Modern spartans armed to the teeth: Cinema and the whitewashing of the Wagner group’s African gambles10 min read
In 2021, two Russian action films transformed the Wagner Group’s armed interventions in Africa into spectacles of Russian national heroism: Tourist (Turist), set during the Central African Republic’s 2020 presidential election, and Granit, set in Mozambique’s restive Cabo Delgado region. Both belonged to a larger body of cinematic productions associated with the media apparatus of Evgeniy Prigozhin, Wagner’s principal financier and leader until his death in a plane crash in August 2023. These two Africa-themed films in this Wagner-linked cinematic cycle recast Wagner’s opaque commerce in violence and extractive exploitation as humanitarian assistance and fraternal internationalist solidarity. Released before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought Wagner far greater global notoriety, the films preserved the group’s preferred image at the apogee of Prigozhin’s power. Read against Wagner’s widely documented human-rights abuses (most iconically embodied in the use of sledgehammers), extractive activities, and subsequent restructuring, their heroic narratives reveal an interventionist ideology whose paternalistic and infantilizing representations of African societies are remarkably consistent with Soviet anticolonial discourse in the Cold War era.
The studio behind both films remained formally separate from Wagner, although its integration into Prigozhin’s media network made that distinction useful for deniability. Investigations have traced Tourist’s financing directly to Prigozhin and identified military equipment supplied by Wagner for its production. Neither film names the group or displays its insignia; the terms “Russian instructors” and “military specialists” instead transform an armed commercial enterprise into an ostensibly lawful state mission. The frequent display of Russian flags and St. George’s ribbons helps nationalize Wagner while preserving its formal invisibility. Russian diplomatic support for Tourist’s premiere in Bangui carried this nationalized fiction into public diplomacy directed at a Central African audience.
Legalistic framing, asymmetric terminology, and a doctrine of ostensibly reactive violence constitute Tourist’s deliberate effort to disguise Wagner’s intervention as a limited mission subordinate to Central African sovereignty. Opening disclaimers, captions, and dialogue consistently define the Russian militants’ task as exclusively instructional. However, the terminology remains conspicuously asymmetrical throughout the film: unmarked Chadian armed units are labeled “mercenaries,” whereas unmarked Russians are “instructors” or “military specialists.” The film ultimately undermines these distinctions by showing Russians conducting reconnaissance, directing operations, laying traps, capturing and interrogating prisoners, fighting sustained battles, coordinating reinforcements, and subjecting Central African commanders to patronizing reprimands.
Mediated spectacles function as extensions of military intervention aimed at Russian and international audiences. Villagers greeting Russian convoys, crowds waving Russian flags, and repeated expressions of gratitude form a visual plebiscite endorsing Russian intervention. The white Francophone strategist who helps plot the insurgency similarly treats publicity as a weapon and seeks a minor victory that international media could present as evidence of a Russian retreat and vincibility.
The film presents African political actors through a distinctly Russian colonial vocabulary that flattens irregular armed opposition to state power into criminality. Its recurrent use of the word “banditism” recalls the terminology through which successive Russian regimes depoliticized indigenous resistance, from the nineteenth-century conquest of the Caucasus and the Ürkün and Basmachi movements in Central Asia in the 1910s and 1920s to the two Chechen wars in the 1990s and 2000s. The insurgents’ T-shirts, sleeveless vests, motorcycles, and incessant violence cast them as animalized marauders. Antoine’s recurrent promises of plunder and rape further strip the insurgency of political content and reduce it to unrestrained criminal pillage.
The same colonial discourse renders the Central African Republic as a generic space of backwardness, chronic disorder, and childlike dependence awaiting Russian discipline. Images of crowded bazaars, stray dogs, women carrying loaded trays, breastfeeding, knife sharpening, and flies covering raw meat recur throughout the film. At a statue of the country’s deposed self-proclaimed emperor, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a Russian casually remarks that war has continued since his overthrow, which reduces Central African political history to perennial chaos. After the Russians repel the insurgency, young villagers carrying rifles made from taped branches eagerly request military training from them. In another scene, a helpless mother kneels before the Russians and begs them to retrieve her abducted son. A Russian militant’s warning to locals about mines invokes children gathering coconuts, which is reminiscent of the racial caricaturing of Africans in Soviet cartoons.
White characters in the film are divided into benevolent Russians and neocolonial Francophone Westerners, although both retain strategic authority over Central Africans. Russian militants embody discipline and humanity, whereas an unnamed white Francophone strategist coordinates the insurgency and treats his client, former Central African president François Bozizé, with detached superiority. One scene shows him nonchalantly seizing a mango from local children, waving them away, and spitting it out, staging colonial entitlement in miniature. Central African and Chadian characters principally appear as soldiers, marauders, victims, or grateful recipients of protection. Even at the United Nations peacekeeping bases, Black peacekeepers guard the perimeters while white French officers converse and negotiate with the Russians.
The film’s gender, age, and religious dimensions reinforce its racial hierarchy by placing agency among Russian men and vulnerability among Central African women and children. Women appear as caretakers, sexualized companions, hostages, and victims of rape or murder, while the Russians inhabit an overwhelmingly homosocial and monocultural military fraternity. The film’s sole unnamed female FACA (Central African Armed Forces) officer provides a partial exception, but her military agency ends with her rescue by Russians, her care for the wounded Grisha, and her final televised appearance in civilian attire thanking Russia while kissing a Russian correspondent on the cheek. Catholic churches alternately shelter civilians from insurgents and host meetings between a Central African warlord disguised as a priest and his white handler. Insurgents destroy a church with RPG fire while civilians are sheltering in it. Meanwhile, the Central African Republic’s Muslim minority remains almost entirely absent despite its widely documented persecution by Wagner militants.
