The Sahel's Sovereignty Mirage: Russia, Juntas, and the Limits of Liberation

The Sovereignty Mirage

Three military juntas, three flags, one shared delusion. When the leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023, they proclaimed “an architecture of collective defence and mutual assistance” that would finally deliver what decades of French intervention and UN peacekeeping had not: security. Eighteen months later, the Alliance of Sahel States has expelled French forces, quit ECOWAS, launched a 5,000-strong unified military, and invited Russian mercenaries to fill the vacuum. The question is whether this constitutes a security architecture or an elaborate suicide pact.

The answer is neither—and both. The AES represents something more interesting than the binary framing suggests: a genuine sovereignty movement that has outsourced its enforcement to an actor with no interest in sovereignty at all. Russia’s Africa Corps does not want the Sahel to succeed. It wants the Sahel to need Russia. These are incompatible objectives masquerading as partnership.

What the West Misunderstands

Western analysts tend to view the AES through a Cold War lens: Russian expansion versus Western retreat. This framing flatters Moscow and misreads the region. The coups in Mali (2020, 2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) were not Russian operations. They were indigenous responses to state failure—specifically, the failure of French-backed governments to stop jihadist violence that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.

The structural dynamic is straightforward. France’s Operation Barkhane, which ran from 2014 to 2022, failed to defeat the insurgency despite deploying 5,100 troops across five countries. The UN’s MINUSMA mission in Mali became the deadliest peacekeeping operation in UN history. Neither delivered what populations demanded: physical security. When military officers seized power promising a different approach, they found genuine popular support—not because Sahelians love coups, but because they had exhausted alternatives.

Russia exploited this opening. It did not create it.

The distinction matters because it shapes what comes next. If the AES were merely a Russian puppet operation, its trajectory would depend on Moscow’s strategic choices. But the juntas possess genuine agency, which means their decisions—and their contradictions—will determine outcomes.

Consider Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s 36-year-old president. His formative experience was frontline combat in northern Mali, where he witnessed the inadequacy of conventional counterinsurgency. He explicitly models himself on Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader assassinated in 1987 at age 37—an incomplete generational transmission that current Sahel leaders are attempting to finish. Traoré’s anti-Western rhetoric is not performative. He genuinely believes that “Western influence in Africa is fundamentally exploitative and must be completely eliminated.” This conviction drives policy choices that Russia encourages but did not manufacture.

Colonel Assimi Goïta of Mali operates differently. The son of a military officer, raised in barracks, trained by American special forces, he is more pragmatic than ideological. He expelled French troops not from revolutionary conviction but from calculated assessment that they had become a political liability. His relationship with Russia is transactional: security services in exchange for mining concessions. Goïta would work with the West again if the terms suited him. Traoré would not.

General Abdourahamane Tchiani of Niger falls between these poles. A career military officer decorated for crisis management, he launched his coup after protecting President Bazoum’s transition in 2021 and receiving no recognition for it. His grievance is personal as much as ideological. He seeks alternative partnerships when rejecting traditional ones—not from anti-Western conviction, but from wounded pride and strategic opportunism.

Three leaders, three psychologies, one alliance. The AES is not a monolith.

The Wagner Transition

What Russia provides is not a security architecture but a security service—and an extractive one at that. The Wagner Group operated in Mali from 2021 with approximately 1,000 personnel. Following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August 2023, operations were rebranded as “Africa Corps” under direct Russian Ministry of Defense control. The personnel remained. The model remained. Only the letterhead changed.

That model is simple: military services in exchange for mining access. According to investigative reporting, Wagner-linked entities have extracted an estimated $2.5 billion in gold from the Sahel since 2021. This represents not corruption in the traditional sense but the actual business arrangement. The juntas lack the revenue to pay for security services in cash. They pay in gold.

The arrangement creates a structural trap. Russia has no incentive to defeat the insurgency, because doing so would eliminate the demand for its services. What it needs is perpetual instability—enough violence to justify its presence, not enough to collapse the states it parasitizes. This is not speculation about Russian intentions. It is the revealed preference of Russian behavior.

