Sieges around the north, a militia-based state response, and the region's largest displacement — with almost no published count of any of it.
Counter-terrorismDefence
Open the full relationship record →Coverage · Central Sahel
Vigil publishes no measure of how strong or how hostile a relationship is — the description and its evidence are the record.
Two insurgencies fighting each other over the same ground, with civilians between them.
Defence
Open the full relationship record →The army that retook Kidal in 2023 and the front that took much of the north back in 2026 — the Algiers accord's collapse, as a war.
DefenceCounter-terrorism
Open the full relationship record →A garrison army holding hubs and an insurgency attacking the roads between them — the war's central military relationship since 2017.
Counter-terrorismDefence
Open the full relationship record →An insurgency that has offered to talk and a state that has refused to, now contesting the roads rather than the towns.
Counter-terrorismDefence
Open the full relationship record →The war in Niger's west — a state ranked second among reported killers of its own civilians, fighting the province that ranks first.
Counter-terrorismDefence
Open the full relationship record →The broker of every Malian peace deal, estranged for fifteen months over a drone, and back at the table by August 2026.
DiplomaticBorder securityTrade
Open the full relationship record →Severed by Bamako on 4 August 2024 over a Ukrainian intelligence spokesman's remark, and not restored since.
Diplomatic
Open the full relationship record →Alleged by three governments and by Moscow, described by participants in one outlet's reporting, and denied by both of the parties to it.
TrainingIntelligenceEquipment transfer
Open the full relationship record →A country that left the bloc and keeps its fuel inside it — in tank farms on other states' territory.
TradeInfrastructureEnergy
Open the full relationship record →It left the institution and kept the ports — which is the opening an armed group turned into a strategy.
TradeInfrastructureEnergy
Open the full relationship record →A landlocked state whose principal route to the sea was closed by politics, not by fighting — and only partly replaced since.
TradeInfrastructureEnergy
Open the full relationship record →Founding membership of a bloc whose common enemies cross its internal borders more fluidly than its own forces do.
DefenceInstitutionalDiplomaticTrade
Open the full relationship record →Out with the other two in January 2025 — and still importing almost everything it consumes through the bloc it left.
InstitutionalDiplomaticTradeLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →The state that broke first, in the bloc that turned its break into an institution.
DefenceInstitutionalDiplomaticTrade
Open the full relationship record →Sanctioned to force an election, radicalised instead, and gone by January 2025 — the first of three.
InstitutionalDiplomaticTradeLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →The member that hosts the bloc's joint command, its Russian interlocutor and, in August 2026, a mutiny in the same capital.
DefenceInstitutionalDiplomaticTrade
Open the full relationship record →Sanctioned after the 2023 coup, out by January 2025, and still routing its trade through the neighbour that closed the border.
InstitutionalDiplomaticTradeLegal and treaty
Open the full relationship record →Aircraft handed over on the tarmac at Bamako, instructors in the camps and personnel in the columns — what the Russian partnership delivers to the army.
Equipment transferTrainingDefence
Open the full relationship record →A defence relationship that asks for nothing — which is the whole of its appeal, and the reason it outlasted the Western one.
Equipment transferTrainingDefence
Open the full relationship record →An instructor contingent an order of magnitude smaller than Mali's, an expansion that did not happen, and a partial recall.
DefenceTraining
Open the full relationship record →A joint command inaugurated in Bamako and headquartered in Niamey, to which the army contributes a share of an announced six thousand troops.
DefenceCounter-terrorismInstitutional
Open the full relationship record →From the intervention Bamako asked for in 2013 to the treaty it denounced in 2022 — the relationship the Russian presence replaced.
DefenceCounter-terrorismBasingTraining
Open the full relationship record →Ten years of a peacekeeping mission with no peace to keep, ended in six months when the host asked it to leave.
DefenceHumanitarianInstitutionalDiplomatic
Open the full relationship record →Combat manpower and political cover, bought with mining revenue and paid for in reputation.
DefenceTrainingEquipment transferFinance
Open the full relationship record →Sixty years of defence cooperation ended in five months — the agreements denounced in August 2023, the last French troops gone by Christmas.
DefenceCounter-terrorismBasingTraining
Open the full relationship record →The one deployment Moscow has publicly admitted fought — at the airport in January 2026, and at its own base in the August mutiny.
DefenceTraining
Open the full relationship record →The moment three separate security relationships acquired a single counterparty.
DefenceDiplomaticInstitutionalTraining
Open the full relationship record →A settlement torn up in 2024 and a front formed to replace it, contesting Kidal and the idea of Azawad.
DiplomaticInstitutionalDefence
Open the full relationship record →Descriptive records, not ratings. There is no field anywhere in this layer for relationship strength, warmth, hostility or direction of travel, and none may be added. Change is carried by the validity period, the recorded last material change and the linked events — each of which a reader can check. See the methodology.