The Mali Conflict in Context — Actors, Alliances, and the Wider War

Mali is a vast, landlocked country of roughly 22 million people^[1] in the heart of West Africa — geographically larger than France and Germany combined, but with state institutions that have never extended meaningfully beyond its major cities. The Sahara and its fringes cover the northern half of the country, a territory historically inhabited by Tuareg and Arab communities who have never accepted incorporation into the post-colonial Malian state as more than a formal arrangement. In the south and centre, the Bambara and Fulani ethnic communities dominate a landscape of subsistence farming, river trade, and persistent poverty. It is in this structural fragmentation — of geography, ethnicity, and governance — that every conflict in Mali's modern history has its roots.

To understand Mali, one must first understand the broader regional current in which its crisis is embedded. Between 2020 and 2023, a wave of military coups swept across West and Central Africa with a speed and consistency that no single explanation fully accounts for — Mali (twice), Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Gabon, and Chad all experienced seizures of power by military officers within roughly three years.^[2] The pattern is striking enough to have acquired its own name: analysts and geographers speak formally of the Coup Belt — in French, the ceinture de coups d'État — a concept that emerged during the 2020s to describe the chain of coup-affected states stretching between the east and west coasts of Africa.^[27] The three states that have gone furthest in formalising their break with the existing regional order — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — constructed an alternative political framework, the Alliance of Sahel States, oriented explicitly against both ECOWAS and Western security partnerships. Domestically, all three project an ideology of radical sovereignty: anti-French, anti-ECOWAS, and what their leaders explicitly describe as anti-imperialist. This is the regional context within which the April 25 offensive must be read: not an isolated national crisis, but the most acute expression of a decade-long realignment that has fractured the post-colonial governance architecture of West Africa.

The Economic Community of West African States — ECOWAS — was designed as a vehicle for regional integration and collective security, modelled loosely on European precedent. In Western capitals, it has long been regarded as the most credible multilateral institution in sub-Saharan Africa: a forum that could manage political transitions, sanction unconstitutional changes of government, and provide the diplomatic legitimacy for external engagement. The EU and the US have consistently channelled security assistance, democratic governance support, and development funding through ECOWAS and its member states. When the coup wave began, ECOWAS imposed sanctions on Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in succession^[3] — sanctions that included trade restrictions severe enough to cause genuine economic pain in some of the world's poorest countries. In Brussels and Washington, this was framed as the defence of democratic norms. In the Sahel, it landed very differently.

The juntas, whatever their other failures, did not seize power in a political vacuum. Each coup drew on genuine popular grievances: governments that had manifestly failed to provide security, chronic unemployment, deep suspicion of an electoral class seen as self-dealing and foreign-sponsored, and — most potently — accumulated resentment of France. It is important to be precise about what France's role in the Sahel actually was, because the easy narrative — that a security vacuum opened when France left, and others filled it — understates the degree to which French policy itself was a generative condition of the crisis. France was present in Mali, in force, for over a decade. Operation Serval began in 2013; it was absorbed into the larger Operation Barkhane in 2014, which at its peak deployed around 5,000 troops across five countries. That presence did not contain the insurgency. JNIM was formed and expanded under French watch. The 2019 Ogossagou massacre occurred while Barkhane operated across the country. By the time the juntas began expelling French forces in 2022 and 2023, the populations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger had lived through years of an externally-led counterterrorism campaign that had simultaneously failed to deliver security and generated civilian casualties, accusations of French political interference, and a pervasive sense that Paris's interests in the region — mineral access, uranium supply, monetary architecture — were not the same as the interests of the people living there. The crisis that erupted on April 25, 2026 was not produced by Russia's arrival or France's departure. Its roots go considerably deeper — into state fragility, colonial-era border structures, ethnic conflict, and governance failures that no external security partnership was ever going to resolve on its own.

France's presence in the Sahel was not experienced primarily as military partnership; it was experienced as continued dominance. The CFA franc, the currency still used across fourteen African countries^[4] and pegged first to the French franc and subsequently to the euro, has long been the most visible symbol of what critics call Françafrique — the system of monetary, political, and economic ties through which France maintained effective control of its former colonies long after formal independence. Paris holds a portion of CFA zone central bank reserves in French accounts;^[5] French companies retain privileged positions in West African resource extraction and infrastructure; and for decades, French intelligence services maintained relationships with African leaders that functioned as a veto on political outcomes Paris disapproved of. The resentment this system generated is not a Russian or Chinese information operation. It precedes both by generations.

