The video is as triumphant as it is horrifying. Rebel fighters, rifles slung over their shoulders, march among a dozen bodies scattered on the sand and rocks. Off-screen, gunshots can be heard.
The scene takes place in another battle in the vast deserts of northern Mali, except this time the victims are Russians. At the end of the video, the camera focuses on a bearded white man lying on the ground, apparently begging the soldiers for mercy.
Another video shows several white men, still alive, kneeling amid the wreckage of a vehicle as guerrillas surround them. A van carrying militants approaches the men, while others kick them in the head.
The Russian mercenaries appear to have been attacked while accompanying Malian government troops on patrol last week near the Algerian border, a vast hostile region where jihadist and Tuareg groups have long been active.
The attack was claimed by a Tuareg rebel group and the Al-Qaeda affiliate in the Sahel, JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). Known for their occasional cooperation, they appear to have collaborated to trap the Russian convoy.
JNIM said Sunday that a “complex ambush” wiped out the convoy, killing 50 Russians and several Malian soldiers, and released videos showing several vehicles burning and dozens of bodies in the area. A spokesman for the Tuareg militant group said Malian soldiers and Russian fighters were also captured in the battle.
According to some unofficial Russian Telegram channels, up to 80 Russians were killed.
It would be by far the worst loss for Russian paramilitaries in years of operations in Africa, as the Kremlin seeks to use proxy forces to challenge Western influence across the Sahel and Central Africa and prop up unstable regimes.
On Monday, in an extraordinary turnaround, a Ukrainian official claimed that kyiv had provided intelligence to the militants.
Andriy Yusov, a representative of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), told Ukrainian television that “the rebels received the necessary information, which made it possible to carry out a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”
“We will not discuss details at this time, but there will be more to come,” Yusov added.
Channels associated with the Wagner Group, a private military contractor active in Africa that is now part of what the Russian Defense Ministry calls the Africa Corps, said its fighters initially inflicted heavy losses on the militants.
But the militants had regrouped and Wagner’s command “decided to transfer additional forces into the combat zone.”
In a battle that lasted from Thursday to Saturday, the jihadists carried out massive attacks, “using heavy weapons, drones and ballistic missiles.” [drones] and suicide vehicles,” according to a Telegram account associated with Wagner.
The last radio message from the Russian contingent, broadcast late Saturday, said: “There are still three of us, we continue to fight,” according to the channel.
Major Sergei Shevchenko was among those killed in combat, 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 photo taken at the scene bears a strong resemblance to him. A longtime Wagner analyst told CNN that the Grey Zone channel was no longer updated. “I think the story is true; he’s probably dead.”
The former commander of the ambushed contingent said on Telegram that more than 80 men were killed and more than 15 captured. The commander – whose call sign is Rusich – said on Telegram that he was trying to convey a message to the Russian Defense Ministry. “I am ready to give myself and everyone who is ready to follow me absolutely free of charge to save the guys.”
Another social media account linked to Wagner spoke of a “heavy and unequal battle, as a result of which our fighters and the Malian military perished heroically.” It assured that no matter who the enemy is, “global terrorism, the henchmen of Western countries or the rabid Ukrainian heresy… we know that the Russian warrior will certainly continue his path.”
There is no way to verify the exact number of Russian casualties (some Russian channels claim that the toll does not reach 80 dead), nor the number of Malian soldiers killed. The Malian armed forces said Friday that only two soldiers were killed, but that the clashes were taking place in a region that “remains a stronghold of concentration of terrorists and traffickers of all stripes.”
CNN has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment. Denis Korotkov, who works for the London-based Dossier Center, noted that “no official body of the Russian Federation has commented on this issue. Neither the Defense Ministry, nor the Foreign Ministry, nor the Kremlin have commented on the deaths of dozens of Russian citizens in clashes on the African continent outside the zone of special military operations.”
A blow to Africa
Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups are accustomed to losses – in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mozambique and Mali in recent years. The Russian mercenary group Wagner lost hundreds, if not thousands, of men when it captured the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut two years ago. And in Syria five years ago, a disastrous attack by Russian mercenaries on an oil refinery left dozens of casualties.
But beyond eastern Ukraine, Russian mercenaries have rarely suffered a setback of this magnitude.
Amid upheavals in Mali, the Central African Republic, Niger and Burkina Faso, Russian elements, with Kremlin support, have stepped in to usurp traditional French influence, starting with the CAR in 2018. Mali’s military regime turned to Wagner shortly after taking power in 2021.
After Wagner’s boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash near Moscow last year, several of his fighters were integrated into the Russian Africa Corps led by Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Yevkurov is an occasional visitor to Mali and on his Telegram channel, the Africa Corps said in January that it planned to increase its troop levels in Mali from 100 to 300 troops.
The latest clashes also indicate that a coalition of militant groups is gaining strength, in Mali and beyond.
Alliances among rebel groups in the Sahel are constantly shifting, but Tuareg groups have at times made common cause with al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, JNIM.
JNIM has claimed to have attacked Wagner contingents in Mali in the past. It has been particularly active recently in northern Mali and in several parts of West Africa. In the past week alone, JNIM has claimed responsibility for five attacks in different parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist groups. One of them was an improvised explosive device attack on a Russian vehicle in the same part of Mali as the latest devastating attack.
In addition, it carried out a rare attack on a military base in northern Togo last week, expanding its scope of operations.
But it was the ambitious attack on the Russian-Malian convoy near the Algerian border that would propel JNIM’s operations to a much wider audience.
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