End of Wagner Group mission in Mali. They will be replaced by the African Corps

Russian mercenaries from the so-called Wagner group announced on Friday that their mission in Mali had ended and they were leaving the country. However, their place in Mali and other African countries is being taken by soldiers from the Africa Corps, who are directly subordinate to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Reuters quoted the mercenaries as saying they had left Mali after “successfully completing a three-and-a-half-year mission” in the African country. The mercenaries boast that they have pushed out Islamist forces, killed their commanders and handed the entire country over to the Malian military junta.

The jihadist attacks last weekend on the airport in the historic city of Timbuktu and on a military base in the city of Boulikessi, where more than 30 Malian soldiers were killed, are evidence of the failure of Russian mercenaries to restore calm.

Mali has been battling jihadists linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) for years, and on the border with Algeria it has been struggling with Tuareg groups, some of which are fighting for the secessionist state of Azawad.

The country’s interim president, Assimi Goita, who came to power in two coups in 2020 and 2021, promised to restore calm to the country. Dissatisfied with the progress of French troops, he ordered them to leave the country, from which he also asked the 11,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission to leave. In their place, in 2022, he invited mercenaries from the Wagner Group, who – according to estimates by the American think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) – were in the country a year later at around 2,000, although their number dropped to 1,000 the following year, probably because of the failures in Ukraine, where they were brought.

In Mali, the third largest gold producer in Africa, Russia is heavily involved in its extraction. In early 2023, Russian mercenaries took over at least three large mines in Balandougou, Koyoko and Yanfolila. And recently, they have also been involved in refining. Earlier this week, Moscow signed a contract with the junta to build a gold refinery in Bamako, where it plans to process more than 200 tons of the metal annually. At the same time, the process of expropriating the Canadian company Barrick Gold, which operates the most productive mines in Loulo and Gounkoto, is underway.

For this reason, the Kremlin cannot afford to abandon Mali. The Wagner Group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was once close to Vladimir Putin, has long enjoyed considerable autonomy. But after Prigozhin's death, the Kremlin decided to completely subordinate it or replace it with other units. The case of Mali, but also of the Central African Republic, where mercenaries are to be replaced by regular units of the African Corps from January 2026, shows that Russia has lost confidence in insubordinate mercenaries.

Mining is just one element of Russia’s plan to profit from Africa. Russia’s goal is to stoke uncertainty so that it can be seen as the only player capable of providing security, for which it demands a hefty price, as Jack Watling, a land warfare specialist at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), put it.

Tadeusz Brzozowski (PAP)

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