The rebels swept out of the desert, armed to the teeth on motorbikes and pickups, and on to the dusty streets of Kidal at dawn. Within hours, they had forced the few dozen Russian paramilitaries tasked with holding on to the remote town in northern Mali into a choice: surrender or die.
The Russian forces were soon beating a retreat as ethnic Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters together began a blistering offensive over the weekend of April 24th against cities and towns across Mali, whose military regime turned to Moscow five years earlier in an attempt to turn the tide in its battle with the insurgents.
But the devastating defeat in Kidal has exposed Russia’s failure to stabilise Mali and has called into question both the future of its African military adventurism and survival of the pro-Russian government in Bamako, the country’s capital.
“It is a humiliation. This is another confirmation that they are inefficient and unreliable in the fight against insurgents and jihadists,” said Wassim Nasr, an analyst at New York’s Soufan Center, who added that recapturing Kidal three years ago had been the sole battlefield success Russian forces were able to show.
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“They have not achieved anything beyond helping the regime hold on to power,” he added.
Mali has been grappling with a worsening security crisis for more than a decade but the unprecedented breadth and scale of the co-ordinated assaults by the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), an ethnic Tuareg separatist group, and the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate, have shaken the country.
Sadio Camara, the Russian-speaking defence minister who was the architect of Moscow’s presence in Mali, was killed on Saturday, April 25th, as rebels stormed the main military command centre in Kati, a town near Bamako.
Modibo Koné, the powerful intelligence chief out of whose budget paid for the Russian presence, was also critically wounded.
Mali had turned to Russia for military assistance as relations with France soured following a military coup in 2021. Mali had initially contracted with the mercenary Wagner Group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Wagner was largely superseded by the Africa Corps, an outfit managed and equipped by the Russian defence ministry, after Prigozhin launched an abortive insurrection against Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Africa Corps formally inherited its operations in Mali in June last year.
Kidal, a town deep in the Sahara Desert, is both strategically and symbolically important. Its recapture three years ago gave a significant popularity boost to the military regime in Bamako.
There are now signs Russia is withdrawing from other outposts and bases across wide swathes of northeastern Mali, including along the borders with Algeria and Niger. Bamako has still not been fully secured: JNIM announced a siege of the capital last Tuesday and its fighters were reportedly still roaming its outlying suburbs.
There is growing anger in Mali about the way Russian paramilitaries, stranded without reinforcements, retreated from Kidal and left many Malian soldiers trapped.
“They left behind Malian soldiers to be captured like rats,” said Moussa Kondo, a former official who now runs the Sahel Institute for Democracy and Governance in Bamako.
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Russia had invested heavily in building an image of itself as a partner, Kondo said. But he argued that no amount of propaganda would erase the images of the Russian paramilitaries being hounded out of Kidal by victorious Tuareg militants.
“How can you say that you have not been humiliated? How can you say that you are a powerful country?” said Kondo.
This has not been lost on Russia itself, which has sought to reaffirm its support for the battered regime that remains. Malian president Assimi Goita was shown with several Russian officers and officials last Tuesday in his first public appearance since the start of the offensive.
Africa Corps claims its outnumbered soldiers fought bravely the length and breadth of Mali. Telegram channels close to the group spent days sharing gruesome images of mangled corpses of rebel militants it claimed to have killed during the fighting and combat videos of its units fending off attacks.
“It is a serious blow to their reputation,” said Sergey Eledinov, a former Russian officer who now works as an analyst in Dakar, Senegal. “It suggests the Russians are not invincible after all.”
Maxim Solopov, the Bamako bureau chief for African Initiative, a Russian news agency accused by the EU of disinformation, said he saw “a pile of bodies of terrorists” in Kati.
He denied that Russia had suffered a major setback: “This was not a defeat. This was the retreat of one remote garrison.” He claimed that the decision to retreat was taken together with the Malian army’s general staff, and that local soldiers were not left behind. The situation in Bamako was stable, he added, and months of attempts to lay siege to the city had failed.
Africa Corps, whose soldiers are also present in neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, had been central to the Russian security pitch across Africa. Moscow has presented itself as a more flexible and efficient partner compared with France, whose troops were ejected from Mali in 2022 as relations soured.
There are several explanations why Africa Corps, whose men have built an image of themselves as daring desert warriors, has struggled on the battlefield. Mali, for one, is twice the size of Ukraine and the approximate 2,000 Russians lack the surveillance and intelligence networks to monitor militant movements closely.
“They do not have the capabilities that the French and US had intelligence-wise,” Nasr said. “They are not well equipped, and they have an unreliable partner in the Malian military.”
He added that the indiscriminate violence that Wagner and Africa Corps had exacted across northern Mali had also driven recruits towards JNIM and the FLA, which made their own challenge more difficult. “They did not solve the problem. They made it worse,” Nasr said.
Russian forces have been accused of atrocities including massacres, rape and torture in villages across Mali.
Another reason for the setback is that Africa Corps has been badly managed.
Justyna Gudzowska, at the monitoring organisation The Sentry, said the group’s equipment, which they had been sent by Moscow, was ill-suited to desert warfare, including tracked vehicles, and newly arrived commanders neglected vulnerable northern outposts.
“They have been more cautious” compared with the gung-ho approach that Wagner had pioneered, she added.
Africa Corps had been staying closer to its bases when it went out patrolling and leaned more heavily on air power than Wagner did, Gudzowska said.
It does not help that there is growing frustration among rank-and-file Malian officers towards Russian forces either. Analysts in regular contact with them said they complained bitterly that Russians took their equipment without permission and moved out on operations without co-ordination.
This disappointment was mutual, said Eledinov. “Mali overestimated the stabilising capacity of Russia. Russia overestimated the capability of Mali as a partner,” he said.
Solopov said Africa Corps “operates at the invitation of the Malian government and works closely with Malian armed forces. It cannot replace the Malian army – that is not its role.” He stressed that the Africa Corps played a key role in defending the capital and major cities.
Inpact, an Africa Corps-focused monitoring organisation, estimated it had cost Bamako between $500 million (€425 million) and $900 million since 2022 to underwrite Russia’s presence.
Africa Corps had repeatedly telegraphed to Mali that it wanted to reorient its mission away from frontline fighting and towards protecting critical infrastructure and the regime in Bamako, said Ulf Laessing, a Mali-based analyst at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
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But he said the embattled Malians had few other options beyond Russia if they wanted to keep on fighting. Moscow would probably now regroup and consolidate its mission in Mali, he added.
“They will probably give up the idea that they could control the whole country,” Laessing said, adding that this would bring their operations in line with how the small Russian contingents in Niger and Burkina Faso operated.
For the moment, Russia is being forced to dance to a tempo set by the FLA – which has promised to march on to Timbuktu and Gao – and JNIM, which is threatening Bamako itself. Both have called on Russia to stand aside.
“The Malians were naive about what they could deliver,” added Laessing. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
