At dawn on Saturday 25 April, Bamako, the capital of Mali, woke up under a coordinated attack. Two explosions at the military base in Kati, where junta leader Assimi Goïta resides. A suicide car bomb destroyed the residence of Defence Minister Sadio Camara, killing him along with his wife and two grandchildren. Russian soldiers were defending the capital’s airport. A thousand kilometres further north, Tuareg rebels of the Azawad Liberation Front announced the conquest of Kidal. To claim the operation, besides the Tuaregs, was the JNIM: the jihadist aggregation affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Sahel. Two ideologically incompatible forces, coordinated to the minute against the same adversary.
To understand what really happened, and why it matters far beyond the Sahel, we have to go back some ten years.

Nine years of France

Mali has been the heart of French military projection in Africa for almost a decade. In January 2013, François Hollande launched Opération Serval: Azawad (the north of the country) had fallen to a coalition of secular Tuareg and jihadist groups: the capital Bamako was within range. The French intervention was successful, in a few weeks Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal were liberated. Hollande was welcomed in triumph in the mosque-library of Timbuktu by a crowd waving French flags.
From that operation came Opération Barkhane in August 2014, with a regional mandate in the Sahel: G5 Sahel, bases in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad. It was joined by the UN mission MINUSMA, the EU missions EUTM and EUCAP, and in 2020 the Task Force Takuba: European special forces in which Italy also participated with 250 men. At the peak of these operations, the combined Malian regular forces and international contingents on the ground exceeded 50,000.

Yet violent incidents rose from just over a hundred in 2014 to over a thousand in 2021. Counter-guerrilla warfare killed high-profile jihadist leaders – Droukdel, al-Sahrawi, Bah Ag Moussa – but the phenomenon expanded geographically, towards Burkina Faso, Niger, now also Ivory Coast, Togo, northern Benin. A classic of many military campaigns: tactical victories, strategic defeat.
On the political level, the 2015 Algiers Accords, which were supposed to integrate the Tuaregs into the Malian state through decentralisation and constitutional reform, ran aground. The Carter Center, an independent observer, described the situation as an unprecedented 201d deadlock. Bamako did not really want to decentralise, mediating Algeria could not impose it, the West did not have sufficient leverage.

The breaking point was Colonel Assimi Goïta’s two coups d’état: in August 2020 against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, and in May 2021 against transitional president Bah N’Daw. The junta was born on the wave of popular sentiment that saw Paris as a failure and colonial interference. In February 2022, France announced its withdrawal, accusing the junta of working with Wagner’s Russian mercenaries, and the junta responded by demanding withdrawal ‘without delay’: both sides thus saved face. On 15 August 2022, the last French soldier crossed the border into Niger. Operation Barkhane was officially closed in November.

The Russian package: from Wagner to Africa Corps

Already during the French withdrawal at the end of 2021, the first Wagner soldiers landed. The junta officially denied it; according to the US State Department, the agreement included a fee of around ten million dollars per month for the Russian group.
The attractiveness of the Russian package over the Franco-Western one for Goïta lay in one key point: no conditionality. The Wagner group did not demand elections, did not discuss human rights, did not distinguish between rebels to fight and those to negotiate with. All enemies of the military junta were simply enemies. And it accepted mixed payments – money plus gold mining concessions in northern Mali.
The Wagner issue is very peculiar: the Russian legal structure formally forbids mercenary activities. But precisely this illegality – paradoxically but deliberately – was functional to Putin’s regime: it kept the groups under the ‘power vertical’, restricted the market to state favourites, and offered Moscow the possibility to deny its involvement in international fora. Headquarters shared with the GRU in Krasnodar, state decorations for commanders, wiretaps documenting the chain of command: all revealed an instrument of the state disguised as private enterprise.
The system changed its face between 2023 and 2025. After Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, his march to Moscow and his suspicious death in August, the structure was officially absorbed into the Russian Ministry of Defence as the Africa Corps, under the command of Deputy Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. More discipline, less autonomy, but also less tactical effectiveness and more dependence on Moscow’s disputed decisions with the Ukrainian front.
Today, Russian personnel in Africa number around 5,000-6,000, with main deployments in Mali (around 2,500), Central African Republic (1,500), Libya, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan. A modest projection in absolute value but with great political leverage, built not on quantity but on positioning in fragile regimes that have chosen Moscow as their sole patron.

