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 →Conflict coverage · Central Sahel · Relationships
Relationships
The standing arrangements between the actors in this module, each as a record with its own dates, sources and confidence: what the arrangement covers, when it began, what last changed it, and what remains unclear. Vigil publishes no measure of how strong or how hostile a relationship is — the description and its evidence are the record.
Everything in this module13 analytical layers in this conflict
Understand
Military & security
Effects & resilience
Follow
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 →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 →Combat manpower and political cover, bought with mining revenue and paid for in reputation.
DefenceTrainingEquipment transferFinance
Open the full relationship record →The one deployment Moscow has publicly admitted fought — once, at an airport, in January 2026.
DefenceTraining
Open the full relationship record →The moment three separate security relationships acquired a single counterparty.
DefenceDiplomaticInstitutionalTraining
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.