It begins with a sentence meant to sound like triumph, but it rings like retreat: "Mission accomplished. Private Military Company Wagner returns home." So read the announcement Friday evening on a Telegram channel run by the mercenary group - as if the story they leave behind were nothing more than a completed formality. But Mali, this dust circle between desert and hope, is no place for farewells. And what remains is not absence - but another accent of the same violence.
Wagner was in Mali for three and a half years. In that narrow window following the French withdrawal and the collapse of international peacekeeping missions, when violence had already become a constant rumble. Now the group is pulling out - or being pulled out - after heavy losses in recent clashes with the al-Qaida-linked group JNIM. Dozens of Malian soldiers fell, as did mercenaries. The public heard only fragments. The images that remain are those of bodies in uniform, of charred positions, of women who say nothing.
But the Kremlin stays. Just in a different form. While Wagner officially vacates the field, a new structure takes its place: the so-called Africa Corps. No longer a private army, but one directly subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense. A state-controlled shadow army, less visible but no less effective. It operates not in the name of money, but in the name of the state. Analysts like Beverly Ochieng of Control Risks see in it the execution of a plan Moscow had pursued since the death of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023 - the complete incorporation of paramilitary forces under state command. The founding of the Africa Corps is more than a rebranding - it is the response to the unreliability of the mercenaries, to their defiance, their obstinacy.
While Wagner operated in Mali like an army without a state, the Africa Corps acts as an army without borders. It promises training instead of offensives, protection instead of escalation - at least on paper. In reality, however, the goal has remained the same: geopolitical entrenchment in the heart of Africa. The Russian flag now flies more discreetly, but it flies. The reality on the ground remains bleak. Time and again there are reports of massacres, of missing men, of villages that cease to exist in the fog of military operations. In December, Human Rights Watch accused the Malian army and Wagner of deliberately killing at least 32 civilians over an eight-month period. The UN demands answers, but the echo is faint.
It is a strange kind of partnership that has taken root here - one between a military regime that views its own population as suspects, and a great power trying to turn weakness into strength. Mali, once reliant on international aid, now finds itself in the grip of a new protector who does not ask, but acts.
The shift from Wagner to Africa Corps thus marks less an end than a transformation. Away from the martial Rambo-type, as analyst Ulf Laessing of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation calls it, toward a quieter, more institutional form of military penetration. The Africa Corps fights less, trains more. It supplies equipment, secures positions - and embeds Russia deep within the strategic structure of a country that has long become a pawn.
But anyone who believes this shift brings peace is mistaken. For even a light footprint can leave deep marks - especially in a country whose soil is made of blood and sand. And so Mali remains a country in transition. Between hope and exhaustion, between mercenaries and soldiers, between past and future, which keeps revealing itself as repetition. And Russia? It stays. Only quieter. Only smarter. Only more dangerous.
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