The Double Breach

The political line of the Goïta junta can be summarised as a double rupture: external and internal, mutually functional.
Externally: in 2023, MINUSMA is expelled after ten years; in the same year, the Alliance of Sahel States is created with Burkina Faso and Niger; in January 2024, the government unilaterally terminates the Algiers Agreements and launches a frontal attack on Algeria; in January 2025, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger formally leave ECOWAS.
Domestically, a new constitution is approved in 2023 with little participation; presidential and legislative elections are postponed sine die in September 2023; political parties are suspended in April 2024 and dissolved by decree in May 2024; in July 2025, an amended ‘Transition Charter’ grants Goïta five years in office renewable ‘as many times as necessary’ without elections.
A geometry of systematic closure: the junta has eliminated every channel that could put it under pressure. Internal opposition, regional mediation, UN framework, Algerian diplomatic track, critical press, western cooperation. What remains is a direct line between Bamako and Moscow, and a self-perimeter military junta.

Coordination, but not alliance

The attack on Saturday 25 April should be seen in the scenario just described. The forces that struck Bamako, Kidal, Sevaré and Gao are of a profoundly different nature.
The Front for the Liberation of Azawad (FLA) is a secular Tuareg ethno-nationalist movement with roots in the northern uprisings since 1963. Its political horizon is the autonomy or independence of the Azawad region: identity-based territorial nationalism.
The JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) is a jihadist Salafist aggregation affiliated with al-Qaeda, led by Iyad Ag Ghali, paradoxically a former leader of the Tuareg uprising of the 1990s who transited to jihadism. Their goal is Islamic rule according to Sharia law over the entire region.
These two forces have incompatible political aims: an independent Tuareg and secular Azawad and an Islamised Sahel under sharia cannot coexist. Historical precedents also confirm this: in 2012, MNLA and jihadist groups collaborated to drive the Malian army out of the north; three months later, Islamists drove the secular Tuaregs out of Gao and Timbuktu. The convergence had crumbled as soon as the common enemy had withdrawn.
What we have seen in recent days is therefore a tactical coordination rather than a strategic alliance. Two separate insurgencies have found an opportunity to simultaneously strike at a weakened adversary, taking advantage of the weakening of the Russian umbrella due to the pressure of the Ukrainian front. On Sunday 26 April, Africa Corps negotiated a protected exit from Kidal with the Tuaregs: the Russian mercenaries who had recaptured the city in November 2023, returned it two and a half years later without a fight.
The erosion of Russian forces due to the effort in Ukraine is the same factor that also explains the Azerbaijani reconquest of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023 and Assad’s escape from Syria in December 2024: the Kremlin no longer being a guarantor for its clients.

Map of no one

But therein lies the lesson of 25 April. The attack is not the signal of a new-found strength of Tuaregs and jihadists: it is the signal of the vacuum around the Malian regime. FLA and JNIM were able to strike because there is no longer anyone between them and Bamako. Neither Algiers that mediated, nor MINUSMA that monitored, nor Barkhane that patrolled, nor Malian parties that produced internal political debate.
Mali is reduced to the binomial military junta + Africa Corps, and it is that binomial that has been attacked, showing all its vulnerabilities: the death of Minister Sadio Camara and the negotiated withdrawal of the Africa Corps from Kidal. Two facts that could not explain it better: the Russian model has not just been punctured. It has been driven out.

Mali is a case study of what happens when a government treats sovereignty as a zero-sum game between Western and Russian dependence, ignoring third-party options – Turkey, Morocco, China, the Gulf States, India. Bamako opted for a clean substitution of one patron for another, and now pays the price for the choice. When Russian support weakened, the regime no longer had any alternative parachute.
What now appears to be a united front is instead a precarious balance between two insurgencies that have chosen, for a week, the same target. The Sahel is no longer a French map, but it is not yet a Russian map. It is nobody’s map. And it is precisely this, today, that is its most dangerous condition.

The lesson for Europe

For Europe, and for Italy in particular, the Malian case should be a serious warning. The coordinated exit of France and its European partners has opened a vacuum quickly filled by Moscow. It is also a sign that the Russian projection is shifting towards the African Atlantic arc (Equatorial Guinea, Togo, possibly Senegal): a front that directly touches the energy routes of the Gulf of Guinea, where Eni and our maritime security partners operate.
The Mali of April 25th is not just a Sahelian affair. It is what could happen to our energy routes if we continue to believe that Africa’s strategic vacuum will regulate itself peacefully.