When the juntas expelled French forces and UN peacekeepers, they did so to scenes of public celebration that Western media struggled to square with its own narrative of democratic backsliding. In Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey, crowds carried Russian flags alongside national flags, burned French tricolours, and chanted against ECOWAS as a tool of foreign interests. Surveys conducted across the region consistently found that the juntas commanded higher public approval ratings than the elected governments they replaced^[6] — a finding that discomforts liberal observers but reflects something real about how populations experience governance rather than how they experience its nominal form. Across much of African public opinion, the coup leaders were not seen as authoritarians subverting democracy. They were seen as nationalists finally daring to say no: to France, to ECOWAS sanctions delivered at the behest of Western sponsors, and to an international order in which African sovereignty had always been conditional. Russia positioned itself expertly to exploit this sentiment, but it did not create it.

ECOWAS, for its part, found itself in an increasingly untenable position: an institution designed to represent "the peoples of West Africa" that was imposing economic blockades on those same peoples at the urging of external powers. The juntas were quick to frame ECOWAS as a body that had been captured by foreign interests — "under the influence of foreign powers" and guilty of "illegal, illegitimate, inhumane and irresponsible sanctions," as the three juntas stated verbatim in their joint withdrawal communiqué.^[7] The accusation had enough popular resonance to stick. When Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formally announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS in January 2024, the African Union declined to condemn the move, and several ECOWAS member states quietly expressed sympathy. The fracture was not merely political; it reflected a genuine divergence in how sovereignty, security, and the legacy of colonialism are understood across the region.

The institutional consequences for ECOWAS were severe. The three departing states together account for roughly 15% of ECOWAS's total population and nearly half its territorial surface area — a demographic and geographic loss without precedent in the bloc's fifty-year history.^[25] ECOWAS attempted to manage the exit with pragmatism, establishing transitional arrangements that preserved visa-free movement rights for citizens of the departing countries, maintaining some trade benefits, and keeping its doors formally open to re-engagement. But these provisions addressed symptoms rather than causes. The AES itself had meanwhile escalated well beyond a mutual defence pact: its member states signed a confederation treaty in July 2024, announcing ambitions for a common market, a shared currency, free movement of persons, and an eventual political federation — a direct institutional rival to everything ECOWAS had spent five decades constructing.^[26] A deeper structural fault line had also emerged within ECOWAS between its landlocked Sahelian members and its coastal states — the latter increasingly seen by the AES as proxies for continued Western and French military presence, with Côte d'Ivoire explicitly accused by Burkina Faso's leadership of hosting French installations intended to destabilise the Sahel juntas. By 2025, all three AES states had also expelled American military forces and closed US drone facilities, including the $110 million installation at Agadez in Niger, effectively ending the Western security architecture in the Sahel that had been constructed over two decades. It is within this fracture — between a Western-aligned coastal bloc and a sovereigntist landlocked counter-order — that the current conflict in Mali is ultimately playing out.

The Malian junta, formally the Transition of Mali, is led by General Assimi Goïta, who came to power through coups in 2020 and 2021. The junta does not govern through elections, political parties, or a functioning civil society — all of which it has progressively dismantled. It governs through the armed forces, through the authority of the state security apparatus, and, since 2021, through a security partnership with Russian mercenary and state military forces. Its central claim to legitimacy is that it will restore order where the elected government failed. That claim has aged badly. The insurgency has expanded significantly under its rule, and by early 2026 it cannot reliably secure the supply routes into its own capital.

Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) — which translates roughly as the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims — is the dominant jihadist coalition operating across Mali and the broader Sahel. Formed in 2017 through a merger of several al-Qaeda-aligned factions, including Ansar Dine and the Macina Liberation Front,^[14] it is formally affiliated with al-Qaeda's central leadership and ideologically committed to the establishment of an Islamic emirate across the Sahel. JNIM is not primarily a terrorist organisation in the tactical sense; it is a governance project. It administers territory, levies taxes, adjudicates disputes, and in some areas provides more consistent services to rural populations than the Malian state does. Its military strategy since 2024 has included systematic economic warfare against Bamako — blocking fuel convoys on key supply routes, strangling the capital's logistics, and demonstrating the fragility of junta authority without necessarily seeking to seize the city outright. It operates across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and its expansion tracks closely with the withdrawal of French and UN stabilisation forces.

The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) — in French, the Front de Libération de l'Azawad — is the latest iteration of the Tuareg separatist movement that has been contesting the Malian state's authority over the north since independence. Tuareg communities, nomadic and trans-Saharan in their historical range, rejected incorporation into the post-colonial borders drawn by France in 1960, and have mounted several armed rebellions since then. The most recent cycle began with the 2012 rebellion, which briefly established a de facto independent state of Azawad in the north before being reversed by French military intervention.^[15] The movement subsequently evolved through several organisational forms — the MNLA, then the CMA — before consolidating as the FLA after the junta terminated the 2015 Algiers peace accord and retook Kidal in 2023. The FLA's political objective is either full independence for Azawad or at minimum a deep federalisation of Mali that gives northern communities genuine autonomy. It is a secular, ethno-nationalist movement — its ideology is fundamentally incompatible with JNIM's jihadist project, which is precisely what makes their operational coordination on April 25 so analytically significant.

