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In the Central African Republic, a former propagandist lifts the veil on the inner workings of Russian disinformation
Journalist Ephrem Yalike took part in the relentless disinformation regime Russia employs in the Central African Republic. After narrowly escaping death while under interrogation by his case officer, he fled his country. For the first time, he tells the inside story of Russia’s campaign to influence public opinion: a secret network you can only leave at the risk of your life.
(Visuel : Mélody Da Fonseca)
- Central African journalist Ephrem Yalike offers evidence revealing the underbelly of Russian disinformation campaigns in the Central African Republic, in which he himself took part.
- Africa Politology, a secret organization belonging to the “Prigozhin galaxy,” uses Central African journalists to manipulate public opinion in the country.
- Among those in charge of coordinating disinformation campaigns is Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovitch Prudnikov, a close associate of the Wagner Group who worked on behalf of Moscow in Sudan before influencing public opinion in the Central African Republic.
By Léa Peruchon
November 21, 2024
The air was cold on the banks of the Ubangi River in Bangui that morning in February 2024. As usual, dozens of dugout canoes made their way across the water from the Central African Republic’s capital to Zongo, a border town in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the passengers was a young journalist. Laden with secrets, he was about to embark on a journey to save his life.
“It’s gone too far,” said Ephrem Yalike. Now 29, he has chosen for the first time to step out of the shadows and reveal what he was both a participant in and witness to. From 2019 to 2022, he took part in disinformation campaigns carried out by Moscow in the Central African Republic. A local journalist turned clandestine cog in the Russian propaganda machine, he has decided to sound the alarm. But “staying in the Central African Republic and denouncing it meant risking [my] life,” said Yalike. Exile became the only way for him to expose the secrets he held.
A few days before crossing the Ubangi River, he was planning to leave the country by air, suitcase in hand and passport in pocket, with his family. But at the airport departure gate, his luggage was removed from the plane and several men took him to an office for interrogation. As his wife and child took off, Yalike was confronted by a police commissioner, who warned him, “You think it’s us you’ll be dealing with, but it’s the Russians who will handle you.”
“That’s when I understood where the order came from,” said the journalist. The police commissioner “made me leave his office, and I went into hiding to save my skin.” Yalike realized he had to leave his country at all costs.
The information he shared with Forbidden Stories and its ten media partners reveals the inner workings of an unofficial Russian organization called Africa Politology. His testimony sheds light on the existence of disinformation campaigns disseminated through Central African media, to the presence of invisible intermediaries, cash payments, brutal methods of intimidation, and to a pervasive cult of secrecy. Together, these revelations paint the picture of a propaganda machine which, despite the August 2023 death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the reorganization of the Wagner Group in Africa, continues to operate in the Central African Republic.
“I had no doubts”
Just over a year before he fled by canoe, Forbidden Stories met Yalike in a hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was determined to denounce the practices he had been party to.
“I’m not just doing this for myself, but also for the journalists who worked with them,” he said. “Some of them may be suffering.”
For hours, he confided in us about his two and a half years spent collaborating with Russian disinformation agents on Central African soil. These agents appeared in the Central African Republic shortly after Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenaries from the Wagner paramilitary group. From the hard drive he brought with him, Yalike produced dozens of articles he wrote, along with his correspondence with his handlers: all the evidence he needed to support his extraordinary story.
On November 2, 2022, in his Johannesburg hotel room, the young journalist filed away the newspapers he had brought with him as evidence.
The second of seven siblings and a practicing Catholic, Fidèle Ephrem Yalike-Ngonzo had his future all mapped out: he would be a priest. But much to the chagrin of those close to him, he turned to law in 2015, working in parallel for various “local” newspapers – that is, at the only newsstand in Bangui – in order to finance his studies.
The country was just staggering to its feet after a bloody civil war, and the French forces of Operation Sangaris were preparing to gradually leave Central African territory. “The people who thought they’d been abandoned saw the Russians arrive,” said Yalike. “The population was there to applaud them, waving Russian and Central African flags.”
On January 28, 2018, Yalike covered the first delivery of Russian-supplied weapons for the Central African newspaper Le Citoyen. “As a Central African, when I saw the tanks and weapons, I told myself that it was a good thing, that there would soon be peace in the country.”
