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A lot happens every day. Alliances shift, leaders change, and conflicts erupt. With In Brief, we’ll help you make sense of it all. Each week, experts will dig deep on a single issue happening in the world to help you better understand it.***Earlier this month, a group of seven African leaders carried out a “peace mission” to Ukraine and met President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. The group then traveled to Russia, where they presented a peace plan to President Vladimir Putin, who largely dismissed the group’s suggestions. While this trip was widely condemned as a failure, the attempted mutiny by the leader of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has even further complicated the role of these leaders in the conflict. Many African countries rely on Wagner for security guarantees and, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have toed a careful line between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies. We asked four experts to tell us more about the visit, African countries’ role in the war and what might happen to Wagner on the African continent.Ebenezer Obadare Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies, Council on Foreign RelationsFollowing earlier reports that South Africa had been secretly funneling arms to Russia, only one outcome was possible for the Cyril Ramaphosa–led African peace mission to Kyiv and St. Petersburg: failure. While this in no way suggests that African countries should abandon efforts to bring both countries to the table, it is an apt reminder that having a country so deeply involved with one of the parties to the conflict (and one with scant leverage otherwise) lead such an initiative was never a great idea to begin with. Hopefully, that grotesque spectacle, together with the fallout of the failed mutiny by the Yevgeny Prigozhin–led Wagner mercenary group, will force African countries to