Russia's Africa Corps is the successor organisation to the Wagner Group in Mali and across Russia's African deployments. After Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in August 2023 — in an aircraft incident universally attributed to the Kremlin^[16] — the Russian state moved to bring the mercenary network under direct Ministry of Defence control. Africa Corps inherited Wagner's personnel, its bases, its Malian government contracts, and its record — which includes the documented massacre of approximately 500 civilians at Moura in 2022.^[17] Its role in Mali is threefold: protecting the junta's core infrastructure, conducting offensive operations against insurgent and separatist groups, and managing Russia's extractive interests in Malian gold and other minerals. It arrived in Mali with at least 400 personnel deployed across key positions,^[18] and on April 25 it found itself simultaneously defending Bamako's international airport and losing Kidal to the FLA.

The Islamic State — Sahel Province (ISSP), previously known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), is the fourth armed actor of consequence in the Mali war — and the most frequently overlooked in Western coverage, which tends to frame the conflict as a binary between JNIM and the junta. The ISSP is the Sahel franchise of the Islamic State's global network, formally incorporated into the Islamic State's West Africa Province structure in 2019 and operating primarily out of the Ménaka region in eastern Mali and the Niger-Mali border zone.^[28] Its origins lie in a 2015 split from al-Mourabitoun, when a dissident commander pledged allegiance to ISIS rather than al-Qaeda — a break that created an enduring and often violent rivalry with JNIM that persists to this day. Ideologically, the ISSP and JNIM share a broad jihadist framework but diverge sharply on method and doctrine: ISSP adheres to a maximalist interpretation of Islamic law and is far more willing to attack Muslim civilians it deems insufficiently devout, a stance that has both generated local resentment and made it a magnet for hardliners who consider JNIM too accommodating. That tension is directly relevant to the April 2026 offensive: JNIM's decision to coordinate — however temporarily — with the secular, nationalist FLA sits poorly with ISSP doctrine, and there are already reports of JNIM fighters defecting to ISSP rather than participate in an alliance with a movement that does not share their vision of Sharia governance. The more pragmatic JNIM becomes in pursuit of tactical advantage, the more of its hardline fringe it risks losing to ISSP — which would make an already complicated conflict substantially more chaotic.

The Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) — the governing framework that notionally unites Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger into a confederation — deserves separate treatment as a political actor in its own right, not merely as a backdrop. Established as a mutual defence pact in September 2023 and elevated to a confederation treaty in July 2024, the AES was from the outset as much an ideological project as a security arrangement. Its founding narrative is explicitly anti-imperial: the three junta leaders have positioned themselves not as coup plotters but as architects of a second decolonisation, finally breaking the economic, military, and political dependencies that they argue continued to condition African sovereignty long after formal independence. The AES's stated ambitions — a common currency to replace CFA structures, shared military command, eventual political federation — represent a direct challenge to fifty years of French-influenced regional architecture. What April 25 has done to this project is apply the most severe stress test it has yet faced. The AES was built on the claim that the Russian security partnership, combined with pan-Sahelian solidarity, could deliver security where France and ECOWAS had failed. The partial collapse of that claim — the defence minister dead, the north lost, the capital blockaded — places the AES model under scrutiny that extends well beyond Mali's borders, directly threatening the political legitimacy of the junta governments in Ouagadougou and Niamey as well.

The offensive was not a surprise to everyone. An FLA field commander stated after the fact that it had been planned for months. A Malian official told Radio France Internationale that the governor of Kidal, General El Hadj Ag Gamou, had warned the Russian Africa Corps of an imminent attack three days before it began, and that the Russians did not react in time. Africa Corps, for its part, believed it had fulfilled its end of the partnership by successfully defending Bamako airport from attack — a claim that captures something real about the tensions that have since surfaced between Malian junta officials and their Russian partners. The mutual recriminations that followed the offensive, in many ways, are as significant as the offensive itself.

