Russia’s Hollow Promises: Mali’s Fuel Blockade Exposes the Myth of Moscow’s Power
By: Christopher Faulkner and Raphael Parens
Over the past two months, terrorists have mounted a fuel blockade that has starved Mali’s capital and put severe pressure on its military junta. Mali’s junta has been caught on the back foot by the al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) and by public opinion in the capital, Bamako, leading to a growing chorus of reports that Bamako might fall. Amongst a host of concerns, this outcome would mean that al-Qaeda would take de facto control of a key Sahelian state and could increase the pressure on Mali’s neighbors, Niger and Burkina Faso, to succumb as well. Yet, several have cautioned about the likelihood of such an outcome given that governance is complex and JNIM’s true goals in this case remain ambiguous.
Yet, lingering in the background of all of this is the role of Russian surrogates via Africa Corps. Many will recall the arrival of the infamous Wagner Group in December 2021 as the nascent Goïta regime broke relations with the West and sought security assistance from Moscow. Wagner’s willingness to engage alongside the Malian army, its brazen counterinsurgency approach, and its support for opening new fronts against secessionist movements in the country’s north were attractive selling points to a military regime fatigued by Western restrictions. That gamble, as many argued, was shortsighted and strategically impotent. Instead of helping alleviate a stark trajectory of insecurity, Wagner contributed to its acceleration. Violence against civilians has skyrocketed, terrorists have increased their operational tempo and territorial control, and the broader region has continued to inch toward catastrophe as jihadists knock on the doorsteps of littoral West African states.
For Moscow, this moment is a reckoning. Mali was advertised as a flagship for Russia’s Africa strategy—a symbol of Russian influence, reinforcing Bamako’s demands for sovereign partnerships, and a bulwark in Vladimir Putin’s promise to stunt Western interference. Instead, the crisis in Bamako highlights just how shallow that partnership has become. As Mali’s gas tanks run dry, so too does the illusion of Russian power in the Sahel.
Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Petr Tolstoy and President of the National Transitional Council of the Republic of Mali Malick Diaw.
Image Credit: Duma.gov.ru, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Running on Fumes
When Wagner personnel arrived in December 2021, they were greeted as liberators. Colonel Assimi Goïta’s regime, seeking to consolidate power, saw Wagner as an opportunity to escape the chains of Western conditionality and influence that had irked military hardliners for over a decade. Russia offered equipment and fighters—and most importantly, the easing of pesky human rights and civilian protection requirements for continued security assistance.
At first, the optics appeared to work. Russian propaganda flooded Mali’s media ecosystem as Moscow evoked the importance of African sovereignty and its role in supporting that effort. Wagner’s mercenary army, some 2,000 strong, fanned out across the country engaging in scorched earth offensives designed to reclaim territory from jihadists and separatists alike. But while Wagner choreographed its campaign as a dramatic improvement from Western counterparts, it wasn’t long before their deficiencies as security partners were exposed. Jihadist attacks not only persisted, they expanded, buoyed by recruitment from Wagner-backed atrocities. Separatist groups, once clinging to a fragile armistice with Bamako, resumed campaigns to thwart the military’s expansionism. Rather than stem the tide of insecurity, Wagner’s engagement ushered in new waves of violence.
The Wagner mutiny of 2023 led to many questions surrounding Wagner’s operations in Mali, and Africa in general. Ultimately, former Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s efforts to ensure the durability of Wagner’s campaign survived nearly two years longer than he did. Despite initial successes, including the capture of the then-undefended city of Kidal, the Malian army and Wagner Group were hurtling towards defeat in 2024. A joint column of Wagner and Forces Armées Maliennes (FAMa) forces were attacked in late July 2024 near the Algerian border at Tinzouatene, falling into an ambush set by Tuareg separatist forces. Suffering initial losses, the forces pulled back into a JNIM-occupied area, where they were ambushed from the rear and routed. The defeat was total–46 Wagner fighters and 25 FAMa soldiers found dead on the battlefield by the victorious JNIM and Tuareg forces. This loss—the largest since Wagner Group’s cataclysmic encounter with American forces in Syria in 2018—reflected concerning developments across the organization.
Wagner’s losses at Tinzouatene exhibited a perfect storm of battlefield failures. First, it demonstrated the organization’s failure to maintain strong intelligence networks. Wagner Group’s frequent attacks on civilians degraded FAMa’s informant networks, limiting the organization’s capacity to predict JNIM’s movements. The extent of internal disgruntlement was even more dire, with FAMa allegedly abandoning Wagner forces at the battle. All of this has led, according to a recent report from The Sentry, to a complete breakdown in relations between FAMa and Wagner Group. According to one FAMa officer: Wagner troops “don’t speak with us anymore, don’t even ask if one location seems like a possible jihadist spot to us … It clearly shows that they don’t trust us.”