He decided to turn to Le Potentiel Centrafricain, an online media outlet that supports the regime of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra and for which Yalike covered defense and security issues. When contacted, the publication’s director at the time, Patrick Mogani, claimed not to know Yalike, in spite of articles accredited to Yalike that were published on his site, and a photo published on Facebook in 2021 showing the two men together.
It was there that he was spotted by a young Russian who went by “Micha,” who spoke only a few words of French. With the help of “Vladimir,” Micha’s interpreter at the time, he arranged to meet Yalike at the Grand Café, a Bangui patisserie popular with expatriates.
It was during this meeting in November 2019 that Yalike first received a proposition from Micha : to publish communiqués favorable to the army and their new Russian partners in exchange for payment. “I had no doubts. I liked it,” said Yalike. It was an arrangement that exalted his patriotic sentiments and earned him 30,000 CFA francs (€45) per article.
With just three articles, he would make more than his monthly salary – Central African journalists make about 75,000 CFA francs (€114) per month. “I needed to take care of myself and my family,” explained Yalike, who has since become a father.
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False information developed and manufactured on an industrial scale
Within a few months, the collaboration accelerated. Yalike was no longer content to simply disguise the Russians’ communiqués in false news articles; he became a cog in their operation. Each morning, he began by doing a news roundup of “all that was being said about the Russians, about power, on both the positive and negative sides.” He then had to “write an article denying the truthfulness of everything said by opponents or critical voices.”
Without any mention of their sponsors, these stories were then discreetly distributed to various newspapers in Bangui, who ran them in return for payment. Once the article had been published, each Journalist approached by Yalike received 10,000 francs (€15). Yalike was also in charge of promoting ‘Russian instructors’ – mercenaries from the Wagner group assigned to villages to supposedly bring peace – in the country, as shown in this video dated 6 September 2022.
Video of a child praising the arrival of ‘Russian instructors’ in his village shared with Ephrem, on Telegram.
Instructions sent to Ephrem on September 6, 2022 over Telegram by one of his Russian principals, Johnny.
Yalike further circulated the sponsored articles by publishing them on his blog. They would then be picked up by the online publication Ndjoni Sango and the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik, as well as by Grégoire D, a disseminator of Russian propaganda on X, who presented himself as a military commentator. Before long, Yalike’s work was focused almost exclusively on praising the security prowess of the Central African army and its new allies.
On August 30, 2021, 100 kilometers from the capital, residents of the town of Mbaïki brandished signs reading “Stop MINUSCA,” referring to the United Nations mission in the Central African Republic. “The demonstrations are continuing to multiply, denouncing the passivity and ineffectiveness of MINUSCA,” reads coverage of the protest.
“These demonstrations have never emanated from the will of the people. They were always orchestrated,” said Yalike, before going on to explain how they were organized on the ground. “As soon as a MINUSCA vehicle [appeared] in the distance, the spotter [signaled] to the young people, who then [rushed] out into the road to demonstrate.” In exchange, each young person received a sum of 2,000 CFA francs (€3), according to Yalike.
Images of these protests were then posted online, most notably by avatars and Facebook pages run by the Bureau of Information and Communication (BIC), a shadowy office responsible for creating fake Facebook accounts to celebrate the Touadera regime and attack its opponents. According to two Central African journalists, the BIC is linked to the Presidency. They said this “troll factory” was headed at the time by Héritier Doneng, who has since become Minister of Youth and Sports.
The prime targets of these operations? Western countries and institutions, starting with France, the United States, and UN peacekeepers.
Extracts of instructions sent by Micha (Michelo Boss) to Ephrem Yalike (Source: Telegram screenshot)
Another of Yalike’s tasks was to steer public debate by supplying radio stations with experts who were ready to support any measure taken by the current regime and its Russian allies.
A call recorded in October 2022 between an interpreter, Micha and Ephrem Yalike, asking the journalist to find civil society experts who, in exchange for 20,000 CFA francs (around €30), would agree to make statements on Lengo Songo radio.
Statements, for example, supporting a presidential decree terminating the duties of the Constitutional Court’s president in October 2022.
“When the Russians are behind certain decrees, they seek to amplify the communication around [them coming into force],” said Yalike, adding that although this particular decree was contrary to the constitution, “they wanted to let people know by any means necessary – namely via the airwaves of the radio station Lengo Songo – that the broader population was for it.”
The Russians’ stranglehold on Lengo Songo is an open secret for the Central African population. In a country where barely 10% of inhabitants have access to the internet and almost two-thirds are illiterate, radio plays a vital role in shaping public opinion. Quick to understand this, agents from Moscow created the station in 2018, just a few weeks after their arrival. Lengo Songo representatives did not respond to our questions.