What made April 25 historically significant was not its scale alone but its geographic simultaneity. The attacks targeted sites spanning from Bamako in the south to central and northern Mali — a geographic spread that punctuates patterns of deterioration that have been building for years. In Kati, a VBIED was driven into the residence of Defence Minister General Sadio Camara, killing him alongside members of his family.^[19] Camara was not merely a minister; he was widely regarded as one of the most powerful figures inside the junta and a plausible future leader of Mali. His death was a decapitation, not just a casualty. In Kidal, the FLA recaptured the city within the first hours of fighting, with checkpoints changing hands almost immediately and the governor taking refuge in a former MINUSMA compound. The Malian army and Africa Corps subsequently withdrew not only from Kidal but from Aguelhok, Tessalit, Tessit, and Ber — every northern position they had consolidated since the 2023 campaign. Tessalit is a particularly stark example: its garrison of Russian and Malian troops withdrew, and JNIM seized the city without encountering any opposition whatsoever. On April 28, alongside JNIM's Bamako siege declaration, ISSP moved to take advantage of the chaos on its eastern flank, seizing the border fort of Labbezanga after Malian troops abandoned it and fled south to Ansongo, and launching a separate attack on the city of Ménaka that was repelled.^[29]

Situational Map — Faction Control as of 30 April 2026

Faction control positions as of 2 May 2026. The map illustrates the geographic division of objectives: the FLA operates primarily within its northern Azawad territorial claim and does not seek to move south toward Bamako. JNIM's advance is oriented southward toward the capital. ISSP operates from its eastern Ménaka stronghold. Towns highlighted in the most critical position include Timbuktu, Léré, Soumpi, Goundam, Aguelhok, Gao, Anefif, and Ménaka.

The situation as of 2 May has deepened materially since the first days of the offensive. On 30 April, Camara's state funeral was held in Bamako — Goïta's first confirmed public appearance since the attacks began. That same day, JNIM announced the capture of the Hombori military base in central Mali, a claim Africa Corps disputed, stating its helicopters had resupplied Malian troops there and evacuated the wounded. By 1 May, JNIM fighters had established armed checkpoints at two entry points near Bamako and blocked at least three of the city's six main road corridors, calling on the population to rise up against the junta and adopt Islamic law. Hundreds of vehicles were stranded in Ségou, less than 80 kilometres from the capital. France, the UK, the United States, and Canada issued security warnings to their citizens in Mali. Separately, a Malian military court issued a statement alleging that certain serving and recently dismissed military officers had participated in the planning, coordination, and execution of the April 25 attacks — an allegation that, if substantiated, would represent an internal dimension to the offensive that goes well beyond external coordination.

An important distinction that is easy to miss in coverage of the offensive is that the three armed movements threatening Mali do not share the same territorial objectives. The FLA, as a movement, is defined by and confined to northern Mali — specifically the territory it identifies as Azawad. It does not intend to, and functionally will not, advance south toward Bamako. Its political programme is separatist, not revolutionary: the FLA wants an Azawad state or autonomous zone, not to govern Mali as a whole. JNIM's trajectory is the opposite. Its strategy has always been oriented southward — toward the central regions, toward Bamako's supply lines, and ultimately toward the capital itself. ISSP operates primarily from the east, from its Ménaka stronghold, and its ambitions are expansion into the Gao region and the Niger-Mali border zone rather than the capital. The three fronts are therefore geographically distinct in their directions of pressure, even if they are all tightening around the Malian state simultaneously.

As of 2 May, the towns and cities of Timbuktu, Léré, Soumpi, Djibo, Aguelhok, Goundam, Ansongo, Gao, Anefif, and Ménaka are all under serious and credible threat of capture. Of these, Anefif, Timbuktu, Léré, Soumpi, Goundam, Aguelhok, Gao, and Ménaka are in the most critical position. The key distinction — visible in the faction control map — is which movement threatens which city. The northern towns, including Timbuktu and Aguelhok, face primary pressure from the FLA and residual JNIM presence. Gao and Ménaka, to the east, face convergent pressure from JNIM and ISSP. The junta's ability to hold any of these positions depends on logistics chains that are themselves under threat.

The current strategy of the Malian junta and Africa Corps appears to be one of deliberate attrition rather than immediate counteroffensive. The objective in the near term is to survive the initial momentum of what is effectively a multi-front blitzkrieg — absorbing the impetus phase of the rapid advance before the attacking forces overextend. Holding Bamako and the southern tier is the immediate priority. On this front there has been some measurable progress: by late April, Malian and Africa Corps forces had broken part of the fuel blockade on Bamako and resumed some fuel imports into the capital, partially stabilising the economic front. The longer-term strategy, as it can be inferred, involves consolidating southern Mali and reforming sufficient state capacity and military cohesion to then either engage diplomatically over the north or make a structured bid to recover lost territory. Reaching that stage realistically requires more than a year.

There is an additional dynamic that could materially complicate the offensive's trajectory, and it runs through JNIM's internal tensions. JNIM's decision to coordinate with the FLA — a secular, nationalist, non-Muslim movement — sits directly against the ideological commitments of its own hardline factions. There are already reports of JNIM fighters and sub-commanders defecting to the Islamic State's Sahel Province rather than participate in a coalition alongside a group that does not share their vision of enforcing Sharia law across Mali. The calculus here is significant: the more pragmatic and tactically flexible JNIM becomes — willing to cooperate with secular separatists to achieve a political outcome — the more hardliners it risks haemorrhaging to ISSP. A more fractured JNIM, with its radicalised elements absorbed into ISSP, would produce a more chaotic conflict, harder to negotiate and harder to contain, even if the immediate military pressure on Bamako were to ease.

The single most analytically striking feature of the April 25 offensive is not what the FLA did or what JNIM did independently. It is that they did it together. These two movements have been adversaries for the better part of a decade. JNIM — formed in 2017 through a merger of several al-Qaeda-aligned factions across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — is a jihadist organisation with a transnational Islamist agenda fundamentally incompatible with the Tuareg ethno-nationalist project of an independent Azawad. The FLA and its predecessor movements have fought JNIM for control of northern territory, competed for local civilian allegiance, and clashed repeatedly in the Kidal region. The Algiers peace framework, whatever its limitations, represented a Tuareg political vision oriented toward negotiated autonomy within a Malian state — not toward al-Qaeda.

The convergence on April 25 was not an ideological merger. It was a tactical arrangement premised on a shared near-term enemy: the Goïta junta and its Russian security partners. The FLA did not adopt jihadism. JNIM did not adopt Tuareg nationalism. What both movements identified was a window — created by the junta's political isolation, its economic failures, the fuel blockade that had exposed the regime's inability to secure Bamako's supply lines, and the accumulated resentment of a northern population that had been promised security and received massacres instead. The logic is familiar in the history of insurgencies: movements with irreconcilable long-term objectives can and do cooperate when they share a near-term target, suspending their mutual hostility for as long as that target remains the priority. The operative phrase is "enemy of my enemy" — and in April 2026, both the FLA and JNIM had the same one.

What this means for the Alliance of Sahel States is consequential beyond Mali's borders. The AES — formed by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in 2023 as an alternative to ECOWAS and a vehicle for mutual security cooperation under Russian sponsorship — was presented as the proof of concept for the sovereigntist model. If the model's flagship state can be brought to the brink of governmental collapse within two years of formalising it, the export value of that model to other fragile states in the region becomes considerably harder to argue. The FLA spokesman's explicit warning to "the authorities of Burkina Faso and Niger to stay out of the ongoing events in Mali" was not a courtesy. It was a deterrent — a signal that the AES's mutual defence commitments should not be tested in this particular theatre.

Ukraine's involvement with the Tuareg rebels in Mali was not a secret by the time the April offensive began — it was a confirmed fact that had been publicly acknowledged by Ukrainian military intelligence. In August 2024, Le Monde reported that Ukrainian special services had been providing the Tuareg rebel coalition — the forerunner of the FLA — with drone operation training and operational intelligence. Andrii Yusov, spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence directorate (HUR), confirmed on national television that Ukrainian intelligence had cooperated with rebels in Mali, saying they had "received useful information, and not just that, which allowed them to carry out a successful military operation against Russian war criminals." The FLA's own spokesperson, Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane, separately confirmed links with the Ukrainians, though he characterised them as one relationship among many.

What Ukraine was doing in Mali, and why, requires no elaborate theorising. Russia's Africa Corps — formerly Wagner — was extracting gold from Malian mines, providing the security cover that kept the Goïta junta in power, and generating hard currency that flowed back to fund Russia's war against Ukraine. Every setback for Africa Corps in Mali was a direct material benefit to Ukraine. Training Tuareg fighters in FPV drone construction and operation cost Ukraine relatively little and imposed costs on Russia that were real and measurable: the Battle of Tinzaouaten in 2024, in which Wagner suffered its most publicly confirmed losses in Mali, followed the period of Ukrainian training. The drone footage that now circulates from the Kidal attacks shows capabilities that, prior to Ukrainian involvement, the FLA and its predecessor movements did not possess.

The harder question — and one that Russian officials were quick to raise, without producing evidence — is whether Ukraine's cooperation extended beyond the FLA to JNIM itself. Russia blamed "French and Ukrainian direct support" for the April 25 assault in official statements. No concrete evidence for direct French operational involvement has been presented; Russia's claim should be read partly as a deflection from its own failure to defend its partner. But the question of Ukrainian contact with JNIM is not as easily dismissed as it might appear, for one reason: Ukraine has done it before, and the precedent is public record.