The electoral legitimacy of Central African president Faustin-Archange Touadéra anchors the film’s equation of Wagner’s intervention with the defense of Central African sovereignty. Touadéra first appears on billboards and campaign vehicles and later through an actor portraying him under his own name, whereas the Russians securing his rule remain identified only as “instructors.” The closing sequence completes this equation with a television report crediting Russian “instructors” for Touadéra’s “peaceful” reelection, despite the insurgent violence and severe disruptions that marred the actual vote.
The UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSCA) functions in the film as an institutional foil whose alleged passivity makes unilateral Russian force appear morally necessary. UN armored vehicles repeatedly remain in the background or travel opposite Russian convoys, while peacekeepers stand aside as insurgents enter the southeastern city of Bangassou. At the local MINUSCA base, a French UN officer offers the Russians sanctuary only if they disarm, after which he delivers an implausible historical monologue about France’s uncertain relationship with Russia.
Technological mastery provides a material counterpart to the Russians’ self-appointed strategic primacy. Maps, radio networks, drones, and networked headquarters grant Russian commanders near-omniscient awareness of the insurgents’ movements. Il-76 transport aircrafts, armored vehicles, helicopters, and rapid reinforcements further underscore the association of intervention with logistical supremacy. This nationalist display is inadvertently compromised by a police motorcycle marked with a Chinese flag and a Huawei tablet used as a drone monitor.
Direct military engagement in the film turns Russian strategic primacy into a national martial mythology and converts deployment into a rite of initiation within Wagner’s martial fraternity. Besieged and massively outnumbered in the remote town of Bangassou, eleven Russians repel and ultimately annihilate hundreds of insurgents and Chadian mercenaries while suffering only one serious casualty. Bozizé’s comparison of a three-hundred-man Russian reinforcement contingent to the three hundred Spartans supplies Wagner’s myth of invincibility with a classical emblem.
The centerpiece of the film’s ideological signaling is its projection of “justice” (spravedlivost’), which functions much like the notion of “truth” (pravda) in the 2000 Russian cult film Brother 2 (Brat 2). The film’s protagonist, Grisha, has lost his police career after releasing a young drug suspect out of pity, while his fellow militant, Aleksey, despises the police due to his son’s death in an armed confrontation with police officers. Their reconciliation after breaking through a siege casts Wagner as an alternative institution capable of redeeming men alienated from Russia’s state security apparatus. Aleksey nationalizes this creed in the film’s bluntest line: “Americans fight for democracy; we fight for justice.”
Language and humor extend the film’s projection of Russian superiority into cultural interpretation, even as its artificial dialogue exposes considerable production sloppiness. Grisha understands complex French conversations despite producing only halting, heavily accented sentences; Central African characters consistently speak French among themselves despite French not being the default language of informal communication; and a Russian interpreter inexplicably speaks French with a Québécois accent. Distinctly Russian cultural references also occur in the dialogue, from a joke about “the appearance of the Tourist before the people” (yavlenie Turista k narodu), a parody of Alexander Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ Before the People (Yavlenie Khrista narodu), to repeated demands for Russian surrender that evoke the iconic Brother 2 tagline, “Russians don’t surrender!” (Russkie ne sdayutsya!).
Tourist achieves its propaganda objective by reversing Wagner’s documented practices and assigning them to Central African insurgents. Independent investigations have attributed summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention, robbery, sexual violence, and anti-Muslim persecution to the Wagner Group in the Central African Republic. Wagner-affiliated companies simultaneously extracted gold, diamonds, and timber, while satellite analysis identified land degradation, deforestation, and water pollution around Prigozhin-linked mining sites. These activities indicate that Wagner’s political and economic interests were not fully aligned with those of the Central African government. The film instead assigns rape, pillage, murder, and rapacious greed to Central African insurgents while portraying the Russians as restrained defenders of civilians without material interests.
Prigozhin’s other Africa-themed film, Granit, extends Wagner’s legitimating enterprise to Mozambique by presenting the military company as the heir to Soviet support for FRELIMO, the country’s formerly Soviet-backed liberation movement that has governed since independence from Portugal in 1975. A grandfather repeatedly tells his grandson José about os soviéticos (the Soviets) during Mozambique’s early independence, emphasizing that they were white but fundamentally different from the white Portuguese colonizers. The appearance of Russian militants amid a counterinsurgency operation appears to José as confirmation of his grandfather’s account about os soviéticos. Despite its Mozambican setting, Granit was filmed in the Central African Republic. Songs by the Russian rock band Leningrad recur in both productions: Tourist features the band’s “Krasnaya smorodina” (red currant) and “Dorogi” (roads), while the band’s frontman, Sergey Shnurov, supplied Granit’s eponymous title song.
Notwithstanding their fervently anti-Western rhetoric, the two Africa-themed Wagner films’ narratives reproduce the same racialized colonial hierarchy they claim to oppose. Extensive access to Wagner’s military equipment, foreign settings, and state patronage cannot rescue their artistically crude, frequently farcical propaganda or conceal their blatant distortions of political and historical reality. Central African insurgents receive far more dialogue than state military personnel or civilians, whose voices remain muted, infantilized, or sexualized. Wagner’s documented brutality and extractive activities disappear altogether as the organization becomes a nationalized and mythologized embodiment of Russian heroism. Central African natives and the “collective West,” a term used increasingly commonly in Russian state-media discourse, consequently serve as parallel objects of subordination, while Russia alone appears to combine military power, justice, humanity, and political legitimacy, the polar opposite of which continues to be manifested by Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and the survival of Wagner’s African model through both residual networks and the state-controlled Africa Corps.
