Britain is targeting Russian-backed mercenaries and the defense industry in a major sanctions package

The British government on November 7 announced its biggest package of sanctions against Russia since May 2023, focusing on Russia’s defense industry and mercenary groups.

The new 56 lists include the Moscow-backed mercenary group Africa Corps, private companies linked to the Wagner Group and suppliers Russia‘s war through dual-use weapons and goods.

Russia has long used private military groups, most notably Wagner, to support friendly regimes in Africa plundering natural resources. Their activities were accompanied by widespread human rights violations.

The Russian Defense Ministry launched the Afrika Korps in 2024 to replace Wagner after the group short uprising in June 2023 and the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhinin a plane crash in August of that year. Britain has now become the first G7 country to impose sanctions on the Africa Corps, a group that bears the same name as the Nazi forces in Africa in World War II.

The Afrika Korps, two other private mercenary groups and 11 Kremlin-linked individuals have been sanctioned for human rights abuses and threatening peace and security in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic. British Foreign Office said in one statement.

“Today’s actions will continue to undermine the Kremlin’s corrosive foreign policy, undermine Russia’s attempts to promote instability across Africa and disrupt the supply of vital equipment for Putin’s war machine,” said British Foreign Secretary David Lammy .

“And destroying the illegal international networks that Russia has worked so hard to build.”

The list also includes 28 entities based in China, Central Asia and Turkey that “supply machine tools, microelectronics, components for drones, ball bearings or other goods to the Russian military-industrial complex.”

The UK has sanctioned Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) Denis Sergeev, also known as “Sergei Fedotov”, who was linked by British authorities to the 2018 Novichok poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK.