CNN
—
The video is both gruesome and triumphant: rebel fighters, rifles slung over their shoulders, walk among a dozen corpses strewn across the sand and rocks. Gunfire can be heard off-camera.
The scene is from another battle in the vast desert of northern Mali, but this time the victim is Russian. At the end of the video, the camera pans to a bearded white man lying on the ground and appearing to beg for mercy.
Another video shows several white men, still alive, kneeling in the remains of a car while surrounded by guerrilla fighters, some of whom are seen kicking others in the head as a pickup truck approaches them.
The Russian mercenaries were apparently attacked last week while accompanying Malian government forces on a patrol near the Algerian border, a vast and dangerous area where jihadists and Tuareg groups have long been active.
The attack was claimed by Tuareg rebels and the Sahelian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JNIM), known for their ad hoc cooperation and likely working together to lure the Russian convoy into a trap.
JNIM claimed on Sunday that a “complex ambush” wiped out its convoy, killing 50 Russians and several Malian soldiers, and released a video showing several vehicles on fire and dozens of bodies in the area. A spokesman for the Tuareg militia group said several Malian and Russian fighters had also been captured during the fighting.
An unofficial Russian Telegram channel said as many as 80 Russians were killed.
It would be by far the worst loss for Russian paramilitary groups in years in Africa as the Russian government seeks to use proxy forces to counter Western influence and shore up unstable regimes across the Sahel and Central Africa.
In an unexpected development on Monday, Ukrainian officials alleged that Kiev had provided intelligence to the militants.
“The rebels received the necessary information and successfully carried out a military operation against Russian war criminals,” Andriy Yusov, head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said on Ukrainian television.
“We cannot discuss the details at this stage, but more details will be released in due course,” Yusof added.
Channels linked to the Wagner Group, a private military contractor operating in Africa and now part of what the Russian Defense Ministry calls Afrika Korps, initially reported that the group’s fighters had inflicted heavy losses on the militants.
However, the insurgents were regrouping and Wagner’s command “decided to send additional forces to the combat zone.”
In the fighting that continued from Thursday to Saturday, the jihadists used “heavy artillery, drones, [drones] One Telegram account linked to Wagner said a “suicide vehicle” had been found.
The Russian military’s last radio message late Saturday was: “We have three men left. We will keep fighting,” the station said.
Commander Sergei Shevchenko was among those killed in the fighting, according to Wagner 2 channel.
Among the dead was one of Russia’s most popular military bloggers, Nikita Fedyanin, whose Gray Zone channel has more than 500,000 subscribers, according to Russian Telegram channels.
Fedyanin’s death cannot be independently confirmed, but photos from the scene bear a strong resemblance to Fedyanin. Denis Korotkov, a longtime Wagner analyst, told CNN that the Grayzone channel had stopped updating it. “I think the story is true. He’s probably dead.”
A former commander of the ambushed unit said in a Telegram message that more than 80 people were killed and 15 more taken prisoner. The commander, who went by the call sign Rusich, said in the Telegram message that he was trying to convey a message to the Russian Defense Ministry: “I am ready to offer myself and all those who are ready to follow me free of charge to save my comrades.”
Another social media account linked to Wagner said, “As a result of fierce and unequal fighting, both our warriors and Malian troops died heroically,” and vowed that we know Russian warriors will continue their journey without a doubt, whether the enemy is “global terrorism, agents of the Western powers, or enraged Ukrainian heretics.”
There is no way to verify the exact number of Russian casualties — some Russian channels have put the death toll at fewer than 80 — and it is unclear how many Malian soldiers were killed. The Malian army said Friday that only two soldiers were killed, but that the clashes were occurring in an area “that has become a hotbed of concentration for terrorists of all kinds and smugglers.”
CNN has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment. Denis Korotkov of the London-based Dossier Centre said, “No official Russian Federation institution has spoken on this issue. Neither the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry nor the Kremlin have commented on the deaths of dozens of Russian nationals in clashes on the African continent outside the area of special military operations.”
Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have become accustomed to suffering losses in recent years in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mozambique and Mali: Wagner PMC lost hundreds, possibly thousands, of soldiers during the capture of the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut two years ago, and five years ago in Syria, a disastrous attack by Russian mercenaries on an oil refinery left dozens dead and wounded.
But outside eastern Ukraine, Russian mercenaries have rarely suffered setbacks on such a scale.
Amid ongoing unrest in Mali, the Central African Republic, Niger and Burkina Faso, Kremlin-backed Russian forces have stepped in to try to usurp traditional French influence, beginning in the Central African Republic in 2018. Mali’s military junta turned to Wagner soon after seizing power in 2021.
After Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a mysterious plane crash near Moscow last year, many of his fighters were integrated into Russia’s Africa Corps, commanded by Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Yevkurov is an occasional visitor to Mali, and Afrika Korps said on its Telegram channel in January that it planned to increase its troop strength in Mali from 100 to 300.
The recent clashes also highlight the growing influence of a coalition of extremist groups both within and outside Mali.
Alliances among rebel groups in the Sahel are constantly shifting, with Tuareg groups sometimes cooperating with JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate in the region.
JNIM has claimed responsibility for attacks on Wagner faction in Mali in the past, and has been particularly active in northern Mali and several other parts of West Africa in recent days. In the last week alone, JNIM claimed five attacks in various parts of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist groups. One of those attacks was an IED attack on a Russian vehicle in the same part of Mali as the latest devastating attack.
They then expanded the scope of their operations last week with an unusual attack on a military base in northern Togo.
But an ambitious attack on a Russian-Mali convoy near the Algerian border is likely to bring wider visibility to JNIM’s activities.
