Reports that Mali’s military junta has negotiated a prospective deal to bring in 1,000 Russian mercenaries from the notorious Wagner Group are anything but surprising.
Russia has been trying to expand its influence in Mali for the past several years. Disinformation campaigns first seen in 2019 were instrumental in stirring up the protests that toppled democratically elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in August 2020.
“Moscow has followed a pattern of parachuting in to prop up politically isolated leaders facing crises in regionally pivotal countries, often with abundant natural resources.”
In addition to maligning Keïta, the messages from these campaigns were anti-French, disparaging of democracy, and pro-Russian. Curiously, dozens of people who came onto the streets following the coup were waving Russian flag placards. Several of the coup leaders, moreover, had just returned from an extended security assistance training in Moscow. And the Russian Ambassador in Mali, Igor Gromyko, was one of the first foreign officials to be received by the junta. So, the prospective deal with Wagner can be seen as a continuation of this sequence.
With coup leader Colonel Assimi Goïta at the helm, Mali has been especially ripe for the picking as part of Russia’s asymmetric influence campaign in Africa. Borrowing from its Syria playbook, Moscow has followed a pattern of parachuting in to prop up politically isolated leaders facing crises in regionally pivotal countries, often with abundant natural resources. These leaders are then indebted to Russia who assumes the role of regional powerbroker.
This elite cooption sequence is facilitated when it involves an autocratic leader who lacks other checks and balances. In the case of Goïta, who has mounted two coups and consistently ignored ECOWAS’ stipulations on the transition, he’s not even beholden to a constitution.
The essence of the prospective Wagner deal, then, is an unaccountable junta leader vying to bring in unaccountable mercenaries. It’s not hard to imagine how this could turn out badly.