Wagner's Successor Force Is Losing the War It Was Sent to Win
He organized Wagner's deployment to Mali and paid for it with his life. Eighteen months after Russia rebranded its mercenaries as a "cleaner" state force, the war it promised to win is the one killing it.
KATI, Mali — The town was supposed to be untouchable. Kati is Mali's garrison capital, the barracks town where the country's last two coups were planned, the place where the men who run Mali actually sleep. Before dawn on April 25, a vehicle drove up to one particular house inside it and detonated.
The house belonged to General Sadio Camara, Mali's defense minister. The blast killed him, his second wife, and two of his grandchildren. It also killed something else: the last credible argument that Russia's rebranded mercenary force in Africa was working.
Camara was not a bystander in that story. He was one of its authors. In 2023, the United States sanctioned him by name for organizing the original Wagner Group deployment to Mali, the deal that brought Russian fighters into the country in exchange for security guarantees and, investigators alleged, access to gold. He had been in the room, literally, since the 2020 coup that put Mali's junta in power. Al Jazeera would later describe him as one of the most influential figures within the ruling military leadership, a man some saw as a future president. On April 25, jihadist and Tuareg fighters chose his bedroom as a target, and the choice was not incidental.
The attack on Kati was one strike inside a nationwide offensive. Fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked JNIM and the Tuareg separatist Azawad Liberation Front hit Bamako, Gao, Mopti, and Sévaré simultaneously that morning, in what would become one of the most coordinated assaults Mali's junta has faced since seizing power. Junta leader Assimi Goïta was moved to a secure location in time and survived. His defense minister did not.
The town Wagner won, and lost again
The same wave of attacks pushed Malian troops and their Russian partners out of Kidal, a northern town that had carried outsized symbolic weight since November 2023, when Wagner fighters helped the Malian army recapture it from Tuareg control. At the time, Kidal was Moscow's proof of concept, evidence that Russian mercenaries could do what French and UN peacekeepers, after a decade of trying, could not. Residents watched both Malian soldiers and the Russians who had replaced Wagner withdraw again in April, this time for good. One local source told AFP the Russians were expected to leave the country through Libya.
By July, the fighting hadn't slowed, it had found a new target. On July 4, the same jihadist-Tuareg alliance struck Gao and the last two government-held towns in the Kidal region, Aguelhok and Anefis. The siege at Anefis ran six days. Malian forces say they broke it with 54 airstrikes and over 300 insurgents killed. But when an army convoy tried to withdraw from the town on July 19, it drove into an ambush. At least 50 soldiers didn't make it out.
A war crimes file with Russia's name on it
The force fighting alongside Mali through all of this is not Wagner anymore, at least not on paper. In June 2025, Wagner announced on Telegram that its mission in Mali was complete, "Mission accomplished," the message read, "PMC Wagner returns home" — and handed operations to Africa Corps, a unit built directly inside Russia's Ministry of Defense specifically to avoid the deniability problems and reputational damage that came with Wagner's brand after founder Yevgeny Prigozhin's failed mutiny and death in 2023. Reuters reporting on internal Telegram chats put the overlap in personnel at 70 to 80 percent former Wagner fighters. Same men, new letterhead.
The rebrand was supposed to buy discipline along with deniability. On July 31, Human Rights Watch published evidence it says shows otherwise. A Russian-flown Sukhoi Su-24 dropped munitions on the village of Kyrnia in Mali's Mopti region on June 15, killing eight civilians, three of them children, one strike landed outside a village elder's house, killing his wife and two of his children; a second hit a livestock market twenty meters away. Africa Corps posted footage of the strike itself, calling it a hit on a "gathering place of terrorist groups." HRW geolocated the video to the same village and found no evidence any fighters were among the dead. Separate reporting by Africa Defense Forum found the group has since begun using cluster munitions in Kidal-region communities, a direct violation of Mali's commitments under the international treaty banning them.
For the people who have lived through both eras, the distinction between the old brand and the new one was never obvious. A Mopti-region man named Bocar, who fled Wagner's operations once and returned home after the rebrand, told the Associated Press what he found waiting for him. "Only the name was changed," he said.
The pipeline the war hasn't touched
None of this has slowed the network that keeps feeding Russia's paramilitary machine fighters from outside Russia — including, still, from the Balkans. An April profile from the Jamestown Foundation traced the ongoing work of Davor Savičić, a Bosnian Serb with documented ties to both Wagner and Russian military intelligence, who has spent years recruiting Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin nationals through Telegram channels, reportedly helping some obtain fraudulent construction work permits to slip past border controls. An October 2025 BIRN investigation found the pipeline still active despite mercenary service being a criminal offense in all three countries. It is the same network, using the same platforms, that first drew international attention in 2022 and 2023, when Wagner murals appeared in Belgrade and Serbian recruits were spotted at the group's St. Petersburg headquarters.
Moscow's pitch to the region, and to every government weighing a Russian security partnership, was that Africa Corps represented something more disciplined and more accountable than the mercenary chaos that came before it. Mali was where that pitch was supposed to prove itself. Instead, it buried the minister who believed it, lost the town that was meant to be its showcase, and is now the subject of a war crimes file with Moscow's own defense ministry named as the perpetrator.
Only the name was changed.
