Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop on Tuesday said the government does not need to justify working with Russia, despite concerns raised by several Western countries over alleged human rights abuses committed by Russian mercenaries working for the private military contractor Wagner Group, reported The Print.
Diop’s statement comes as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made his first visit to the West African nation battling jihadists.
During a press conference in the capital Bamako, Lavrov said Russia would continue helping Mali’s junta improve its military capabilities. He said the fight against terrorism is an issue not only for Mali but for other countries in the region as well.
“We are going to provide our assistance to them to overcome these difficulties. This concerns Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Chad and the Sahel region generally and even the coastal states on the Gulf of Guinea,” the Russian foreign minister said.
Notably, Mali has been the epicenter of a jihadist insurgency that started in northern Mali in 2012 and spread to neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso in 2015. Thousands of civilians have died across the three countries, and millions have fled their homes so far.
Mali had long relied on France for military assistance in fighting the insurgency. But last year France announced the withdrawal of its troops out of the West African nation amid tension with the ruling junta.
Since seizing power in 2020 in a coup, Mali’s ruling junta has brought in Russian planes, helicopters, and paramilitaries to strengthen its fight against jihadist militants.
The French government claims that the Russian operatives are Wagner mercenaries, a private military group that Moscow has deployed in Syria and now Ukraine.
Even the United Nations (UN) and the Human Rights Watch (HRW) have implicated Wagner and the Malian army in an alleged massacre at Moura in central Mali last March in which several hundred people were killed.
