EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — The column of Malian government soldiers and Russian mercenaries from the former Wagner Group was advancing through a shallow valley in the southern Sahara desert in late July, several hundred miles north of the legendary caravanserai of Timbuktu, when a roadside bomb exploded, halting the troops and their vehicles.
What followed was a three-day battle, pitting Tuareg separatists against the Malians and their Russian protectors near the town of Tinzaouaten. When a sandstorm prompted a retreat, the Malians and Russians stumbled into an ambush by an al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militia group known as the JNIM, which has cooperated with the Tuaregs. Scores of Wagner fighters and Malian soldiers were killed, and several more were captured.
Two days later, new information emerged about the Tuaregs’ assault on the well-equipped Wagner mercenaries: the spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence said his country’s special forces had given the Touregs intelligence and other help to pull off the attack.
The toll was high. The Tuareg independence movement claimed that 84 Wagner troops and 47 Malian soldiers had died. Wagner leaders confirmed a large number of deaths on one of the group’s Telegram channels.
What was Ukraine doing in Africa, helping inflict one of the worst defeats that Russian mercenaries have suffered there?
The answer is simple, an unidentified Tuareg commander told the French newspaper Le Monde. “Together with the Ukrainians, we are confronting the same Russian menace,” the commander said. “So we are naturally supporting each other. We’ve shared information on Wagner’s methods of operations, and the Ukranians have promised to go farther.”
The Ukrainians certainly have a motive, said Lucian Kim, senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group. “They want to hit back at Wagner, which was used as such a relentless battering ram against Ukrainian forces in the Donbas,” Kim said in an emailed comment to The Cipher Brief. “The Ukrainians probably have the capability, though it may not seem like the wisest use of scarce resources.”
Ukraine has vowed repeatedly to strike back at Russia wherever it can – and Russia’s Africa presence has proven a juicy target.
Russia’s Africa push
For nearly a decade, Russia has built a military presence in Africa, a theater of influence where the Kremlin can win African votes in the United Nations and put pressure on its opponents in Europe.
“Russia’s resurgence in Africa is largely politically motivated,” Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, said in an interview with The Cipher Brief. “They want to win support for Russia, embarrass France,” a leading supporter of Ukraine, “and undermine those in the EU who have been vocal opponents of Russia’s foreign policy and its invasion of Ukraine.”
Russia has used the Wagner Group to position roughly 5,000 troops in Africa. Some – like those in Mali – are nominally there to train local troops to use Russian weaponry. The contingent in Mali is believed to have included between 1,000 and 1,500 troops; the loss of 84 in a single ambush is significant.
The Wagner Group, set up by former Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, has earned a reputation for savagery in Ukraine and across West Africa. The group has had forces in Mali since 2021, when it was deployed to help then-Vice President Assimi Goita, a pro-Kremlin (though U.S.-trained) special forces colonel, lead a second military coup.
After Prigozhin’s aborted 2023 march on Moscow, and his subsequent death in an explosion aboard an airplane, Wagner was absorbed by the Russian defense ministry and its Africa operations reformed as Russia’s “Africa Corps”.
“They are not just undermining US and European policy in the region, they want to present Russia as a more reliable security partner than the U.S. for the juntas,” Lebovich said.
The work has paid off. In 2022, when the United Nations passed its first resolution condemning Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 16 African states abstained, while Eritrea and Mali joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea in voting no.
In exchange for its services in at least four African nations, the Wagner Group was reportedly promised access to natural resources, from gold to timber, which helped Prigozhin amass a personal fortune. At one point Wagner was being paid $11 million a month for its work in Mali, mainly in gold, according to Joe Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, part of the National Defense University.
For the Ukrainians, one-off operations like the Mali attack, and recent reported attacks on Wagner troops in Syria in June and in Sudan last fall, have boosted morale in Ukraine. Videos posted by the Kyiv Post showed what it said were Ukrainian special forces in Sudan, aiding rebels fighting the Russian-backed army of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The Le Monde report said that in addition to sharing intelligence with the Tuaregs in Mali, the Ukrainians were also teaching them to use small drones to drop explosives on their opponents – a tactic Ukraine has used regularly against Russian forces in Ukraine.
A game-changer for Wagner?
The defeat of the Wagner mercenaries by the Tuaregs – and the Ukrainian involvement – may have done grave damage to Wagner’s reputation in Africa. .
“This is the worst defeat for Wagner troops in Mali, and their famous brand will lose its value,” Nina Wilen, research director for Africa at Belgium’s Royal Institute for International Relations, said in an interview with The Cipher Brief.
“The defeat signaled to pro-Kremlin states [Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger] that Wagner mercenaries are simply not as strong as they seem to be, and even more alarming, that they do not know the region well, as they have been ambushed by Tuaregs in Northern Mali,” said Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. “Their legitimacy is now being questioned, which can damage Russia's reputation with those states,” she added in an email to The Cipher Brief.
While Wagner troops have earned a reputation in West Africa as skilled soldiers, they are also widely reviled by many West Africans for incidents of looting, raping, pillaging and murder. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said Malian troops and Wagner fighters had killed and summarily executed dozens of civilians in counterinsurgency operations since December.
“(Wagner’s) mere presence has revived other reactionary movements in Mali that are opposed to their presence,” Riboua said.
For Ukraine in Africa, an awkward question
While the prospect of attacking Russians on another continent holds obvious appeal for Ukraine, in the Mali case the Ukrainians have associated themselves to a group that is problematic to say the least.
The Tuaregs, a largely nomadic and partly Arabic group living in the arid north of Mali, have been fighting for years for greater autonomy, and their own state. Russian mercenaries came to help government forces in 2022. Meanwhile, the Tuaregs have occasionally allied with Islamic jihadists active in the region.
The complicated politics in Mali have meant that in targeting Russians, Ukraine was essentially on the side of the jihadists as well.
Earlier this month, as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba traveled to Southern Africa in a diplomatic effort to win new international allies, Ukraine’s involvement in Mali left him hamstrung. First, he denied that Ukraine had helped attack the Malian soldiers, but he struggled to explain the Tuareg accounts of Ukrainian assistance.
“We never acted against the regular army of any country except Russia,” Kuleba told reporters in Port Louis, the Mauritian capital. “We are not seeking any conflicts with any African nation. Our job is to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression.”
Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation said the Mali involvement is deeply problematic for Ukraine. “They publicly backed Touareg leaders…(who) are among the most unpopular people for their double-dealings with jihadists,” Laessing said in a series of posts on X.
“How Ukraine didn’t see they were opening a can of worms with their claims is beyond me.” he added. “They have been setting up embassies in Africa to tell their side of the story, but will struggle to talk their way out of this.”
Who’s Reading this? More than 500K of the most influential national security experts in the world. Need full access to what the Experts are reading?
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
