Since 2020, Russia has been expanding its presence in the Sahel region, seizing the initiative from Paris and Washington and enhancing its standing across sub-Saharan Africa. Recognizing that mounting instability and popular anger with incumbent regimes provided an opening to exploit, the Kremlin capitalized on the first of the region’s coups, in Mali, and supported those that followed, in Burkina Faso and Niger. In doing so, Moscow has signaled to global audiences that it retains a degree of freedom of action abroad despite efforts by the United States and Europe to isolate it after its invasion of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russian national security elites have profited from resources-for-security deals with embattled leaders in the region, offering services—direct military intervention, intelligence support, regime protection, and disinformation campaigns—in exchange for mining concessions and access to extractive industries. Yet more than five years on, the early appeal of those offerings has started to fade. As Russia confronts shortcomings in its own capacity and the complexities of an environment it never fully understood, its expansion into the Sahel is on the verge of stalling, if not unraveling entirely.
Moscow’s staying power is far from exhausted, and the Kremlin has faced headwinds in other parts of the continent, such as the Central African Republic, with tenacity. But Moscow’s fraught initiatives—marked by unfulfilled promises, egregious human rights abuses, and poor results on the ground—should serve as a cautionary tale for other African states contemplating whether to accept Russian assistance. Outside powers, too, would do well to heed the lessons of the Kremlin’s ill-fated Sahel project.
For the United States and Europe, the implications are clear. Instead of trying to compete for influence with the Sahel’s autocrats on the transactional terms Moscow has set, Western policymakers should exercise restraint and allow Russia to remain hemmed in by its own limitations and by mounting competition from other outside states. At the same time, they should invest in what Moscow has been unwilling and unable to deliver: cross-regional cooperation and governance capacity that addresses civilian suffering and builds more durable security in the region.
One Coup After Another
Moscow’s entrée into the Sahel grew out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s broader effort to reassert Russia as a global power through a string of opportunistic and successful interventions between 2014 and 2019 in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, and Libya. Blending the use of conventional military and intelligence capabilities with information operations, deniable proxies, and political subversion, these campaigns caught the United States and Europe off guard and undermined U.S. President Barack Obama’s famous dismissal of Russia as a “regional power.”
They also provided a template for the Kremlin’s turn to the Sahel, which, by the end of the 2010s, was suffering from rapidly deteriorating security and a crumbling political order. Fueled by public frustration over the corruption and the incompetence of democratically elected regimes, especially amid rising jihadi violence, a succession of military juntas came to power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023. Combined with a popular backlash against France, the region’s former colonial power, these upheavals created an opportunity that Russia was quick to seize.
Following the first of two back-to-back coups in 2020, Mali became a focus for Russian engagement and a proving ground for many of the tactics Russia would apply elsewhere. The country had been a U.S. counterterrorism partner following the 9/11 attacks and the central theater of France’s Operation Barkhane, a counterterrorism mission that began in 2014. Against the backdrop of deepening political instability, Russian operatives tied to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner private miliary company, sponsored a series of disinformation operations that piled scorn on the failures of civilian leadership, denounced Operation Barkhane as colonialism reborn, and glorified Russia as a capable and loyal friend. Fake content and accounts on major social media platforms, agitation by paid antigovernment influencers, and street demonstrations peppered with pro-Russian placards and flags helped prepare the ground for a successful “coup within a coup” in 2021 that torpedoed plans for elections and a return to civilian rule.
Moscow conducted additional disinformation campaigns before and after subsequent coups in Burkina Faso, in 2022, and Niger, in 2023. Measuring the impact of Russia’s activities is notoriously difficult, and it would be wrong to overly attribute the Sahel’s turbulence to the Kremlin’s handiwork. Still, the scale of these disinformation efforts suggests a considerable refinement in the techniques Russia and its local proxies first deployed in the Central African Republic in 2018.
Russia’s direct military and security support of embattled strongmen in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger gave these autocrats just enough protection to establish them as clients—and granted Moscow access to valuable resources, including gold, uranium, and lithium. But as these engagements in the security realm stretched on, the first cracks in Russia’s Sahel project began to appear.
Too Small, Too Brutal
From the beginning, Moscow’s military footprint in Mali—in the form of an initial deployment of 1,000 Wagner mercenaries in 2021 that has grown to roughly 2,500 fighters today—was too small and too ill disciplined to tackle the scale of the insurgent and jihadi threats faced by the leadership in Bamako. More important, Moscow failed to account for the lessons of Operation Barkhane. Like the French deployment, Russian military operations privileged attritional warfare without any supporting attempts to improve rural governance, engage in intercommunal and subregional mediation efforts, or reach a durable political settlement through local power-sharing arrangements. But in Moscow’s case, these shortcomings were magnified by the indiscriminate violence practiced by Russian forces.
Nowhere were the consequences of this violence more apparent than in the joint Malian-Russian operation in 2023 to retake Kidal, a city in northern Mali that had served as the stronghold for a series of Tuareg uprisings starting in the early 1960s and since the mid-2010s had been occupied by a collection of predominantly Tuareg separatist rebel groups. After an attack that included the use of Turkish-made strike drones, Malian and Russian forces seized Kidal in less than two weeks.