Consider the evidence. In areas where Wagner/Africa Corps operates alongside Malian forces, civilian casualties have increased, not decreased. The Global Terrorism Index 2024 documents that Mali experienced 1,486 civilian deaths from state actors between January 2024 and March 2025. These casualties do not represent collateral damage in counterinsurgency operations. They represent a business model. Violence against Fulani and Tuareg communities generates the grievances that jihadist groups exploit for recruitment—ensuring the insurgency continues, ensuring Russian services remain necessary.

The juntas understand this dynamic at some level. They are not stupid. But they face a temporal trap: the insurgency threatens their survival now, while the long-term consequences of Russian dependency remain abstract. Hyperbolic discounting under uncertainty makes institutional fragmentation appear optimal in the short term, even when it destroys long-term capacity.

The Jihadist Paradox

The insurgency itself has evolved in ways that complicate simple narratives. The Islamic State Sahel Province and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) are not merely terrorist organizations. They are proto-states that provide governance services in territories they control: dispute resolution, justice, taxation, even infrastructure maintenance. In many areas, they represent the only functioning authority.

This creates a measurement problem. Western analysts track terrorism fatalities as the primary metric of insurgent strength. But fatality data reveals a paradox: Burkina Faso experienced 17% fewer attacks in 2023 but 68% more deaths per attack. The insurgency is not weakening. It is concentrating force—conducting fewer operations of higher lethality to probe state capacity for responding to mass-casualty events.

The geographic spread tells a similar story. Jihadist groups now operate using pre-colonial Tuareg territorial concepts—Azawagh, Anderamboukane—rather than colonial state boundaries. They have mapped their organizational structure onto ethnic and clan-based divisions that predate the states they fight. This is not coincidence. It is strategic adaptation to terrain that colonial borders never reflected.

Against this enemy, the AES offers a 5,000-strong unified force launched in December 2024. The force represents genuine innovation: joint command structures, shared intelligence, coordinated operations across borders that colonial powers drew arbitrarily. But 5,000 troops cannot secure three countries with a combined population of 70 million across territory larger than Western Europe.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Effective counterinsurgency doctrine suggests ratios of 20-25 security personnel per 1,000 population in contested areas. The AES states would need 1.4 to 1.75 million security personnel to meet this threshold. They have perhaps 50,000 combined, including police and gendarmerie. The gap cannot be closed through willpower or Russian mercenaries.

The ECOWAS Rupture

When Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger announced their “immediate withdrawal” from ECOWAS in January 2024, they severed more than diplomatic ties. They exited a legal and economic architecture that had governed West African integration for five decades.

The ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement guarantees citizens of member states the right to enter, reside, and work across the bloc without visas. The ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme eliminates tariffs on goods produced within the region. The ECOWAS Court of Justice provides supranational adjudication of disputes. The AES states have now lost access to all three.

The immediate economic impact is manageable. Informal cross-border trade, which constitutes 20-62% of African GDP depending on the estimate, does not require formal treaty frameworks. Traders will continue trading. Migrants will continue migrating. The borders are too porous to police.

But the long-term institutional damage is severe. The AES has announced plans for a shared bank, common market, and monetary union—institutions that ECOWAS spent decades building. Creating these from scratch, in countries with fragile state capacity and active insurgencies, represents magical thinking. The AES currency announcement functions like cargo cult ritual: treating the symbol as the output rather than the means to an end.

More practically, ECOWAS withdrawal eliminates the legal architecture for resolving disputes. When the AES states inevitably conflict—over borders, over refugees, over resource extraction—they will lack institutional mechanisms for resolution. The Liptako-Gourma Charter commits signatories to mutual defense, but mutual defense pacts between authoritarian regimes have a poor historical record. They work until interests diverge.

The Resource Curse, Accelerated

Gold prices have reached historic highs. This is the worst possible news for the Sahel.

