BANGUI, Central African Republic — Just a stone’s throw from President Faustin-Archange Touadera’s offices in the hills to the east of this city sits a new monument: four life-sized Russian soldiers cast in bronze, three toting AK-47s and one peering with binoculars into the distance, protecting a mother and a toddler who crouch behind them. Bouquets of fresh flowers rest at its base, a supposed tribute to the Wagner Group mercenaries whom Touadera contracted as insurgents closed in on the capital shortly before Christmas 2020.

Over coffee, Central Africans, including human rights activists, told me separately that their memories of the 2013 rebel sack of the city were still raw. It was for that reason that Central Africans had real gratitude both to the Rwandans, who deployed to prevent a repeat of the anti-Tutsi genocide, and “the Russians.”