President Putin’s paramilitary wing is poised to expand its power in West Africa after France completed its military withdrawal from Mali on Monday, ending a nine-year presence in a country it first colonized in 1892.  

With the French heading for the exits, Bamako is turning to a Russian military contractor — the Wagner Group — that has fought on behalf of the Kremlin in Syria and other conflict zones, accruing a record of brutality along the way. 

Mali is in the Sahel region of Africa, which stretches between the Sahara and the Sudanian savanna. Militant Islamist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group have focused on the Sahel in recent years after facing setbacks in the Middle East. 

“With instability in the Sahel on the rise, and with countries like France scaling back their military efforts against Salafi-jihadist groups in the region, Wagner’s emergence comes at a particularly fraught moment for Mali and is representative of Russia’s strategy to spread influence in the region through irregular, deniable means,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies reports. 

French troops have been in Mali since 2013, when a French-led counterinsurgency operation forced out Islamists who were taking control in the country’s north. When the intervention was completed, about 5,000 French troops stayed in Mali as well as neighboring countries to provide support for anti-terrorist operations. 

After a 2020 coup, relations have been fraught between Mali’s new government and French and United Nations forces. Tensions rose when, as countries like France scaled back involvement, the Mali government turned to the pro-Kremlin Wagner Group, a shorthand for a group of paramilitary organizations bound up with the Russian state, whose deployment in Mali began in December 2021. 

Initially, Paris hailed its Mali operation as a major contribution to the global war on terror. In Operation Serval, which launched the effort, the French ousted AQIM and ISIS terrorists in the country’s north. That zenith proved unsustainable, as French Foreign Legion troops failed to navigate Mali’s fraught local politics. As Islamist threats multiplied, the troops came to be seen as ineffective by many Malians. 

In February 2022, France, along with Canada and several EU partners, announced plans to pull out of Mali within six months. The military junta at Bamako responded with a demand that French troops leave immediately, with a spokesman saying on public television that the nine-year engagement was “not satisfactory.” In July, the foreign ministry of Mali released a statement temporarily suspending troop rotations by MINUSMA, a UN peacekeeping mission.

France’s loss has been the Wagner Group’s gain. In exchange for training local forces in Mali and protecting senior Malian officials, Wagner has secured financial gains, including access to natural resources like gold, as well as geopolitical power for Russia. This strategy echoes Wagner’s engagement in other African countries like the Central African Republic and Sudan. 

Although Wagner has sustained losses during Russia’s war with Ukraine, and some Wagner troops have been pulling out of Syria and parts of Africa to fight in Ukraine, Russia has largely maintained its presence in Mali through the war. On Monday, the governor of Luhansk, a city in Eastern Ukraine, reported that Ukrainian forces had successfully struck Wagner headquarters in that region of the country.

The arrangement with the Wagner Group provides Mali’s military junta with a partnership capable of defending the government from Islamist movements without being forced to endure Western demands to respect human rights and move toward a democratic system of governance.

“Like others, the United States is deeply troubled by the developments in Mali,” the deputy American representative to the United Nations, Richard Mills Jr., said at a UN Security Council meeting this spring. “The last three months have been marked by alarming accounts of human rights violations and abuses against civilians by terrorist armed groups and the Malian Armed Forces with individuals linked to the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group.” 

Wagner has also engaged in attempts to discredit French efforts in West Africa. In April, the French military released satellite imagery and drone footage that documented Wagner troops arranging corpses in mass graves to fraudulently stage evidence of mass killings by French forces.

With no boots on the ground left in Mali, France is shifting “the heart” of its operations fighting Islamic extremists in the Sahel region to neighboring Niger, President Macron explained. France will keep more than 1,000 men in Niger, where a tactical group will continue to work in partnership with the Nigerian forces.

The Wagner Group could be inheriting a poisoned chalice. On Monday, an Al Qaeda affiliate in Mali claimed to have killed four Wagner mercenaries in an attack near Bandiagara, a small town in central Mali.