The AES states sit atop significant gold deposits—Burkina Faso alone contains reserves “in every region of the country.” At current prices, this represents enormous potential revenue. But the revenue flows not to state treasuries but to armed actors who control extraction sites: Wagner-linked entities, jihadist groups, local militias, and artisanal miners operating outside any formal framework.

The structural problem is that gold deposits are geographically ubiquitous. When a resource exists everywhere, the state cannot establish a monopoly on extraction without omnipresent force—force the AES states manifestly lack. This transforms sovereignty from territorial control into a competitive extraction race where armed actors capture rents faster than states can tax them.

Wagner’s business model exploits this dynamic perfectly. It does not need to formalize artisanal mining. It needs to capture the informal flows that formalization attempts have failed to regulate. The “one-size-fits-all” licensing regimes that development agencies have promoted for decades systematically fail to accommodate diverse mining methods. Wagner succeeds by ignoring formalization entirely and extracting from the permanent informality gap.

The gold price surge creates what might be called metabolic arbitrage: the AES states can convert stored geological energy (gold) at unprecedented exchange rates to import operational energy (fuel, ammunition, food). This sustains military operations in the short term. It also accelerates resource depletion without building institutional capacity. The juntas are eating their seed corn.

The Legitimacy Question

Do Sahelians support the juntas? The honest answer is: probably yes, for now, with significant caveats.

Public opinion data from the region is scarce and unreliable. But the available evidence suggests genuine popular support for the sovereignty narrative the juntas promote. Anti-French sentiment runs deep, rooted in colonial history and reinforced by Barkhane’s failure. Russian information operations have amplified this sentiment, but they did not create it.

The juntas have also dismantled the political parties and civil society organizations that might articulate alternative visions. This is not incidental. Freedom House’s 2024 report on Burkina Faso documents systematic suppression of political opposition, media, and judicial independence. The space for dissent has collapsed.

This creates a legitimacy trap. The juntas derive support from promising security. They cannot deliver security because the insurgency is structurally advantaged. They cannot acknowledge failure because they have eliminated the institutions that might process political accountability. So they double down on sovereignty rhetoric while security deteriorates.

The information environment compounds the problem. West African societies possess indigenous information validation systems—griot networks, joking relationships across ethnic lines, oral traditions—that operate independently of broadcast media. Russian disinformation campaigns have proven effective at manipulating formal media, but they struggle to penetrate these informal networks. The juntas’ legitimacy depends less on what state media reports than on what people experience directly: whether their villages are safe, whether their children can attend school, whether markets function.

By this measure, legitimacy is eroding. Displacement figures continue to rise. Jihadist attacks continue. The security situation is objectively worse than when the coups occurred.

What Happens Next

The default trajectory is grim but not catastrophic. The AES states will not collapse into complete state failure—they lack the capacity for even that. Instead, they will settle into a pattern familiar from other fragile states: nominal sovereignty over capitals and major cities, contested control of hinterlands, permanent low-intensity conflict, and dependence on external patrons who extract resources while providing minimal security.

Russia will remain engaged as long as gold flows. It has no interest in the Sahel beyond extraction. When resources deplete or prices fall, Russian attention will shift elsewhere, leaving behind weapons, grievances, and institutional wreckage.

The insurgency will persist because it has achieved strategic equilibrium. Jihadist groups control enough territory to sustain operations but not enough to trigger the kind of international intervention that destroyed the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq. They have learned from that experience. They will not overreach.

ECOWAS will eventually readmit the AES states, probably within five years, because the alternatives are worse. The bloc cannot sustain a permanent rupture with three member states. Some face-saving formula will emerge—new elections, transitional arrangements, security cooperation frameworks—that allows reintegration without requiring the juntas to admit failure.

The question is what happens between now and then.

Alternative Paths

Three intervention points could alter the trajectory, each with significant trade-offs.

First, the African Union could broker a security partnership that provides alternatives to Russia. The AU has the legitimacy that Western actors lack. It could coordinate an African-led force—drawing on Nigerian, Senegalese, and Chadian capabilities—that offers security services without the extractive model Russia employs. The trade-off: this requires AU members to commit troops and resources to a conflict that does not directly threaten them. Nigeria, the obvious anchor, faces its own insurgency in the northeast. Senegal has limited expeditionary capacity. Chad is itself fragile. The political will does not exist.

