Mali's Junta Bet Everything on Russia. Four Days Ago, the Bill Came Due.

Four days ago, fighters from al-Qaeda's Sahel affiliate JNIM and the Tuareg Azawad Liberation Front launched what the Africa Center for Strategic Studies called¹ the largest coordinated offensive in Mali since 2012. They struck simultaneously in Bamako, Kati, Gao, Sévaré, Mopti, and Kidal — cities spanning roughly 1,500 kilometers. They killed Defense Minister Sadio Camara with a car bomb at his home². They fought Russian Africa Corps mercenaries near Bamako's international airport. They recaptured Kidal, forcing Africa Corps to negotiate its withdrawal from northern bases³. Junta leader Assimi Goïta did not appear publicly for three days.

I think this is the moment we can stop debating whether Mali's junta strategy has failed. It has. The question now is why, and what the failure tells us about a broader pattern.

Let me reconstruct what was promised. When Goïta's officers seized power in 2020, and again in a second coup in 2021, they offered a simple thesis to Malians: France's decade-long counterterrorism presence had failed, the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA was useless, and a sovereign Malian force backed by Russian partners could do what the West could not. They expelled France's Operation Barkhane in 2022. They forced MINUSMA out by December 2023. They terminated the 2015 Algiers peace accord⁴ with Tuareg separatists and launched an offensive to retake Kidal by force. The entire political legitimacy of the junta rested on this security bet.

Now here is where I want to be fair about something. There is a reasonable objection that goes like this: Mali's insurgency defeated the Western-backed framework too. JNIM's southward expansion was already documented before the junta expelled France. The Algiers Accord froze Tuareg control of the north without suppressing JNIM. ACLED event data from the Barkhane era showed escalating violence year after year. If you judge the junta against a standard of "fix Mali's insurgency," that standard is arguably unfair because nobody has managed it.

I accept that objection — partially. It is true that JNIM was expanding before the junta's pivot, and it would be sloppy to attribute all current deterioration to the Russian partnership alone. But the objection has a limit, and the April 25 attacks have smashed right through it.

The limit is this: the junta did not promise to match the Western baseline. They promised to exceed it. They said the old approach had failed and theirs would work. That is a specific, directional claim. And the trajectory since 2022 has not merely continued the pre-existing deterioration — it has qualitatively accelerated in ways that were not occurring under Barkhane or MINUSMA.

Consider the sequence. In July 2024, Wagner forces suffered their worst-ever defeat in Africa at the Battle of Tinzaouaten⁵, where 84 Russian mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers were killed in a rebel ambush near the Algerian border. In September 2024, JNIM attacked a gendarmerie school and military base inside Bamako itself⁷, killing 77 people — the first major assault in the capital in nine years. In July 2025, JNIM attacked the cities of Kayes and Nioro du Sahel in western Mali⁶, opening an entirely new front that had not existed under Barkhane. By September 2025, JNIM imposed a fuel blockade on Bamako itself⁸, attacking tanker trucks on supply routes from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, and for weeks most of Bamako's residents could not buy fuel⁹. The Soufan Center described Mali as "on the brink of collapse." And then came April 25.

None of this — not the blockade of the capital, not the assassination of the defense minister, not the loss of Kidal for a second time — happened under Barkhane. JNIM never besieged Bamako's fuel supply under French forces. The Algiers framework, whatever its flaws, kept the northern front frozen in a way that prevented JNIM and separatists from coordinating the kind of nationwide offensive we just witnessed. The pre-junta trajectory was bad and worsening. The post-junta trajectory is something categorically different.

Why Wagner and Africa Corps failed on their own terms is a story that several investigations have now documented in detail. The Sentry's "Mercenary Meltdown" report¹⁰ from August 2025 lays it out: Wagner had "not only failed to achieve any significant battlefield successes in central and northern Mali" but had "also failed to gain access to the country's lucrative gold mining sector," becoming dependent on direct payments from Moscow. Wagner announced its withdrawal from Mali in June 2025, declaring "Mission accomplished" while leaving behind a country in worse condition than it found.

