Pushing Further into Africa, Russia Signs a New Military Accord

MOSCOW — Just three weeks after three Russian journalists were murdered while investigating the role of Russian mercenaries in the Central African Republic, Moscow and the turbulent African country signed an agreement on Tuesday to expand military cooperation.

Details of the agreement were not announced but it seemed to relate to Russian military trainers, 175 of whom are already present in the Central African Republic and who were the focus of a daring investigation last month by the Russian journalists.

All three, Orkhan Dzhemal, Aleksandr Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko, died in mysterious circumstances on July 31 in what Russia and the Central African Republic insist was a roadside ambush by unidentified robbers near the town of Sibut. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian oligarch who funds a media organization that sponsored their trip to Africa, has described the official version as “totally unsustainable.”

Speaking Tuesday at a state arms exhibition near Moscow, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, made no mention of the murdered journalists but was quoted by Russian news agencies as hailing military cooperation with the Central African Republic, a former French colony. He was quoted as saying that the new agreement would “strengthen ties in the defense sphere” between Russia and the central African nation.

Marie-Noëlle Koyara, a senior official from the Central African Republic who also attended the Russian arms exhibition, said the accord would enhance the training of her country’s armed forces.

Russia, which was deeply involved in Africa during the Cold War, when the East-West rivalry fueled a series of bloody proxy wars, largely retreated from the continent after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Over the past year, however, it has shown a growing desire to return, forging close ties with the Central African Republic, Somalia and South Africa.

Russia has said that only five of its instructors in the Central African Republic — some of them based in Sibut, near where the journalists were killed — are military personnel, with the rest civilians.

The journalists were trying to determine whether these civilian instructors were in fact working for Wagner, a murky private military contractor founded by a former officer in Russian military intelligence and linked to an associate of President Vladimir Putin.

Khodorkovsky, who has lived in exile in London since being released from prison in Siberia in 2013, has vowed to get to the bottom of what happened to the journalists and is now funding a private investigation into the murders.

But neither Russia nor the Central African Republic have shown much interest in clarifying why the journalists suddenly changed their plans and decided to leave Sibut after sundown to travel north, instead of waiting until daybreak and traveling east as they had originally intended. Nor why other vehicles traveling on the road where they were killed at around the same time encountered no robbers.

The journalists’ African driver, who somehow survived the attack and is the only known witness, has disappeared, variously reported to be in hiding and in custody. Khodorkovsky has accused authorities of hiding him to prevent him from revealing what he saw on the night of the murders.