A video released today confirms a story that CNN reported a couple weeks ago. Ukrainian special forces were active in Sudan, attacking the local Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which were trying to overthrow the government with the help of Wagner group mercenaries. The video shows Ukrainian snipers and drone attacks on the RSF.

Ukrainian Military Intelligence (GUR), commenting on footage, only mentioned the words of Kyril Budanov that “Ukraine will destroy Russian war criminals anywhere in the world, no matter where they are.”

— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 6, 2023

This confirms a story which CNN exclusively reported on Sep. 20.

Ukrainian special services were likely behind a series of drone strikes and a ground operation directed against a Wagner-backed militia near Sudan’s capital, a CNN investigation has found, raising the prospect that the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spread far from the frontlines…

Covert strikes by Ukraine in Sudan would mark a dramatic and provocative expansion of Kyiv’s theater of war against Moscow. Aside from a string of Ukrainian drone attacks that hit deep inside Russian territory, Ukraine’s ongoing counter-offensive has been focused on the country’s occupied east and south…

The videos, which alternate between the pilot’s view, the viewpoint of a drone observing from overhead and the controller itself, show a succession of drone strikes in and around Omdurman, a city across the Nile River from the capital Khartoum which has become a focal point of fighting between the two rival factions.

The RSF is run by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo who goes by Hemedti who is fighting Sudan’s Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan for control of the country. The backstory here is that Hemedti and Burhan were former allies who seized the control of the country in 2021:

Sudan’s military government had received Wagner’s support in the past, but Hemedti emerged over the years as Wagner’s preferred ally in the country.

Wagner dropped Sudan’s army wholesale when fighting broke out, backing Hemedti and his fighters in the conflict…

“Around 90% of the RSF’s weapons have come from Wagner,” the high-level Sudanese source told CNN, adding that Wagner’s supply of arms to the RSF has continued unabated despite the death of the mercenary group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his deputy Dmitry Utkin in a plane crash on August 23.

At this point you may be wondering what any of this has to do with Ukraine and why Ukrainian special forces would bother getting involved in this battle in Sudan. The answer is that Wagner forces aren’t in Sudan just to get paid. They are there to get gold from Sudan’s mining operations which can be used to help Russia fund the war in Ukraine.

Days after Moscow launched its bloody war on Ukraine, a Russian cargo plane stood on a Khartoum runway, a strip of tarmac surrounded by red-orange sand. The aircraft’s manifest stated it was loaded with cookies. Sudan rarely, if ever, exports cookies.

A heated debate transpired between officials in a back office of Khartoum International Airport. They feared that inspecting the plane would vex the country’s increasingly pro-Russian military leadership. Multiple previous attempts to intercept suspicious Russian carriers had been stopped. Ultimately, however, the officials decided to board the plane.

Inside the hold, colorful boxes of cookies stretched out before them. Hidden just beneath were wooden crates of Sudan’s most precious resource. Gold. Roughly one ton of it.

This incident in February – recounted by multiple official Sudanese sources to CNN – is one of at least 16 known Russian gold smuggling flights out of Sudan, Africa’s third largest producer of the precious metal, over the last year and a half.

Russia’s plundering of Sudan’s gold goes back to 2014 after the annexation of Crimea when sanctions were placed on Russia. Gold is obviously difficult to transport but it also can’t be stopped by sanctions. Best estimates are that Russia may have siphoned off as much as 32 tons of gold from Sudan in the past decade, with a value of about $1.9 billion.

So Ukraine’s strikes against the RSF are aimed at limiting Russia’s ability to operate with impunity in the country and thereby make it more difficult for Russia to collect gold it uses to prop up its economy and fund the very expensive war in Ukraine.

Here’s the CNN report from last month. As the story points out, the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin hasn’t reduced Russia’s involvement in Africa. On the contrary, Russia has been expanding its efforts, which currently extends to at least five countries.