The grass strip outside Bamako has been busy. Russian transport aircraft have been touching down for weeks, off-loading equipment, fuel pallets, and crates that locals say are too heavy to be hand luggage. Now satellite imagery has confirmed what defence analysts had quietly suspected: Russia has assembled a full combat aviation grouping on Malian soil — fighter-bombers, attack helicopters, transport aircraft, and the people to keep them flying.

It is the deepest Russian air-power expansion into Africa since the Soviet era, and a step change for what was, until 2023, called the Wagner Group’s African footprint.

“This is not Wagner anymore. This is the Russian Federation flying combat sorties in West Africa,” one European intelligence official told Defence Blog, which broke the story this week.

From Mercenaries to a Real Air Force

Wagner pulled out of Mali in 2023 after the death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Most of the personnel didn’t leave — they simply changed badges. The renamed “Africa Corps” reports to Russia’s Ministry of Defence, and Moscow has been quietly upgrading the firepower it sends south.

Until recently, that meant rifles, drones, and the occasional Mi-8 helicopter. What’s now parked at Bamako is something else entirely. The Su-25 Frogfoot is a single-seat, twin-engine attack jet built for low-level battlefield air support — the kind of aircraft you use to break up rebel columns and flatten compounds. Mi-24 Hind gunships, the world’s most-produced attack helicopter, give the same job a slower, longer-loiter option.

Why Mali, Why Now?

Mali matters because it sits at the centre of the Sahel — a belt of weak states stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea where French and American forces have been pushed out, and where insurgent groups linked to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State control growing slabs of territory. The Malian junta sees Russia as the cheapest, least-judgemental security partner available. Russia sees Mali as a runway into Africa.

Burkina Faso and Niger have made similar deals. The aviation grouping at Bamako gives Moscow the mobility to support all three from a single hub.

What Comes Next

French defence officials are already warning that the air bridge running into Bamako is now permanent infrastructure, not a temporary deployment. NATO planners are watching for two things: whether the Russian aircraft start flying actual combat sorties (rather than training and “show-of-force” missions), and whether the deployment expands eastward to the Central African Republic, where Russia already has a sizeable contractor presence.

For Africa, it means the great-power competition that defined the Cold War is back — only this time, there’s no Soviet Union, just a Russian air force operating two thousand kilometres from its nearest formal base.

Sources: Defence Blog, The Aviationist, satellite imagery via Planet Labs.