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Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant battleground losses in Mali, the military company acknowledged on Monday, after days of conflicting accounts of what happened during fighting with rebels on the border with Algeria.
The group said its 13th storm brigade, which is fighting ethnic Tuaregs alongside the Malian armed forces, sustained losses during “fierce battles” with the rebels.
It did not share a casualty number, but graphic videos posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a sandy landscape strewn with dozens of bodies, some wearing Russian Orthodox crosses, and multiple burnt-out vehicles.
Russian military bloggers described the incident as a rebel “ambush”, while Wagner, writing via an affiliated Telegram channel, said a sandstorm contributed to the failure of the operation.
The Permanent Strategic Framework for Peace, Security and Development (CSP-PSD), a coalition of rebel Tuaregs, took responsibility for the attack, claiming to have injured and killed dozens of Malian soldiers and Wagner mercenaries around the northeastern town of Tinzaouaten.
Among those killed was the Wagner 13th brigade leader Sergei Shevchenko, the group said, claiming his last radio signal came in at 5pm on July 27.
The neo-Nazi Rusich group, which has operated as part of the Wagner structure, said that Nikita Fedyanin, the main author of the Grey Zone channel on Telegram, was also killed. Grey Zone has more than 500,000 readers and has been the primary source of news about Wagner.
On July 23, Fedyanin’s channel shared a photograph of Wagner fighters grouped around a vehicle in a desert landscape, describing it as “Wagner stormtroopers in an African Sahel country”.
Mali’s armed forces said two of its soldiers died in battle but that it killed 20 rebel fighters. Mali has denied employing Wagner mercenaries, instead claiming that the Russian forces are military instructors teaching its troops how to operate Russian-made materiel.
CSP-PSD said in its own account that it lost seven fighters, adding that it seized military equipment including armoured vehicles in the aftermath of fighting last Thursday and Friday.
African Initiative, a media outlet with links to Russia’s intelligence services, according to the US state department, said the rebel ambush “was organised very competently, possibly with the participation of instructors from western intelligence services”.
The Tuareg, an ethnic minority of largely nomadic herders living across the semi-arid Sahel region, have long felt disempowered from mainstream life in Mali and hold grievances against the state.
CSP-PSD launched an insurgency in 2012, seeking to form a breakaway state, before a tentative peace deal signed in 2015. This collapsed two years ago when the rebels pulled out citing a lack of political seriousness on the part of Mali’s ruling military junta.
Wagner, founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been active in Mali since 2021, fighting alongside the army in its decade-long battle against the rebels as well as Islamist jihadis and other groups.
Mali, like its neighbours Burkina Faso and Niger, has been beset by a long-running insurgency by al-Qaeda and Isis affiliates that have killed thousands and displaced millions of people. About 100 Russian fighters arrived in Niger in April.
Wagner has long been accused of human rights abuses and large-scale massacres of civilians in Mali and in the Central African Republic, where it also operates.
The worsening security situation across the Sahel has contributed to military coups that have ousted mostly democratic governments over their failures to contain the spreading insecurity.
Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are now ruled by military regimes that have cut ties with traditional western partners such as former colonial power France and the US. French forces have been kicked out of all three countries and the US is expected to withdraw its troops from Niger this year.
These breakdowns have coincided with regimes drawing closer to Moscow, which offers security assistance through proxy groups such as Wagner and diplomatic cover amid western pressure to hold democratic elections.
In a Telegram group for the wives and girlfriends of Wagner men posted overseas, women discussed the fate of the 13th storm division. An admin shared a list of more than 75 names of men “to pray for”, while the women swapped news and pictures of churches they went to on Sunday.
Some pro-Kremlin military commentators have blamed the failure of the Mali operation on the clean-up imposed on Wagner after Prigozhin led an uprising against the Russian defence ministry last year. He died with several other Wagner leaders in a plane crash believed to be a Kremlin-directed assassination.