fellow at the Center for Global Law. and Governance at the University of St Andrews.
The United States estimated in December that Wagner had recruited 40,000 convicts to fight in Ukraine. Wagner unsuccessfully asked China to supply it with weapons at the beginning of this year, according to a leaked US intelligence report. Prigozhin said in February that Wagner had stopped recruiting prisoners.
Broker Expert’s Chinese provider, Hangzhou Xinrain, is headquartered in eastern Zhejiang province and has between five and 15 employees, according to the Alibaba page. It usually sells women’s apparel, which means shipping protective headwear to Russia doesn’t seem to be its usual modus operandi.
We are a private company and we do not interfere in national affairs or military issues, and we abide by the law. “We have produced helmets for gaming use,” the company said, adding that the use of helmets would have little protection on the battlefield. The Russian import declaration for helmets states that they are “not for military use”.
The Chinese group said it had no knowledge of Prigozhin or the Wagner Group, or anything about Broker Expert’s ties to Wagner. “We simply fulfill the orders we get, we abide by the law, and we will never ship anything illegal.” It declined to explain what was meant by “toying” or to send pictures of the helmets to the Financial Times.
CNN reported in January that Western intelligence officials are concerned about Chinese companies Supply of non-lethal equipment such as bulletproof vests and helmets to Russia, but it was not clear if the Chinese central government was aware of the sales. Private Chinese companies are not required to follow Western sanctions, and imports from China have risen over the past year as Russian companies seek alternatives to Western suppliers.
Broker Expert’s large purchase from China during Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was the first declared import into the country since 2017, according to commercially available customs data.
The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, says on its website that it provides equipment for geological surveys, industrial extraction and construction. He is not under Prigozhin’s direct control, but he does share a shadowy auditor with US-sanctioned Wagner front companies in Syria, Sudan and the Central African Republic, as well as with his mother’s art gallery in St Petersburg.
Over the past four years, Broker Expert, which has not been sanctioned by any Western government, has regularly shipped equipment from Russia to companies in Sudan and the Central African Republic sanctioned by the United States for being fronts for Wagner mercenary activity.
The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Prigozhin made more than a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue from his offshore natural resources empire in the four years leading up to Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, despite Western sanctions.
“For the UK, US, France and others, the news that Prigozhin’s companies are still going strong after all these measures highlights the need to cooperate with as many African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries as possible to restrict his access to global markets,” Pleshta said.