Yalike became a “little telegrapher” of pro-Russian rhetoric in his country. His articles, their origins disguised, were dictated by his handlers. When we interviewed him, he didn’t hesitate to show us instructions he’d received on his phone from “Johnny,” “Serge,” and even Micha – Telegram messages that sounded like orders: “Translate, read, and write,” and, “Where can you integrate this without making too much noise?”
Yalike scrupulously described these manipulated articles in reports, which Forbidden Stories was able to consult. At the height of his collaboration, Yalike earned 500,000 CFA francs (€766) per month, which he collected in cash at Camp de Roux, the site of Russia’s headquarters in the country, a stone’s throw away from the Republic’s presidential residency. “There are different departments inside,” said Yalike. “There’s a department run by ‘Micha,’ and another one next door that deals with the political sociology of the country.”
There is also a high-security prison where a number of political prisoners are languishing.
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Secrets and potential war crimes
Visits to Camp de Roux occasioned the rare instances that Yalike and Micha physically met. Their exchanges were usually limited to communications on Telegram, a messaging system widely used by Russian speakers. No emails, no employment contracts: everything was done by hand, in a climate of fear.
The local journalists with whom Forbidden Stories spoke during this project all remember the July 2018 assassination of three Russian journalists who had come to the Central African Republic to investigate the Wagner Group. This triple murder was never solved, but across the country, the message was clear: daring criticism or negative coverage of Russian activities carried enormous risk. But as Yalike would discover in March 2022, working for the Russians could be just as dangerous.
The episode began at the end of February, when Micha ordered Yalike to join him on a small plane bound for Bouar, in the west of the country. Rebel groups there were allegedly committing atrocities against the local population, and Yalike was supposed to write an article about it.
The official story he had to write about described the theft of some cattle, which purportedly devolved into an armed confrontation between rebels and Fulani herders. Two young Fulani were severely injured and lay on their hospital beds. Yalike took photos of them and their wounds: deep gashes across their bodies and bandages around their heads.
“I could see in the faces of the two guys on the bed that they were very uncomfortable,” Yalike said. “like they were being forced to do something… their body language…” Yalike trailed off. “Personally, I completely lost confidence in the work I was doing.”
Back in Bangui, he was overcome by doubt and decided to confront Micha. “He admitted that the Russians had attacked the Fulani by mistake,” Yalike said, “and that they had disguised the truth by saying that they had saved them.” Yalike nevertheless wrote an article for Le Potentiel Centrafricain. His account repeated the official story and praised the kindness of the Wagner members who had taken care of the two wounded men.
But a month later, the scandal broke in a rival newspaper, Les Dernières Nouvelles. The Bouar incident was splashed across a full-page spread. Their version of events contrasted radically with Yalike’s. “Russian mercenaries posing as rescue workers seriously wound two Fulani five kilometers from Bouar,” the headline read. “Two Fulani who wanted to save their livestock and protect their families,” the article continued, “were beaten and gravely injured by these Russian criminals, who managed to seize an ox, which they killed and took away.”
At Camp de Roux, the Russians panicked. Micha and his colleagues were furious. They began buying up almost all the paper copies of the newspaper in Bangui.
Article opposing the Bouar incident’s official thesis, published in the newspaper Les dernières Nouvelles on March 28, 2022.
Of one thing they were sure: a mole had spoken to Les Dernières Nouvelles. They just had to figure out who. Given that he had been on the scene and met the victims, Yalike was at the top of their list of suspects.
For Yalike, the day began with a message from his handler. “Micha wrote to me at 9 a.m. and asked me to meet him at Camp de Roux,” he said. “I responded telling him I wasn’t ready yet.”
But Yalike wouldn’t have time to get ready. Micha was already in front of his house. Surprise gave way to fear. “He was standing in front of my gate, even though I never told him where I lived,” said Yalike.
Micha and his interpreter didn’t hold back: pistols at their hips, they loaded Yalike into a 4×4 with tinted windows and took him to the middle of a forest 26 kilometers from Bangui. Isolated and out of sight, the journalist was interrogated.
Micha warned Yalike to tell him everything. “That day, he threatened to kill me if I didn’t tell him the truth,” said Yalike. To corroborate his denials, the interpreter confiscated his cell phone. “He called every contact I had to verify [that I hadn’t leaked the information],” Yalike recalled. As the two Russians found nothing compromising, they drove off, leaving Yalike alone on the side of the road.
