Is Vladimir Putin’s star fading? Recent events seem to indicate so. Bogged down for more than four years in the endless war in Ukraine and facing growing internal problems, the Russian president has suffered severe setbacks on the international stage in just a few months. Unable to stop the United States’ harassment of some of its historic allies in the Middle East and Latin America – Iran, Venezuela, Cuba – Russia also seems to have started losing ground in Africa.
The Malian population of Kidal, on the edge of the Sahara, has historically been a key point on the caravan routes linking Algeria with Mali. A stronghold of the Tuareg, the blue men of the desert, it has been a fiercely contested area in recent decades between the separatists of the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and the State. Controlled since 2023 by the regular army and its Russian allies from the Africa Corps, the offensive launched on April 25 by the separatists and jihadists of the Group to Support Islam and Muslims (JNIM) – the Al Qaeda branch in the Sahel – caused them to lose the enclave. The rebels launched simultaneous attacks that day on half a dozen cities across the country – including the capital, Bamako – and a suicide commando killed the Defense Minister, General Sadio Camara, one of the pillars of the regime that emerged from the military coup of May 2021.
The withdrawal of Russian Africa Corps troops from the city of Kidal is a blow to their presence in Mali
The loss of Kidal is the symbol of a full-scale debacle. Not only for the military junta governing Mali but also for Moscow. The reconquest of the city three years ago by Russian forces and the regular army had been presented by the Malian president, General Assimi Goïta, as confirmation of the soundness of his bet on a military alliance with Russia. The withdrawal of the 400 Russian fighters from Kidal – whose base they were able to leave without being attacked thanks to Algeria’s mediation – is a severe blow to the Kremlin. So is the assassination of the Defense Minister, who was its main interlocutor and the architect of the alliance with Moscow.
The Russian landing in Mali took place in 2022 following the decision of the coup military junta to break with France – the former colonial power – and expel the French troops who had been fighting jihadists since 2013 (with mixed results). The French were initially replaced by mercenaries from the Wagner group and then – after the rebellion and death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had risen up against the Russian army chiefs – by the Africa Corps military, directly obedient to Moscow, who maintain about 2,500 troops in the country.
After Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger followed the same path, also after respective coups d’état. The three countries, which in 2023 created the Sahel States Alliance (AES), had until now constituted Russia’s base in West Africa. A region it could lose and to which the U.S. is signaling a desire to return.
The Russian retreat in Mali against rebel militias is the latest stumble Vladimir Putin faces. But not the first. The war in Ukraine is not going well either. His army, suffering huge human losses due to the effectiveness of Ukrainian drones, barely manages to advance on the ground, it is increasingly difficult to recruit soldiers, and Russian territory has definitively become a war zone – including the capital itself, Moscow – while the economy has begun to suffer seriously and his popularity – despite his absolute control of the media and silencing of the opposition – is declining. And Donald Trump? The U.S. president, in whom Putin had so much confidence to impose a ceasefire favorable to his interests, seems to have completely disengaged from the matter, occupied as he is on other fronts.
Trump’s return to the White House is proving to be a bad deal for the Kremlin. Far from assuming a division of the world into spheres of influence – as his revitalization of the Monroe Doctrine seemed to imply – Washington’s interventionism has no borders or brakes of any kind.
Also read
In a few months, Moscow has seen Trump impose his control over Venezuela – after kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro on January 3 – and begin a siege on Cuba, the two pro-Russian pillars in Latin America. Things are no better in the Middle East. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria at the end of 2024, Putin has seen his other major ally in the region, Iran, attacked in February by the U.S. and Israel and whom Washington would like to tie to its orbit in the Venezuelan style (although it is costing more than expected), if not fall, at least be strongly neutralized. Powerless, Russia has witnessed this multiple offensive without the ability to intervene.
The dismantling of the international order undertaken by Trump and the return of the law of the jungle are not working in Moscow’s favor. As Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasia Non-Proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California and a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), points out, Trump’s policy of marginalizing and disabling the UN leaves Russia without one of its key international influence powers, namely the veto right in the Security Council. “Most likely,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Russia will see its global power projection, already weakened by the war against Ukraine, erode even further at the hands of the U.S.” If the law of the strongest prevails, we already know who that is.