The Ukrainian approach across multiple theatres constitutes a coherent asymmetric strategy: wherever Russia has deployed military forces or security assets, Ukraine has sought to create costs for those deployments — through drone training, intelligence sharing, and in some cases direct operator support — regardless of the ideological character of the proximate beneficiary. In Sudan, Ukrainian special forces and PMC Wagner fought on opposing sides of the civil war. In Libya, on 4 March 2026, Ukrainian forces deployed a remote-controlled unmanned surface vessel — what is commonly known as a maritime drone or kamikaze USV — and struck a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean that was carrying fuel to Russian-friendly governments in the region, including in Africa. In March 2026, Indian authorities arrested several Ukrainian and American nationals at the Myanmar border under anti-terrorism laws, amid reports they were attempting to establish a covert supply chain — presumably drones or associated equipment — to support opposition forces, a development that analysts interpreted as reflecting American as much as Ukrainian strategic interests in the region.

Infographic — Ukrainian Operations & Influence: Current & Former Theatres

Overview of confirmed, reported, and assessed Ukrainian operations and influence operations targeting Russian deployments globally. Mali, Sudan, Syria, Libya, and Myanmar feature as active or former theatres of Ukrainian asymmetric engagement.

The question that emerges from a broader survey of the April 25 offensive is one that remains unanswered in any open-source record, but that analytical logic demands be posed: who brokered the operational cooperation between JNIM and the FLA? These two movements have been fighting each other for years. Diplomatic contacts between them reportedly intensified through late 2025, according to open-source analysis of the period. But sustained contact between jihadist and ethno-nationalist movements with competing territorial agendas does not self-generate. Someone created the channel, managed the incentives, and held the arrangement together long enough for a multi-theatre simultaneous offensive to be executed with the coordination that April 25 demonstrated.

France is the most analytically compelling candidate when the question of brokerage is posed, though it must be stated plainly that no confirmed evidentiary basis exists in open-source reporting for direct French orchestration of the FLA–JNIM coalition. What follows is pattern analysis, not attribution. France was, for over a decade, the dominant external power in Mali and across the broader French-speaking Sahel. It operated military bases, ran counterterrorism missions, trained Malian forces, and maintained the political and economic architecture through which its former colonies remained within its sphere of influence. The junta expelled it humiliatingly. The anti-French sentiment that accompanied that expulsion — amplified by Russian information operations and genuine popular grievance over France's failures to contain the insurgency — was a wound of a kind France has not experienced in Africa since the independence era. If France were involved in what produced April 25, it would not be acting merely as a grieving former patron. It would be acting with a politically strategic agenda: reversing the loss of influence, punishing the regional mechanism that replaced it, and signalling to other Sahel states considering the same pivot that choosing Russia over Paris carries costs that manifest in the form of burning garrisons and dead ministers.

The immediate objection is an obvious one: how could a liberal democracy and NATO member support, even indirectly, an al-Qaeda affiliate like JNIM? The very premise seems to disqualify France as a candidate. And yet the assumption that ideological incompatibility prevents such arrangements is not one that the historical record supports — and one recent precedent demolishes it comprehensively. When Hayat Tahrir al-Sham led the offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria in late 2024, it did so as an organisation that had been designated a terrorist entity by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Its leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa — better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — was a former Islamic State commander who later headed Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, before rebranding as HTS.^[22] He had an American bounty of ten million dollars on his head, removed by the US State Department in December 2024 as diplomats met with him in Damascus.^[23] Within weeks of Assad's fall, al-Jolani was receiving Western foreign ministers in Damascus, conducting press conferences in Western media, and securing the progressive removal of HTS from international terrorism lists. He is now the recognised president of Syria, engaged in formal diplomatic relations with the EU, the US, and their partners.

This is not an anomaly. It is an illustration of how international relations actually functions when examined through the lens of realism rather than liberalism. A state may articulate values at home and deploy ideological frameworks to justify its foreign policy to domestic audiences, but in the anarchic structure of the international system, where no overarching authority exists to enforce norms, states ultimately pursue interests. Lord Palmerston's formulation — that nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests — is not cynicism. It is description. The Western acceptance of al-Jolani is the starkest recent demonstration of this reality: an al-Qaeda commander became a diplomatically recognised head of state because the geopolitical interests of Western powers in removing Russian and Iranian influence from Syria outweighed their publicly stated commitment to the global war on terror. The ideology of the actor was secondary. The strategic outcome was primary.