Russia’s commitment (or lack thereof) to Mali has not occurred in a vacuum. Reports surfaced that Tuareg forces received training and perhaps support from Ukrainian military personnel, demonstrating Kyiv’s interest in combatting Moscow far from the frontlines of Ukraine. While this alignment drew condemnation from Mali’s neighbors, it reflects the broader political ramifications of alignment with Russia today.
Since the defeat at Tinzouatene, Russian forces have reportedly rarely left their compounds. Even during JNIM’s attackon Bamako in September 2024, Wagner forces took several hours to engage in the airport battle that was raging near Wagner Group facilities. According to eyewitnesses, Wagner Group only agreed to support its Malian allies once an additional payment deal had been made—and after most of the fighting had already ended. All of this suggests a systemic breakdown of trust and cooperation between FAMa and Wagner Group, a development that has persisted across the transition from Wagner to Africa Corps, a reorganization of the brand that falls directly under the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU).
A Broken Model
The move to Russian-backed organization has not solved the systemic issues plaguing Malian counterterrorism or Russian security assistance programs. This summer, JNIM launched key attacks on military facilities across Mali. These attacks targeted a border town with Burkina Faso (Boulkessi), a base in Timbouktou which hosted Russian personnel, and included coordinated attacks in the Kayes and Ségou regions. Despite the Kremlin-backed presence of Africa Corps, these attacks elicited no clear punitive responses from the Russians.
Perhaps sensing weakness, JNIM pushed further this fall. Beginning on September 3rd, the jihadist organization announced a blockade of all ground transport into and out of the country, along with sieges of the cities of Nioro and Kayes. Roadblocks began to be constructed across the country, eventually extending toward Bamako. JNIM then began attacking oil tankers, either stealing the gasoline or destroying the tankers and their content. This approach has been particularly effective in a country that is heavily reliant on fuel imports. At present, Bamako is effectively under siege and the capital is being starved of fuel for everyday energy use, affecting everything from transportation to domestic power supply.
Tellingly, Russian responses have been extremely limited, with some reporting that Africa Corps has only recently begun guarding fuel convoys as they make their way to Bamako from Ivory Coast. But by almost all accounts, the response by Africa Corps has been insufficient and perhaps too late. Despite inaugurating a state-backed version of Wagner Group with much fanfare, Russia is rethinking its military commitments to Mali.
A Russian transition appears to be in the works. Over the past several months, it seems that Russia has been looking to supply Mali with military materiel rather than unleash Africa Corps as a frontline counterinsurgency partner. According to multiple sources in Bamako, recent Russian arms deliveries have been underwhelming at best: a handful of Soviet-era vehicles, spare parts, and even three outdated T-72 tanks. Ulf Laessing of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation suggestedsuch equipment is ill-suited for the battlefield and underscores the absurd mismatch between the threats Mali faces and the tools Russia provides.
Sensing weakness in Bamako, Moscow has already begun to reorient its Sahelian strategy. At the United Nations Security Council, even Moscow’s own diplomats seem to recognize the Kremlin’s limits to help resolve a growing crisis. In September, Deputy Permanent Representative Dmitry Chumakov urged the international community to support the Alliance of Sahel States (AES)—the military bloc of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—in its fight against jihadists. Russian academics have pushed this backslide even further, with Elena Suponina of the Moscow Center for International Studies noting in an Al Arabiya interview that Moscow does not intend to save its Sahelian allies, nor does it take on the security of other states.
Meanwhile, the Africa Corps presence in Mali is thinner than propaganda suggests. Most estimates place its contingent at several hundred advisers, many drawn from Wagner’s remnants or from Russian military contractors with limited local knowledge. If anything, the shift from Wagner to Africa Corps has amplified Mali’s dependence while stripping away the flexibility that once made Wagner valuable. Africa Corps operates with tighter oversight and far less autonomy which might help explain its apparent paralysis in mobilizing a response to JNIM’s fuel blockade. Moreover, it lacks Prigozhin’s networks of informal logistics, gold-smuggling arrangements, and local intermediaries that once lubricated Wagner’s shadow economy. The result is a brittle, bureaucratized presence that can neither fight effectively nor deliver meaningful political leverage.
