Ukrainian special forces have begun training members of Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed Ukrainian and Sudanese military officials.
The newspaper said when Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military ruler, found himself besieged by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the country’s capital last summer, he called an unlikely ally for help: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky responded positively because "Burhan had been quietly supplying Kyiv with weapons since shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022," it wrote.
The first wave of Ukrainian troops—nearly 100 soldiers, mostly from HUR's Timur unit—landed on a charter jet in Sudan in mid-August.
The Ukrainians' first mission was to help get Burhan out of Khartoum, where the RSF had surrounded him. But not long after they arrived, Burhan drove in a convoy to the compound outside the capital where the Ukrainians were based.
Burhan thanked the Ukrainians for their efforts, then headed to Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea that his forces still controlled. He met Zelensky at Ireland's Shannon Airport a few weeks later.
Following the meeting, the Ukrainian President wrote on Telegram: "We discussed our common security challenges, namely the activities of illegal armed groups financed by Russia."
The Ukrainian troops supplied Burhan's guards with new AKM rifles and silencers.
A 30-year-old officer from the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, known by the call sign King, who led the first group of Ukrainians to arrive in Sudan, said his team found strong differences between the Russian-Ukrainian war and the local conflict.
According to him, soldiers from both sides fought in sandals and fired at the enemy while holding their weapons above their heads. A large part of the Sudanese army was unmotivated and had not been paid for months. Soldiers did not wear insignia, which constantly led to losses due to friendly fire.
Taking advantage of the poor equipment of the "pro-Wagner" RSF, the Ukrainian military focused on night operations using night vision devices and night drones.
The intelligence officers went on missions at dusk around 8:00 p.m., traveling in vans and moving in several groups of six soldiers each. All operations were completed before dawn so they could return unnoticed at night.
"Even if we wanted to do something during the day, we're a group of white people," King said. "Everyone would realize what was going on."
Source of gold, arms
The WSJ said Sudan has become a battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine war because it is rich in two resources: weapons and gold.
During frequent conflicts in the country over several decades, arms poured in—directly and indirectly—from the US, Russia, China and elsewhere.
As a result, Sudan had plenty of weaponry to spare in early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Kyiv was searching for all the arms it could find.
"We took a lot of weapons out of Sudan. Different countries paid for them. Sudan had a wide range of weapons, from Chinese to American," said Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
Meanwhile, Russia has long been plumbing Sudan for gold. Wagner led Moscow's operation in the country, as it did in several other African nations. They trained RSF fighters, who in turn provided security for Russian entities at the mines.
Before the conflict in Sudan began last spring, only 30% of the gold mined in the country was officially registered with the central bank, leaving $4 billion of gold annually unaccounted for, according to Sudanese officials and activists. Much of that smuggled gold ended up in Russian hands, activists say.
RSF and Wagner
When the war erupted, the RSF initially refused Wagner's offer of heavy weapons, concerned about alienating the US.
But following military setbacks in April, the group reversed course, according to international security officials.
On April 28, a convoy of Toyota pickups supervised by Wagner brought weapons, including shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missiles from the neighboring Central African Republic, where Wagner had established a power base in recent years.
Wagner also began recruiting men from the Central African Republic to fight in Sudan and the RSF soon advanced into Khartoum, WSJ reported.
After the death of Wagner's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin last year, the Russian Defense Ministry took control of the group's operations in Africa, though it is still widely known as Wagner.
Wagner
In November, King's team went home, and another arrived with new troops from the Timur unit. His team captured one Russian Wagner fighter and killed two others.
A 40-year-old Ukrainian officer, who goes by the call sign Prada and led one of the Ukrainian teams in Sudan, told the newspaper the man was detained during a fight in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city on the west bank of the Nile River, after he had grown confused about which fighters were on which side, and stayed after his own side retreated.
"Wagner has become like a franchise in Sudan. They fight using locals. They give them patches, pay them a salary, and say, 'Now you're Wagner,' " Prada said. "It was never our goal to chase individual Wagner soldiers."
He said: "The goal was to disrupt Russian interests in Sudan."