At first, the operation’s lightning success seemed to vindicate the Russian military’s looser rules of engagement and the local forces’ ruthless tactics. Yet in the months that followed, it became clear that whatever security gains were achieved in that victory had been offset by brutal attacks on civilians by Malian government forces and their Russian partners. The tactics backfired: rather than fragmenting the opposition to Bamako they united it, driving a new tactical alliance between three secular Tuareg and Arab groups and several local jihadi networks, including al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, that the Tuareg and Arab groups had long kept at arm’s length. The same pattern has played out across central and southern Mali and in neighboring Burkina Faso. Collective punishment by Russian and local government forces has routinely produced civilian casualty levels that exceeded those caused by rebel groups, fueling recruitment into the armed opposition.
Some analysts have suggested that the withdrawal of Wagner fighters in mid-2025 and their ostensible replacement by the Africa Corps, run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, may signal a shift toward a more conventional, less brutish training and assistance mission. Yet there is little evidence of this on the ground. In practice, the Africa Corps appears to have institutionalized Wagner’s existing intervention model, along with its abuses. Reports from UN human rights experts and international media highlight Russia’s continued combat involvement in Malian-led counterterrorism operations, documenting numerous cases of torture, rape, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings of civilians.
Fragmentation, Not Integration
Beyond its heavy-handedness and inability to convert tactical successes into strategic gains, Russia has failed to support—and in some cases obstructed—meaningful security cooperation among Sahelian states. In 2024, Kremlin officials triumphantly cheered a decision by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States—a Western-backed regional economic and security cooperation grouping—and form their own Alliance of Sahel States (AES). But Moscow’s ensuing support for the AES has been long on theatrics and short on actual resources and capability.
One case in point is the creation of a joint 5,000-strong border control and counterterrorism battalion drawn from the three AES member states; Moscow has publicly embraced the battalion but done little to support it. And despite Russia’s promises to build partner capacity, the Africa Corps is unlikely to change this pattern since its personnel—over 80 percent of whom are former Wagner fighters—lack the operational culture and experience to forge the types of strong personal relationships that have defined decades-long U.S. and European security engagements and counterterrorism training programs. Over the course of its existence, Wagner scored no major successes in training local fighters or fostering unit cohesion anywhere in the world where it was deployed.
Instead, Russia’s attempts at regional integration have consisted mainly of high-level exchanges between senior Russian military officials and Sahelian representatives. In the end, much is discussed, but little is delivered. All the while, the lack of cooperation among countries in the Sahel, especially on intelligence sharing and joint patrols, has given jihadi groups ample latitude to reorganize and expand across the region’s porous state borders. Increasingly, Russian personnel are paying the price. Over the course of the past year and a half, they have suffered a string of bloody setbacks and outright defeats on the battlefield, including a deadly ambush in the summer of 2024 in the Tuareg town of Tinzaouaten in northern Mali in which 46 Russian soldiers died.
A Crowded Field
As if these setbacks were not enough, Russia is also finding that its leverage is being diluted by the increased prominence of other powerful players in the Sahel’s security arena, notably China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. None of these outside states are trying to replicate the Kremlin’s model of deploying large numbers of military personnel in operations against insurgents and jihadis, and all are capable of cooperating with Russia even as they compete. Instead, they are offering things that Sahelian rulers deem more reliable and more affordable: intelligence systems, arms and training packages, infrastructure protection, and investment with fewer strings attached.
Among these newcomers, Turkey poses the most direct, albeit still emerging, challenge to Russia’s market share. Presenting itself as a “third way” for African states—a dependable alternative to both the West and Russia—Ankara has centered its appeal on its ability to offer inexpensive but effective Bayraktar drones and associated training. The pitch has resonated: since 2022, regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have all acquired Bayraktar models that can both surveil and strike, viewing them as more flexible and politically manageable counterinsurgency tools than foreign mercenaries. In addition, Turkish security companies have muscled in on terrain long dominated by Russian actors and provided training to elite units tasked with guarding Mali’s leadership.
Turkey has pressed the same advantage in Niger, signing intelligence cooperation agreements with the junta there in July 2024. Russia also provided surveillance capabilities to the country. Both arrangement proved short-lived: in the spring of 2025, the regime in Niamey terminated its signals intelligence partnerships with Ankara and Moscow, citing the poor quality of their telephonic intercept systems––a pointed reminder that Sahelian regimes are nobody’s clients (The same junta had expelled nearly a thousand U.S. troops just months before briefly welcoming the Turks and the Russians.)
China has been quietly expanding its footprint, too, concentrating on the protection of Chinese-owned investments and internal security rather than frontline combat. Across the region, it has deployed private security contractors and Chinese personnel to guard energy and mining projects, including Niger’s troubled Agadem–Sèmè oil pipeline, which has been attacked repeatedly by anti-junta rebels. More broadly, Beijing is linking arms sales, police and gendarmerie training, and surveillance systems with infrastructure financing—offering Sahelian regimes an attractive package that is backed by meaningful capital and institutional support. In contrast, Russian companies and government entities generally lack the financial resources and commercial acumen to compete head-to-head with Chinese counterparts.
