Mali Cuts Ties with Ukraine, Claiming Kyiv’s Involvement in Rebel Attacks

Kyiv said Mali failed to provide evidence of any Ukrainian involvement in the attacks by Tuareg rebels in northern Mali that killed Russian and Malian troops

By Siobhán O'Grady, Rachel Chason and Serhii Korolchuk

Washington Post

August 5, 2024 at 3:35 p.m. EDT

KYIV — Mali has announced that it has cut diplomatic ties with Ukraine, accusing Kyiv of involvement in attacks on Malian soldiers in the West African country in late July.

The Ukrainian government said no evidence was provided to support the allegation.

But the announcement came late Sunday after Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the GUR, commented on fierce battles in northern Mali between Tuareg rebels and Malian and Russian paramilitary troops on Ukrainian government-backed TV.

Yusov said in a broadcast last week that “the fact that the rebels received the necessary information — and not only information — which allowed them to conduct a successful operation against Russian war criminals, the whole world has already seen this.”

“We will certainly not discuss the details at this time; let’s say, there will be a continuation,” he added.

Dozens of Malian and Russian fighters from the Wagner Group may have been killed in the attacks, the Associated Press reported, citing an analyst who specializes in the region, although the exact death toll was not immediately clear. Wagner-linked Telegram channels reported that the group had sustained losses in northern Mali.

Mali described Yusov’s comments as evidence of “Ukraine’s involvement in a cowardly, traitorous and barbaric attack by armed terrorist groups,” resulting in the deaths of Malian soldiers, and said that it now considers supporting Ukraine to be akin to supporting international terrorism.

Mali’s angry response comes as Kyiv tries to court countries from the global south to assist in the battle against Russia’s invasion, especially as Ukraine pushes for an international peace process to end the war and reclaim its territory now controlled by Russia.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry decried Mali’s decision to cut ties, calling it “shortsighted and hasty,” and said it “resolutely rejects” Mali’s accusations that it is supporting international terrorism.

Mali “decided to sever diplomatic relations with Ukraine without conducting a thorough study of the facts and circumstances of the incident in the north of Mali, and without providing any evidence of Ukraine’s involvement in the said event,” the ministry said in a statement Monday. The GUR reposted the statement.

In Mali, military leaders who seized power in a coup in 2020 have rejected help from traditional sources, asking the French military to leave and shuttering the U.N. mission. Mali’s leaders have instead turned toward Russia, announcing that Russian trainers were coming to the country in 2021. Mali’s government has always said that it has a “state to state” relationship with Russia, but it is widely known that the mercenary group Wagner has been fighting alongside Malian troops.

In its three-page communiqué, Mali’s government claimed that Yurii Pyvovarov, the Ukrainian ambassador to Senegal and several other West African countries, had “openly and unequivocally attached the support of his country to international terrorism, especially in Mali.”

Mali is now calling for the statements of Yusov and Pyvovarov to be referred to legal authorities, claiming they “constitute acts of terrorism and apology of terrorism.” It is also requesting that measures be taken by other African nations to ensure stability in Mali, “especially in regards to Ukrainian embassies located in the subregion with terrorists disguised as diplomats.”

The Malian government also called for a formal alert to be issued to regional and international authorities of countries that support Ukraine to “indicate that this country openly and publicly presents its support for terrorism.”

Ukraine said Mali has ignored that military groups under Kremlin control, including Wagner, “use terrorist methods and are directly involved in numerous war crimes, killings of civilians and cruel treatment of prisoners of war both in Ukraine and in African countries.”

The Wagner Group, previously led by Russian mercenary commander Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a onetime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has provided fighters to war zones from Libya and West Africa to Ukraine and beyond. In eastern Ukraine, Wagner fighters deployed to battle Ukrainian forces and eventually succeeded in seizing the city of Bakhmut last year.

Shortly after, Prigozhin launched a march on Moscow — an attempted insurrection that posed one of the most serious threats to Putin’s power. Prigozhin eventually called off the march when he was offered a safe passage out of the country to Belarus. He was then killed in a plane crash in Russia two months later.

Russian soldiers and paramilitary fighters are present in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso and Niger, as well as Mali.

Human rights groups have accused both the Malian government and Wagner of involvement in war crimes against civilians in the country.

Wassim Nasr, a Sahel specialist and senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, said that he does not believe Ukrainian forces were directly involved in the attacks in late July or provided the intelligence that led to them, but he said they have provided support to the rebels including some financial aid.

Tuareg rebels reached out to Ukraine for help in late 2023 and early 2024, Nasr said, and a small number of rebels received training in Ukraine, along with training on how to use miniature drones, which are used prolifically on both sides of the front line in Ukraine.

The Malian army and Wagner forces were moving in a convoy toward the Algerian border when they were stopped by rebels on July 25, Nasr said, and eventually retreated back toward the town of Kidal.

They were traveling through a valley when rebels and fighters with Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), which is an al-Qaeda affiliate, simultaneously began firing at them, said Nasr, who is in touch with both JNIM and rebel fighters.

JNIM has claimed that 50 fighters were killed and the rebels have claimed that 84 were killed. The relationship between JNIM and the rebel group has evolved over time, with the two sometimes fighting and other times forming alliances.

Both JNIM and Islamic State-Sahel Province have increasingly targeted Wagner in their propaganda in recent years, using the mercenary group’s atrocities as a tool to boost their own popularity. In a rare video appearance late last year, JNIM leader Iyad ag Ghali accused Russian mercenaries of “violence and cruelty” and positioned JNIM as a defender of civilians.

“We have seen JNIM pivot from demonizing the French to demonizing Wagner,” said Daniel Eizenga, a research fellow focused on the Sahel at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. “And the tactics that Wagner uses are so brutal, and so often target civilian populations, that it makes JNIM’s pivot credible.”

J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region, said that the severity of the attack in Mali showed that “Russia is in no position to replace the departing Western partners.”

Pham predicted that the security situation will continue to deteriorate in the Sahel, which stretches across the continent south of the Sahara desert, noting that Niger was one country with a “more effective counterterrorism effort before the coup because of the support of the U.S. and its allies.”

On Monday, the United States withdrew from its base in northern Niger after being evicted by the Nigerien junta, marking the end of Washington’s strongest military relationship in the region.

Chason reported from Niamey, Niger.