What France could plausibly offer in such an arrangement — were this hypothesis to hold — is not operational support in the conventional sense. It is legitimacy, diplomatic architecture, and a post-conflict political framework. The FLA's objective is Azawad recognition. JNIM's near-term interest is the removal of the junta and Africa Corps. France's interest, on this reading, would be the restoration of its influence in a strategically and economically significant region from which it has been expelled. A brokered outcome — in which a post-junta transitional arrangement includes FLA-administered autonomy in the north, JNIM's transformation into a political actor along the lines of the HTS model, and France's return as the preferred external security and economic partner — would in theory provide each actor with a credible incentive structure. It remains speculative. But it is speculative in the way that most successful proxy architectures appear speculative before they succeed, and self-evident after they do.

To understand the full scale of what France stands to lose — or recover — it is necessary to look beyond military bases and counterterrorism missions to the monetary architecture that has underpinned French post-colonial power across the continent for more than eight decades. The CFA franc, used across fourteen African states in two currency zones, has been one of the most durable and consequential instruments of French influence in West and Central Africa.^[4] Its value is pegged to the euro, with France's treasury historically providing the convertibility guarantee. In practical terms this means African member states have operated with monetary policy significantly shaped by external structures — unable to devalue independently, unable to print currency to manage crises, and with foreign reserves historically held partly under French oversight. Critics from across the political spectrum in Africa and beyond have long characterised this arrangement as a direct continuation of colonial financial control under a post-colonial legal framework — Françafrique expressed through exchange rates and reserve ratios rather than direct political instruction. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — now all three AES members — have moved progressively toward the exit of this system. The AES has announced ambitions for a common sovereign currency, independent central banking, and alternative reserve systems potentially backed by gold or diversified currency baskets. If these ambitions are realised, France would lose not just military footholds but the structural monetary leverage it has maintained since 1945. For France, the AES is not merely a geopolitical inconvenience. It is, if it survives and consolidates, an existential challenge to the economic architecture through which France has sustained systemic power in West Africa long after the flags were lowered. Beyond the monetary dimension, Niger alone — an AES member — was responsible for approximately 20% of France's uranium imports, used in its nuclear power infrastructure.^[29b] The AES's anti-imperial ideology, in other words, has direct material consequences for French energy security, not merely its regional prestige. Against this backdrop, France's potential motive to destabilise the AES at its most vulnerable moment — with Mali under the heaviest military pressure it has experienced in over a decade — acquires a weight that goes well beyond the personal grievance of a former colonial power expelled from its preferred sphere.

What is not speculative is the structural logic: proxy architectures of this kind — where an external power provides a facilitation layer to movements that would not otherwise cooperate — have been a consistent feature of Sahel and Levant politics for the past decade. France, the United States, the Gulf states, Russia, and Ukraine have all employed variants of this model in various theatres. The question of which actor stood to gain most from a successful joint FLA–JNIM offensive that destabilised Russia's principal Sahel client does not implicate France — but it does identify France as the actor with the most coherent motive in any such brokerage, should one exist. The Syria precedent removes the last ideological objection to liberal democracies working with al-Qaeda affiliates for strategic ends. The motive is there. The means are plausible. Whether the decision was made remains, as of publication, unknown.

The purpose of placing Mali's crisis within this wider frame is not to diminish the Malian dimensions of the conflict. The Goïta junta's failures are real and largely self-inflicted: it eliminated political parties, suppressed independent media, extended its own mandate without elections, presided over an economy degraded by fuel blockades and insurgent control of supply routes, and oversaw the catastrophic failure of the "Russian partnership" model to deliver the security improvements it had promised. The April 25 attacks are, as the Africa Center for Strategic Studies observes, the latest manifestation of a steadily deteriorating security trajectory that predates any Ukrainian drone and exists independently of any putative French involvement. The junta's political choices created the conditions. External actors exploited them.

But the exploitation is the part that now operates at scale. Ukraine is the world's most operationally experienced drone warfare actor. Its special forces units and intelligence services are increasingly sought as advisors, trainers, and partners by movements in conflict with Russian deployments across the globe. This will not stop when or if the war in Ukraine ends. The expertise is embedded in institutional memory, the networks are built, and the strategic interest in pressuring Russia globally will persist as long as Russia maintains deployments in Africa and the Middle East. Ukraine's military has become, in a very real sense, the most adept light-footprint asymmetric partner available to any movement willing to oppose Russian-backed governance — a role the United States once played, but with less precision and at far greater cost. Underlying all of this is a core Ukrainian strategic interest that is worth stating plainly: every conflict in which Russia is forced to divert attention, resources, and political capital is pressure reduced on the Ukrainian front itself. Mali, Sudan, Libya, Syria — each theatre where Russia finds itself absorbing costs is, from Kyiv's perspective, a contribution to its own survival. This is not coincidence. It is policy.

