The video is as triumphant as it is gruesome. Rebel fighters, rifles slung over their shoulders, step among more than a dozen bodies strewn across the sand and rocks. Off camera, the pop of gunshots can be heard.
The scene is from another battle in the vast deserts of northern Mali – except that this time the victims were Russians. At the end of the video, the camera pans to a bearded white man on the ground, apparently begging for mercy.
A different video shows several white men, still alive, kneeling amid the wreckage of a vehicle, as guerrilla fighters encircle them. A pickup truck with militants approaches the men, as others kick them in the head.
The Russian mercenaries appear to have been attacked as they were accompanying Malian government troops on patrol last week near the Algerian border, a vast, forbidding region where jihadi and Tuareg groups have long been active.
The attack was claimed by a Tuareg rebels group along with the al Qaeda affiliate in the Sahel, JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). Known for ad hoc cooperation, they appear to have collaborated to trap the Russian convoy.
JNIM claimed Sunday that a “complex ambush” had wiped out the convoy, killing 50 Russians and a number of Malian soldiers, and published videos showing several vehicles ablaze as well as dozens of bodies in the area. A Tuareg militant group spokesman said some Malian troops and Russian fighters had also been captured during the battle.
According to some unofficial Russian Telegram channels, as many as 80 Russians were killed.
That would make it by far the worst loss for Russian paramilitaries in several years of operating in Africa, as the Kremlin has sought to use proxy forces to challenge Western influence across the Sahel and central Africa and prop up unstable regimes.
In an extraordinary twist Monday, a Ukrainian official claimed Kyiv had provided the militants with intelligence.
Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), said on Ukrainian television that “the rebels received necessary information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”
“We won’t discuss the details at the moment, but there will be more to come,” Yusov added.
Channels associated with the Wagner group, a private military contractor active in Africa which is now part of what the Russian Defense Ministry calls the African Corps, said that at first its fighters had inflicted heavy losses on the militants.
But the militants had regrouped and the command of Wagner “decided to transfer additional forces to the combat area.”
In a battle lasting from Thursday through Saturday, the jihadis increased the number of massive attacks, “using heavy weapons, UAVs [drones] and suicide vehicles,” according to one Telegram account associated with Wagner.
The Russian contingent’s last radio message – late Saturday – said: “There are three of us left, we continue to fight,” according to the channel.
The commander, Sergei Shevchenko, was among those killed in battle, according to a second Wagner channel.
Also among the dead, according to several Russian Telegram channels, was one of Russia’s most popular military bloggers, Nikita Fedyanin, whose Grey Zone channel has more than half-a-million subscribers.
Fedyanin’s death cannot be independently verified, but a photograph from the scene closely resembled him. A long-time Wagner analyst told CNN that the Grey Zone channel has stopped being updated. “I think the story is true; he probably did die.”
A former commander of the ambushed contingent said on Telegram that more than 80 men were killed and more than 15 had been captured. The commander – call-sign Rusich – said on Telegram he was trying to convey a message to the Russian Defense Ministry. “I am ready to provide myself and all those people who are ready to follow me absolutely free of charge, in order to save the guys.”
Another Wagner-linked social media account spoke of a “heavy unequal battle, as a result of which both our fighters and the Malian military heroically died.” It pledged that whoever the enemy, “world terrorism, the henchmen of Western countries or the enraged Ukrainian heresy… we know that the Russian warrior will definitely continue his journey.”
There is no way to verify the exact number of Russian casualties (some Russian channels say the death toll was not as high as 80), nor how many Malian troops were killed. The Malian armed forces said Friday that only two soldiers had died but that clashes were taking place in a region that “remains a bastion of concentration of terrorists and smugglers of all stripes.”
CNN is reaching out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment. Denis Korotkov, who works with the London-based Dossier Center, noted that “not a single official body of the Russian Federation has spoken on this issue. Neither the Ministry of Defense, nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor the Kremlin commented on the deaths of dozens of Russian citizens in clashes on the African continent outside the special military operation zone.”
A big blow in Africa
Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups are accustomed to losses – in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mozambique and Mali over recent years. The Wagner PMC lost hundreds and probably thousands of men in taking the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut two years ago. And in Syria five years ago, a disastrous attack by Russian mercenaries on an oil refinery led to dozens of casualties.
But beyond eastern Ukraine, Russian mercenaries have rarely suffered a setback on this scale.
Amid upheavals in Mali, the Central African Republic, Niger and Burkina Faso, Russian elements with the backing of the Kremlin have stepped in to usurp traditional French influence, beginning in CAR in 2018. The military regime in Mali turned to Wagner soon after seizing power in 2021.
After the death of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a mysterious plane crash near Moscow last year, many of his fighters were subsumed into a Russian African Corps directed by Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Yevkurov has been an occasional visitor to Mali and on its Telegram channel the African Corps said in January it planned to increase its strength in Mali from 100 to 300 men.
The latest clashes also indicate that a coalition of militant groups is growing in strength, in Mali and beyond.
There are constantly shifting alliances among rebel groups in the Sahel, but Tuareg groups have sometimes made common cause with al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region, JNIM.
JNIM has claimed to have attacked Wagner contingents in Mali in the past. It has been especially active recently in both northern Mali and several parts of west Africa. In the last week alone, JNIM claimed five attacks in different regions of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist groups. One of them was an IED attack on a Russian vehicle in the same region of Mali as the latest devastating assault.
In addition it carried out a rare attack on a military base in northern Togo last week, expanding its range of operations.
But it’s the ambitious attack on the Russian-Malian convoy near the Algerian border that will catapult JNIM’s operations to a much broader audience.
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