The episode terrorized Yalike. As he had witnessed, the Russians would stop at nothing to conceal their alleged abuses. Feeling lucky to be alive, Yalike arrived at an inevitable conclusion. “In that moment, I wanted to leave, but couldn’t,” he said. “Why? Because Micha told me that […] wherever I went, they’d have control over me.”
“Micha,” the mysterious agent of “Project Lakhta”
So who is the omnipotent, omnipresent Micha? This bespectacled man, seems to have mastered the art of anonymity – except, that is, on one rare occasion. In November 2022, he appeared in a series of photos Yalike took during police training in Bangui.
These photos, despite their poor framing, allowed us to identify Micha in a separate set of photos posted to the Facebook page of the Russian embassy in Bangui. By then comparing one of these images with the hundreds of others circulated on social networks among circles close to the Wagner Group in 2022, we managed to discern Micha’s identity.
Photographs of Mikhail Prudnikov in November 2022 and May 2023 in the Central African Republic posted on the Facebook page of the Russian Embassy.
After weeks of open-source research, the investigation conducted by Forbidden Stories and its partners identified the man who recruited Yalike in 2019 as Mikhaïl Mikhaïlovitch Prudnikov. “Micha” Prudnikov, 38, hails from the Tambov Oblast, south of Moscow. According to his resumé, he has always been very politically engaged.
A former participant in “Nashi,” the pro-Putin youth movement, he ran in his region’s election for the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, in 2010. Defeated, it seems he developed a passion for information warfare and soft power, key subjects in today’s Russia. These were the topics addressed at a seminar he organized in 2016, one of the last traces he left on the internet before going dark.
Six years later and 9,000 kilometers away, in the Central African Republic, he has become an instrument in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “Lakhta Project,” which brings together the “troll factories” and media figures behind the dozens of Russian propaganda campaigns operating around the world.
Mikhaïl Prudnikov, in the years 2010. (Source : liveinternet.ru)
Africa Politology plays a central role in Russia’s global disinformation enterprise. According to the US Treasury, this “propaganda organization linked to Wagner … develops strategies and mechanisms to induce Western countries to withdraw their presence in Africa and is involved in a series of Russian influence tasks in the Central African Republic.” Africa Politology’s alleged proximity to the Wagner paramilitary group has earned it sanctions in Canada and the US.
Prudnikov is said to have held several positions within this structure. According to documents obtained and shared by our partner the Dossier Center, an outlet financed by Putin opponent and exiled former oligarch Mikhaïl Khodorkovsky, Prudnikov first participated in disinformation operations in Sudan. He was then appointed head of media management in the Central African Republic – a role very similar to the one described by Yalike, for which Prudnikov was allegedly paid 250,000 rubles (€2,360) per month in 2019.
Russian experts on interference in Africa
Prudnikov cut his teeth with Sergueï Mashkevitch, the man who was at the head of Africa Politology until at least 2022, according to several corroborating sources. Together with other disinformation specialists, they set up a system of media interference in Sudan. Prudnikov then moved to the Central African capital. Several sources confirm that Prudnikov remains active in the Central African Republic at this investigation’s time of publication. He did not respond to our requests.
The “tested and approved” methods used in the Central African Republic have since been replicated elsewhere in Africa. An entire system of disinformation was put in place thanks to local media figures like Yalike, who were indispensable in getting messages across to populations on the ground. Together, they unofficially served Russia’s official agenda in the country.
In his own way, Yalike is a key witness to this system, to which dozens of other journalists may have been recruited elsewhere in Africa. Terrified by the Bouar incident, he knew he had to leave the Central African Republic at all costs, but was also convinced of the need to raise the alarm.
With the crucial and unwavering support of the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), Yalike tried every means possible to flee his homeland.
The only solution was to cross the Ubangi River and escape into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I fled … with my bare hands, taking nothing with me. All I could do was save my body,” said Yalike. His departure was conducted in such secrecy that today, some of his friends still believe him to be locked up in a cell at Camp de Roux.
Now in a safe place, Yalike remains determined to denounce Russia’s actions. He is well aware that his country’s authorities will not hesitate to discredit his story, even if it means using the methods developed by Prudnikov, one of the most secretive figures in the powerful machine manipulating the Central African Republic.
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