Outreach by the Gulf states adds another layer of complication. The United Arab Emirates has been the most active on the military front, signing a security agreement with Mali and supplying armored vehicles to Burkina Faso. Additionally, it has invested more than $500 million in Mali’s gold-mining sector––and serves as the key hub for the refining and sale of Sahelian gold obtained by Russian networks, making it an essential part of the extractive value chain that underpins Moscow’s ventures in the region. Although UAE-backed initiatives do not approach the scale of Moscow’s engagements, they create additional opportunities for Sahelian regimes to hedge and arbitrate among external partners.
Restraint Over Rivalry
As Russia continues to make inroads in the Sahel, it is natural for some U.S. and European policymakers to want to rush back into the region and compete with Moscow for the favor of the ruling juntas. Already there are reports that the Trump administration is seeking to lift a page from the Kremlin’s playbook. For example, the State Department said that a visit by a senior envoy in February reflected a “desire to chart a new course in the bilateral relationship and move past policy missteps.” The driver for this reengagement appears not to be great-power competition but counterterrorism and the Trump administration’s ambitions to develop the region’s critical minerals.
But the temptation to return to the Sahel––especially in a way that replicates Moscow’s approach––should be firmly resisted. Instead, U.S. and European officials would do well to heed the famous maxim often attributed to the French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Moscow’s most obvious mistake was assuming that heavily militarized solutions—absent any effort to address the political and socioeconomic drivers of instability—could work in the Sahel. For Russia, the harsh consequences of this misunderstanding arrived more quickly because of its brute-force tactics, limited military footprint, and Balkanizing approach to regional security. All of this stands in contrast to previous U.S. and French efforts, which, however flawed, confronted terrorist groups in Africa linked to the Islamic State, or ISIS, and al-Qaeda while shoring up regional stability and integration.
To be sure, the insurgency, economic misery, and intercommunal violence in the Sahel are not primarily the result of insufficient external commitment; rather, they are rooted in long-standing failures of domestic governance. Corruption, authoritarian rule, and predatory security establishments have steadily corroded the legitimacy of many regimes, placing limits on what foreigners can hope to achieve—especially when they are trying to prop up rulers who are themselves the source of many of the problems. From the Kremlin’s perspective, the result increasingly resembles a grinding quagmire with few strategic returns beyond the limited spoils gleaned from the region’s extractive industries.
In recent months, insurgent groups in the Sahel have grown bolder and expanded into parts of the region that were previously immune to violence. It is now clear that Russia has not delivered on the most important of its promises: restoring stability and shielding regimes from internal challenges. The political costs of that failure for Russian ambitions in other parts of Africa and beyond are still unfolding, and Washington should allow Moscow to bear them fully. For the United States and Europe, offering to renew security ties with the Sahelian juntas might ease the pressure on Moscow by allowing it to claim that the responsibility for the region’s increasingly parlous condition actually lies with the West, not Russia.
Russia’s engagement in the Sahel increasingly resembles a grinding quagmire.
Beyond relieving Moscow’s predicament, hasty and public U.S. overtures to Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso––especially those that link U.S. security assistance to concessions on gold, uranium, or lithium in a manner evocative of how the Kremlin has operated––would have other deleterious effects. A purely transactional approach would reward the juntas’ extractive bargaining strategy, thereby entrenching the corruption, misgovernance, and economic inequalities that are fueling the very jihadi violence Washington would like to see eradicated.
And by ignoring long-standing congressionally mandated restrictions on aiding governments that come to power through extraconstitutional means, such engagement would further tarnish U.S. credibility with the majority of African citizens who vastly prefer democracy over military rule. The views of the population matter. Even as Sahelian regimes and their Russian benefactors have ignored citizens’ economic and security struggles, citizens are likely to remain wary of foreign powers that keep unpopular governments in power.
That said, avoiding a reflexive rivalry with Moscow does not mean staying passive or disengaging completely. Although the Trump administration has made it clear that it does not view Africa as a top priority, Washington will be more successful if it plays to traditional U.S. strengths of fostering multilateralism and building institutional capacity. Given Moscow’s inability to address the region’s compounding crises, the United States can discreetly support cross-border intelligence sharing and quiet mediation efforts that support the resumption of security, transportation, and trade links between the Sahelian juntas and the remaining 12 members of the Economic Community of West African States. In parallel, Washington should invest more resources in reinforcing the security and governance capacities of the larger states of coastal West Africa, such as Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria. The goal should be to both prevent a spillover of the Sahel’s violence and construct a firewall against Moscow’s westward encroachment, recognizing the fact that its influence has been strongest in conflict-wracked, coup-affected contexts.
Russia has been able to establish a presence in the Sahel not because of its own strengths but because of the fragility of the states in the region. That very fragility, along with Russia’s limited capacity and ineptitude, has put severe constraints on what the Kremlin can hope to achieve, steadily raising the costs of its continued engagement. By exercising strategic patience and resisting the urge to outbid Moscow in a failing model, Washington can position itself to reenter the Sahel in ways that better promote both U.S. interests and a more lasting stability.
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