Empty Promises
The ongoing fuel blockade has exposed a simple truth; despite its claims otherwise, Russia is no savior. Moscow cannot rescue its partners from the very insecurity it helped exacerbate. The Kremlin might try to explain away Africa Corps’ slow response as a strategic move, but in reality it reveals that the group is both politically and militarily hamstrung at Mali’s moment of greatest need. Wagner Group enjoyed some flexibility—untethered from the Russian state, yet it could fulfil Russian policy goals at relatively low cost. Africa Corps is a scion of the Russian military—its losses are Moscow’s losses.
This weakness reflects not just neglect but necessity. Russia’s own war in Ukraine has drained its resources and attention. Every “instructor” deployed to Mali is one less available for Russia’s overstretched defense industry. Africa, once hailed as a theater of opportunity, has become a theater of overextension for Moscow in the near term.
While Africa Corps’ creation was meant to institutionalize Russia’s expeditionary model after Wagner’s implosion it has become a symbol of bureaucratic inertia. Where Wagner could at least improvise—even if through corruption, brutality, and opportunism—Africa Corps is rigid and risk-averse. As Bamako’s isolation deepens, Russia’s promises ring hollow. For Moscow, the only conceivable silver lining lies in the long term: the emergence of a jihadist-controlled state on NATO’s southern flank could trigger mass migration, far-right backlash, and gradual political decay within Europe. In the near term, the collapse or crippling of Mali’s junta—and potentially its AES partners—would underscore the limits of Russia’s so-called security assistance model. The experiment that began with Wagner and continues with Africa Corps’ stagnation may soon stand as a cautionary tale, not a template, for Russian power projection in Africa.
Implications for the West
For U.S. and European policymakers, the risk of Mali’s unraveling poses a serious and ongoing dilemma. Russia’s failures are tempting to interpret as vindication and just, the natural consequence of choosing Moscow over the West. But “told you so” moments will do little to assuage the very real security crises. And in the Sahel, instability rarely stays contained. A weakened Malian state could accelerate cross-border trafficking, empower jihadist movements that are already expanding across Niger and Burkina Faso, and draw in external actors like Algeria and Mauritania.
An appropriate response is not triumphalism but pragmatism. The West should prepare for a Sahel where Russia’s influence lingers even as its capacity fades. That means supporting regional diplomacy, humanitarian relief, and counterterrorism cooperation that does not rely on the Malian junta’s legitimacy. It also means keeping open informal channels with Malian civil society, local governments, and neighboring states that will inevitably bear the consequences if Bamako collapses. It might mean cooperation with non-jihadist separatist groups, particularly Tuareg groups, along the lines of the 2015 U.N.-brokered Algiers Accord. At the regional level, this means supporting diplomatic efforts and institutional rebuilding at a time where relations amongst regional actors are strained if not broken. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) may be damaged given the exit of the AES states, but the broader region stands to benefit from mutual security cooperation.
In a Washington that shows little appetite for new commitments in Africa, a smart alternative is a lean but strategic model geared towards selective logistics and intelligence partnerships, critical-mineral investments, and targeted engagement (if not support) to civil society and local governance actors. In a tentative sign of some U.S. interest, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau recently met with Mali’s foreign minister on security issues of mutual concern, notably the Islamic State in the Sahel. Though there is little tangible information on what this engagement might lead to, it is at least an illustration that the security challenges in Mali remain on Washington's radar. Still, Mali’s junta is operating on fragile ground, so Washington needs to engage in scenario planning for regime collapse. Whether that collapse is at the hands of jihadists, a coup, or popular discontent, containing the fallout and shoring up regional resilience will be paramount.
The current crisis offers at least one clear lesson: Russia’s promises in Africa were never about sovereignty or security. They were self-serving and spectacle-driven. Wagner and now Africa Corps were designed to project power cheaply—to trade mercenaries for minerals and influence. But the Sahel is a complex, volatile region where coercion cannot substitute for governance.
About the Authors:
Dr. Christopher M. Faulkner is a Senior Fellow at the Delphi Global Research Center and Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. His research focuses on militant group behavior, private military companies, and civil-military relations. He is co-author of a forthcoming book on the Wagner Group and has published in leading journals and outlets including Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks.
Raphael Parens is a Senior Fellow at Delphi Global Research Center. He is an international security analyst focused on Africa and Eurasia. Parens has been published in Foreign Affairs, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) Sentinel, War on the Rocks, and FPRI. His forthcoming book, entitled Moscow’s Mercenaries: The Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group and co-authored with Dr. Colin P. Clarke and Dr. Christopher Faulkner, will be published in the spring of 2026.