Myanmar offers a separate and instructive case study in this globalised dynamic — and it requires its own introduction before it is placed in context. Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation governed since February 2021 by a military junta that overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, is a country experiencing a civil war between the Tatmadaw (the military) and a broad coalition of ethnic armed organisations and the People's Defence Force aligned with the civilian National Unity Government. Myanmar has no significant Russian military deployment of the kind seen in Mali; the Tatmadaw's external patrons are primarily China and, to a lesser degree, Russia through arms sales. The strategic interest in supporting Myanmar's armed opposition therefore belongs primarily to the United States and its partners, not to Ukraine acting alone.

In March 2026, India's National Investigation Agency arrested seven foreign nationals in coordinated operations across Kolkata, Delhi, and Lucknow: six Ukrainian operatives and one American, Matthew VanDyke.^[24] VanDyke is the founder of Sons of Liberty International (SOLI), a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 2014 that presents itself as a military training and advisory organisation supporting resistance movements against authoritarian regimes. VanDyke has fought in Libya alongside anti-Gaddafi forces, in Syria against Assad, and subsequently in Ukraine against Russia — and the Ukrainian operatives arrested alongside him were drawn from fighters he had trained and led in those earlier theatres. SOLI's stated mission and VanDyke's public persona are those of a principled freedom fighter; the operational pattern, however, is that of an organisation that has consistently served the interests of Washington-preferred outcomes without ever having an overt official connection to US intelligence agencies. According to reporting on VanDyke's interrogation by Indian intelligence, he told investigators that the operation had been arranged by Maran Tu Awng — a US citizen of Kachin ethnicity based in Maryland — who contacted VanDyke, paid SOLI a sum reportedly in the millions of dollars, coordinated logistics, and arranged the group's entry into Myanmar through the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram. VanDyke himself claimed not to know who his ultimate handlers were. VanDyke's account to Indian intelligence was itself revealing: across his known engagements — Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Myanmar — the pattern has been consistent. Regimes Washington sought to remove were the target. Native intermediaries apparently close to the "deep state" were the contact point. VanDyke was never in direct contact with any official US government body. In intelligence practice, this is a textbook "cut-out" driven operation: a structure that provides plausible deniability by insulating the principal from any traceable connection to the action.

The realist question this raises is straightforward: why would Ukrainian operatives, fighting an existential war at home, agree to participate in a Myanmar operation with no obvious Ukrainian national interest at stake? From a pure realism standpoint, states and their affiliated actors do not expend resources and risk personnel in theatres where they have no direct interest unless they receive something of value in return. Ukraine has no meaningful stake in who governs Naypyidaw. The only plausible answer — consistent with the broader pattern of Ukrainian asymmetric engagement across multiple theatres — is that participation in Myanmar was part of a transactional arrangement: Ukraine provides the operational expertise, the United States provides something Ukraine urgently needs, whether weapons, political support, intelligence, or diplomatic cover. Ukraine would be the instrument; Washington the primary beneficiary. Whether VanDyke is formally a CIA asset, a contractor operating through cut-outs, or simply an ideologically motivated actor whose interests happen to align with US foreign policy is, in some respects, beside the point. The arrangement reflects the terms on which Ukrainian military expertise is increasingly traded globally: Kyiv provides the operational capability; partner states provide the geopolitical dividend Ukraine cannot generate alone.

For Mali, the immediate question is whether the junta survives in its current form. Africa Corps helped hold the line in Bamako on April 25 — the airport did not fall, and the capital remains under government control. But the loss of the northern network, the death of the defence minister, the demonstrated ability of JNIM to besiege Bamako's supply routes, and the collapse of the AES's deterrence credibility collectively represent a governance crisis that military operations alone cannot resolve. The Malian conflict has demonstrated this repeatedly over fifteen years: every major escalation since 2012 has followed a period in which security-first approaches substituted for political accommodation. The junta has now foreclosed virtually every non-military mechanism through which grievances could be managed — no parties, no elections, no free press, no functioning civil society dialogue — leaving the state with nothing but force to answer a crisis that force alone did not create and cannot contain.

Algeria, which mediated the 2015 Algiers Accord that the junta subsequently abandoned, has re-emerged as the most likely external mediator — a country with significant leverage over both the Tuareg movements and JNIM's regional networks, and without France's disqualifying colonial baggage or Russia's significantly diminished credibility as a security guarantor following the events of April 25. Whether there is a political path out of this that leaves the AES intact, or whether April 2026 marks the beginning of its unravelling, is the question that will define the next phase of Sahel history. The offensive has been launched. The broader war that enabled it is not going anywhere.