Russian military helicopter shot down in Mali

A Russian military helicopter went down near Wabaria in the Gao region of Mali on April 25, confirmed by Russian sources, as fighters from the Azawad Liberation Front and al-Qaeda-linked JNIM launched the largest coordinated offensive in the country in years — striking simultaneously at the capital Bamako, the military stronghold of Kati, and the northern cities of Kidal, Gao, and Sevare in an assault that exposed the limits of Russia’s African security gamble in the most visible way possible.

Initial reports, accompanied by FLA video footage, suggested the downed aircraft was a Malian Air Force Mi-35 gunship. Subsequent reporting clarified that the lost aircraft was in fact a Mi-8AMTSh operated by Russia’s African Corps — a transport and assault helicopter that has served as the workhorse of Russian military aviation in Mali. Russian sources confirmed the loss, including aviation blogger Ilya Tumanov, who administers the widely followed Fighterbomber channel. The Russian Ministry of Defense issued no official acknowledgment.

The scale of what unfolded on April 25 went well beyond a single helicopter. Two loud explosions and sustained gunfire struck near Kati, the main military base on the outskirts of Bamako and the home of Mali’s military ruler General Assimi Goita, shortly before 6 a.m. local time. The residence of Defense Minister General Sadio Camara was reported hit and destroyed, though his staff said he was not home at the time. Goita’s whereabouts remained unclear for hours. At virtually the same moment, fighting erupted in Gao, Kidal, Sevare, and Mopti — a coordinated nationwide strike that the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Sahel program director Ulf Laessing called “the biggest coordinated attack for years.”

JNIM claimed responsibility on its website Azallaq, stating that the attacks were carried out jointly with the FLA. FLA spokesperson Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane announced on social media that his forces had taken control of Kidal and positions in Gao, including one of two military camps in the city. A former mayor of Kidal, speaking anonymously to the Associated Press out of fear for his safety, confirmed that gunmen had entered the city and were fighting the army in its neighborhoods. The U.S. Embassy told American citizens to shelter in place. Bamako’s international airport closed, with flights turned back or cancelled. By evening, the governor of Gao had declared an overnight curfew.

Kidal is not just any northern city. It sits deep in the Sahara near the Algerian border and has been the symbolic heart of the Tuareg independence movement for decades. When Malian and Russian forces seized it from Tuareg control in 2023, it was presented as definitive proof that Russia could deliver security where France had failed — a cornerstone of the junta’s narrative of restoring territorial control. If FLA fighters have now retaken it, that narrative collapses with it. Analyst Paweł Wójcik, tracking the situation in real time, described Russia as withdrawing from Kidal, calling it “a humiliating development” and noting that ousting the Tuaregs from the city and pushing to the Algerian border had been “their main goal for years.”

The withdrawal detail that followed was perhaps more significant than the retreat itself. Wójcik reported that the corridor being offered by the rebels applied only to Russian African Corps forces — the Malian army was apparently not being extended the same passage, suggesting that the FLA and JNIM had opened separate negotiations specifically with Russia, leaving their nominal Malian partners exposed. Both groups had made what Wójcik described as “unprecedented” diplomatic outreach to Russia the previous day, a contact that appears to have produced a de facto ceasefire arrangement for Russian personnel while the broader fight continued around them.

Russia formalized its military presence in Mali after the expulsion of French forces and the dismantling of the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA in 2022 and 2023, replacing roughly 20,000 international troops with what analysts have estimated at around 2,000 African Corps personnel. French analyst Clément Molin, writing as the offensive unfolded, did not spare his assessment: “who could have imagined that replacing 20,000 multinational soldiers who don’t massacre civilians and who have air support with 2,000 Russians wasn’t going to work? It was written in the stars.” Molin traced the collapse directly to that substitution, arguing the situation had been suboptimal but manageable in 2022 and had deteriorated “at a very rapid pace” in the four years since, with jihadist forces advancing steadily toward the south while Russian and Malian forces overextended themselves across a country larger than Texas and California combined.

The African Corps — the rebranded successor to the Wagner Group’s African operations, now formally under the Russian Ministry of Defense — has been fighting simultaneously against Tuareg rebels of the FLA in the north and JNIM Islamists in the central belt. Russian forces control key bases in Sevare, Gao, and Kidal, and also guard gold mining sites and other mineral deposits that serve as compensation from the Malian authorities for security services rendered. That arrangement — security in exchange for resource access — has always depended on Russia actually delivering security. April 25 tested that proposition and found it wanting.

The Mi-8AMTSh lost near Wabaria is, in the arithmetic of military aviation, one helicopter. But it went down on a day when rebels simultaneously struck the capital, the defense minister’s residence, and a city that Russia had staked its African reputation on holding. Molin noted that neighboring countries that had expelled French forces — Chad, Benin, Senegal — were already renewing ties with Paris as the costs of the Russian alternative became undeniable. “Today, everyone realizes that Russia was behind all of this,” he wrote, “that it couldn’t care less about the region’s security.”