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Chapter 62: The Sahel II: The Prototype of the Playbook

The air over the Gao forward operating base was thick with dust and the metallic tang of defeat. For Sergeant Antoine Dubois of the French Foreign Legion, the finality of their withdrawal felt less like a strategic redeployment and more like a rout. For nine years, this had been his world: the searing heat, the grit of sand in every meal, the brief, violent firefights against wraith-like jihadists in the endless expanse of the Sahel. They had fought, and bled, and won nearly every battle. But as he supervised the loading of the last pallets of equipment onto a waiting C-130, he knew they had fundamentally lost the war.

The real defeat wasn't in the desert; it was in the villages, in the markets, and on the glowing screens of the smartphones that had proliferated across the country. On his last patrol into town, the atmosphere had been venomous. The old men who once offered his squad a shared glass of sweet tea now stared through them with a hardened indifference. The children, who used to be a reliable source of smiles and intelligence, were gone, replaced by sullen teenagers who whispered “rat” as their convoy passed. He saw the posters then, freshly pasted on the walls of the market, the ink still sharp. One was a grotesque caricature of a French soldier, his face skeletal and his helmet adorned with a skull, holding a bag of money over a map of a fractured Mali. The poster next to it was rendered in a heroic, socialist-realist style: a powerfully built white man, an idealized European but with a Russian flag on his shoulder, stood guard over a Malilian family. The propaganda was not subtle, but it was brutally effective. It told a simple story: the old protectors were the new vampires; the new protectors were the true friends.

This poison had a voice. Back in the relative cool of the barracks, the television was always on, tuned to the new state broadcaster. There, the face of the coup, Colonel Assimi Goïta, was a constant presence. He was young, with an unblinking, reptilian stare, and he spoke in a new, alien dialect of power. He talked of "neocolonialism" and "national sovereignty," of Mali taking control of its own destiny through "mutually beneficial pan-African partnerships." To Dubois, a man who understood the simple logistics of war—water, ammunition, fuel, intelligence—these were just words, meaningless abstractions. But he saw their effect. He saw it in the eyes of the Malian soldiers he had trained, men with whom he had shared rations and firefights, who now averted his gaze, their faces a mixture of embarrassment and a new, unsettling defiance. They had a new script, a new ideology provided by their new masters.

The end came with a surreal, almost cinematic precision. The Legion's transport plane lumbered down the runway, its four turboprops churning the dusty air into a brown cloud. As they lifted off, leaving the base and a decade of French policy behind them, Dubois looked out the small porthole. Descending through the haze was its replacement, a machine that was the very antithesis of their own aging aircraft. It was a massive, hulking Ilyushin Il-76 transport, a flying warehouse with the brutal, unaerodynamic lines of a piece of Soviet hardware. It didn't belong to the Malian air force.

It landed on the runway they had just left, a concrete symbol of a geopolitical changing of the guard. The rear cargo ramp lowered, a massive jaw opening onto the tarmac. Out of the darkness of the hold, the first figures emerged. They were anonymous, sterile men in sand-colored uniforms without flags or insignia, but they moved with a distinct and chilling purpose. Their equipment was new, their weapons were top-of-the-line Russian special forces issue. Wagner. They formed up with an unnerving efficiency, not soldiers of an army arriving to help, but private contractors arriving to possess. One of them, an officer with a radio, glanced up at the sky, his eyes tracking Dubois's ascending plane with a look of complete indifference, like a man watching the previous tenant vacate a property he now owned.

The Discourse 62: Mali: The Proof of Concept

Mali was not a random target; it was the perfect laboratory for Russia's new model of expansionist political warfare. It served as the crucial prototype, the first live-fire field test of the entire five-stage "Coup Belt Playbook." In Mali, Russia’s various instruments of power—covert intelligence operatives, sophisticated disinformation networks, and the private military force of the Wagner Group—were for the first time fully synchronized and deployed to achieve a singular, strategic objective: the complete overthrow of a pro-Western democratic government and its replacement with a dependent military client state. The Malian experience provided a proof of concept, demonstrating that a relatively low-cost investment in information warfare and elite capture could successfully expel a major NATO power from a strategically vital country.

The playbook’s first step was the masterful exploitation of legitimate local grievances. The decade-long French and UN military interventions, while preventing a total state collapse, had become an open wound on Malian national pride. Operation Barkhane was perceived by many as an endless, ineffective, and patronizing foreign occupation. Corruption within the civilian government was rampant, and security in large parts of the country was deteriorating despite the international presence. This created a fertile field of genuine popular discontent. Russian information operations, orchestrated by Prigozhin-linked structures, did not create this anger, but they cultivated it, weaponized it, and directed it with surgical precision against France, the UN, and the elected Malian government, which was successfully branded as a puppet of the West. This sophisticated information blitz, involving thousands of fake social media accounts, the co-opting of local influencers, and the production of slick propaganda videos, effectively severed the bond of trust between the Malian people and their international partners.

The critical phase of the playbook was the direct cultivation of the military plotters. The double coup led by Colonel Assimi Goïta was not a spontaneous event. Evidence points to early and sustained contact between the coup leaders and Russian and Wagner operatives. Russia provided the "coup guarantee" that made the seizure of power a viable option. It offered the conspirators a pathway to legitimacy and survival that they would never have had in the West. This included the promise of a Russian veto at the UN Security Council to shield them from sanctions, a massive propaganda effort to anoint them as national saviors, and, most importantly, the physical protection of the Wagner Group to act as their praetorian guard, making them immune to counter-coups. Goïta and his junta were not Russian puppets in a traditional sense; they were ambitious local actors who were identified, empowered, and equipped by Russia to serve its strategic interests.

The aftermath of the coup saw the flawless execution of the final stages of the playbook. Using the rhetoric of "sovereignty" provided by his Russian patrons, Goïta’s first moves were to systematically create a security vacuum by expelling French forces, demanding the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSMA), and terminating security agreements with European partners. This deliberately engineered void was then promptly filled by the Wagner Group. The transaction was brutally simple: in exchange for regime security and some limited counter-terrorism operations, the Malian junta agreed to pay a reported $10 million per month while also signing over control of key artisanal gold mining concessions to Wagner-affiliated companies.

The results of this prototype were a catastrophic success for Russia and a disaster for Mali. The expulsion of thousands of highly capable French and UN troops led to an immediate and dramatic deterioration in the security environment, with jihadist groups rapidly expanding their territory. The arrival of Wagner led to a horrifying surge in human rights abuses and civilian massacres, exemplified by the UN-documented execution of over 500 people in the village of Moura by Malian forces and their Wagner partners. For Russia, however, the model was a triumph. They had successfully pried a keystone state out of the Western orbit, established a significant military and economic foothold in the Sahel, and created a replicable template for future interventions. Mali was the test case; Burkina Faso and Niger would be the rollout.

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