The coordinated offensive launched across Mali on April 25 was not simply another episode in the country’s decade-long spiral. It was a strategic inflection point. Islamist militants and Tuareg separatists struck simultaneously at military installations and key population centers, pushed Russian-backed government forces out of the strategic northern town of Kidal, and demonstrated an operational reach that now threatens Bamako itself. For the broader Sahel, and for Algeria in particular, the question is no longer whether the region is destabilizing. It is whether anyone is positioned to stop it.

To understand how Mali arrived at this moment, it is necessary to revisit the political choices made after the 2021 coup. The military junta led by Colonel Assimi Goita expelled French forces, terminated the Minusma UN peacekeeping mission, and invited the Wagner Group (now rebranded under Russian state control) as its primary security guarantor. Western critics warned that this realignment would produce a security vacuum. The junta dismissed those warnings as neocolonial pressure. The April offensive validated every one of them.

Wagner’s Russian successors, far from being the decisive counter-insurgency force advertised, have now been driven from Kidal, a town of enormous symbolic and strategic........

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