Second, Western powers could offer unconditional economic support—not tied to democratic transition—to reduce the juntas’ dependence on Russian extraction. This would require abandoning the democracy-promotion framework that has governed Western engagement for decades. The trade-off: it rewards coup-makers, signals that military seizures of power carry no cost, and potentially entrenches authoritarian rule. It might also fail, since the juntas’ anti-Western positioning is now constitutive of their legitimacy.

Third, the insurgency could be addressed through negotiation rather than military defeat. JNIM has indicated willingness to negotiate in some contexts. A political settlement that incorporates jihadist governance structures into formal state frameworks—essentially, federalism with sharia characteristics—might reduce violence. The trade-off: this legitimizes groups responsible for mass atrocities, abandons populations to governance systems that violate human rights, and may simply provide jihadists time to consolidate before resuming conflict.

None of these options is attractive. That is the nature of the situation.

The Honest Assessment

The AES does not create a viable security architecture. Its mutual defense commitments are aspirational, its unified force is undersized, its institutional capacity is minimal, and its Russian partner has interests antithetical to its stated goals. The architecture exists on paper. It does not exist in practice.

But neither does the AES accelerate descent into a “Wagner-controlled failed state zone.” The juntas retain genuine agency. They are not Russian puppets. They have made choices—expelling French forces, quitting ECOWAS, inviting Russian mercenaries—that reflect indigenous political calculations, not Kremlin directives. Those choices may prove catastrophic. They are nonetheless sovereign choices.

What the AES represents is something more banal than either triumphant sovereignty or Russian conquest: the latest iteration of a pattern that has characterized the Sahel since independence. Weak states, strong societies, porous borders, competing armed actors, external patrons extracting resources while providing inadequate security. The faces change. The structure persists.

The juntas have promised to break this pattern. They will not. They lack the capacity. What they have done is replace one set of external patrons with another, while dismantling the domestic institutions that might eventually have built genuine state capacity. This is not liberation. It is substitution.

The people of the Sahel deserve better. They are unlikely to receive it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the Alliance of Sahel States and when was it formed? A: The AES is a military and political confederation between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, established through the Liptako-Gourma Charter signed on September 16, 2023. It evolved from a mutual defense pact into a full confederation on July 6, 2024, with plans for economic integration including a shared bank and common currency.

Q: Has Russian involvement improved security in the Sahel? A: No. Despite the deployment of approximately 1,000 Wagner Group (now Africa Corps) personnel in Mali since 2021, civilian casualties from state actors have increased, and jihadist groups continue to expand territorial control. The Global Terrorism Index 2024 documents worsening security conditions across all three AES states.

Q: Why did Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger leave ECOWAS? A: The three countries announced their withdrawal in January 2024, citing ECOWAS sanctions imposed after their respective coups and what they called the bloc’s drift from its founding principles. The withdrawal became effective in January 2025, ending access to ECOWAS free movement provisions, trade liberalization schemes, and supranational courts.

Q: What happened to the Wagner Group after Prigozhin’s death? A: Following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August 2023, Wagner operations in Africa were rebranded as “Africa Corps” and placed under direct Russian Ministry of Defense control by 2024. The transition maintained similar personnel and operational models while formalizing state oversight of what had been a nominally private military company.

Sources & Further Reading

The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:

• Alliance of Sahel States Wikipedia entry - foundational timeline and treaty details
• BBC reporting on Wagner-to-Africa Corps transition - documentation of Russian military reorganization in Africa
• Global Terrorism Index 2024 - comprehensive terrorism fatality and trend data
• Fragile States Index Africa rankings - state capacity measurements
• Freedom House Burkina Faso 2024 report - documentation of political repression
• ECOWAS Protocol on Free Movement - legal framework for regional integration
• Al Jazeera coverage of AES confederation treaty - July 2024 treaty signing details
• IISS analysis of Operation Barkhane - assessment of French military intervention