The successor Africa Corps, now under Russia's defense ministry, has taken a more cautious, base-centric approach¹² — but with worse results. According to ACLED data reported by Africa Defense Forum, battles involving Russian fighters dropped 33% between 2024 and 2025. They became less active precisely as JNIM expanded into new territory. And their human rights record actually strengthened JNIM's hand: between January 2024 and Wagner's exit¹², Wagner and Malian soldiers caused more than 1,440 civilian casualties — four times the number tied to JNIM. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies documented⁷ that civilian fatalities linked to Malian armed forces and Russian mercenaries rose from 84 in 2019 to a projected 1,044 in 2024. JNIM's leader of the Macina Liberation Front, Amadou Koufa, explicitly cited Russian brutality as a recruitment driver.

This is the mechanism I think matters most: the Russian partnership did not just fail to build governance capacity in recovered territories; it actively generated the conditions for JNIM's expansion. Indiscriminate violence against civilians — drone strikes on weddings, mass executions at markets, the documented pattern of targeting ethnic Fulani communities — pushed populations toward JNIM, which offered alternative governance structures including taxation and dispute resolution. As Sahel specialist Wassim Nasr put it, JNIM focused on Wagner's atrocities "in an effort to win hearts and minds. And why wouldn't they? It's easy."

What about the Alliance of Sahel States? The AES — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — formally launched a 5,000-strong Unified Force in December 2025¹³, headquartered in Niamey. This was supposed to be the institutional answer. The ISS noted it was the "third attempt by central Sahel states to establish a joint security mechanism," following two previous frameworks that both failed. Four months after its launch, JNIM and the FLA executed the largest coordinated attack in Mali since 2012. The AES force did not prevent or even detectably mitigate the April 25 offensive. Whatever it is building in Niamey, it is not producing operational security outcomes on a timeline that matters.

The Global Terrorism Index 2025¹⁴ reports that the Sahel accounted for 51% of all global terrorism-related deaths in 2024, up from 48% in 2023 and roughly 1% seventeen years ago. Mali ranked third in the world. The humanitarian toll is staggering: OCHA reports¹⁵ that by end of 2025, nearly 415,000 people were internally displaced, over 5 million needed humanitarian aid, and humanitarian access incidents increased 40% year-on-year. The Norwegian Refugee Council warned in December¹⁶ that the crisis was spreading south into Mali's "food basket" region for the first time.

I do not think this is a case where we should say "every strategy has failed equally." Every strategy has failed, yes. But they have not failed equally. The junta's Russia-backed approach has produced (1) the first siege of Bamako's fuel supply, (2) the assassination of the defense minister inside the military capital, (3) the loss and recapture and loss again of Kidal, (4) a documented acceleration in civilian killings by state forces that functions as an insurgent recruitment engine, and (5) the largest coordinated insurgent offensive since the war began in 2012. The Western-backed framework produced none of these specific outcomes over its full decade. The baseline was bad. What replaced it is worse.

The thing to watch now is whether the April 25 attacks mark the beginning of the junta's collapse or whether Goïta can stabilize Bamako's immediate perimeter. Critical Threats assessed³ that the offensive aimed either to seize the north and heavily influence new national authorities, or to directly topple the junta. Africa Corps is negotiating withdrawals from multiple northern bases. If Gao falls — and as of this writing, control of the city remains divided — the junta will be confined to a shrinking southern zone around the capital. I think the most likely near-term outcome is a forced negotiation between the junta and JNIM, potentially brokered through intermediaries, in which the junta trades legitimacy for survival. That would be the final irony: the government that expelled Western partners and declared sovereign control may end up negotiating with al-Qaeda's affiliate from a position of desperation that none of its predecessors ever occupied.