The leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane crash last week, and then Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the group’s fighters to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state.
Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, said the bilateral cooperation between Russia and Mali and the “sovereign choice” expressed by the military council regarding its international security partners “are of great concern to our former Western partners.”
“Russia, for its part, will continue to provide comprehensive assistance to Mali and other interested African partners, bilaterally and on the basis of equality and mutual respect,” he told the UN Security Council.
The 15-member council voted in June to end the decade-long peacekeeping mission in Mali after the junta abruptly asked the United Nations force there to leave the country, a move the United States said was behind the Wagner Group.
Mali is struggling to stamp out an Islamist insurgency that took hold in the aftermath of an uprising in 2012.
Mali’s military junta, which seized power in two coups in 2020 and 2021, cooperated with the Wagner Group in 2021.
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