How Wagners Ruthless Image Crumbled in Mali

For years, Russia has promoted the Wagner mercenary group to authoritarian leaders in Africa as a force of fearsome warriors who could protect leaders’ grip on power and help their armies reclaim territories from armed groups.

In return, Moscow has gained access to resource-rich countries, dislodged Western and U.N. troops and seeded influence across West and Central Africa to a degree not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But a major defeat for Wagner this summer in northern Mali showed that its actual capabilities might be overstated and unable to meet the ambitions of one of the group’s closest African partners. The New York Times confirmed the deaths of at least 46 Wagner fighters and 24 allied Malian soldiers by matching details seen in footage of the corpses, such as uniforms and tattoos, with imagery of the soldiers when they were alive.

The loss is Wagner’s largest ever on African soil and one of the deadliest in its entire history, outside Ukraine. Among those killed was Nikita Fedyanin, one of Wagner’s most influential online propagandists, whose death silenced a key platform for cultivating the group’s ruthless image. And the fallout extended to the Russian home front, too, The Times found, as relatives of the mercenaries accused Wagner of failing to tell them that their family members were dead.

Wagner’s combat experience in the region had rarely involved large complex offensives, and had never been in the remote mountains and desert of northern Mali where July’s battle took place. There they faced at least several hundred separatists largely from the Tuareg ethnic group, who are fighting for independence in the north. The separatists were later joined by Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militants, who occasionally partner with them against government forces.

The following reconstruction of the fighting contains previously unreported details, including the running battle’s precise locations and the way they caused a cascade of setbacks that led to Wagner’s rout. The Times pieced together this moment-by-moment account from clues visible in satellite imagery and battlefield footage, and through interviews with participants and residents of the area.

The videos depicting the battle were either filmed by separatists or retrieved by them from the cameras of slain Russian mercenaries. The Tuaregs posted the footage online or provided it directly to The Times. In each case, The Times verified the authenticity of what this imagery depicted.

Neither Wagner nor the Malian government or military responded to The Times’s requests for comment.

Beyond being a major strategic setback, the defeat undermined one of Wagner’s key pitches for luring men from Russia to fight in Africa: the promise of an exotic location far safer and more lucrative than the battlefields of Ukraine, where the group has suffered tremendous losses.

Until July, that was largely true. Wagner mercenaries have operated with near impunity, looting villages and committing scores of atrocities against civilians, including torture, executions and sexual violence, according to an earlier Times investigation, human rights groups and Western and African governments.

“It’s easier for them to go around massacring villagers in the center of Mali,” said Alexander Thurston, an expert on the Sahel region who teaches at the University of Cincinnati. “It’s much harder for them to fight pretty tough people in the desert.”

The Battle of Tinzaouaten

About 1,500 Wagner mercenaries arrived in Mali nearly three years ago to fight alongside the country’s military against jihadist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. Mali soon ejected thousands of French troops, who had also been combating those militants, amid souring relations with Paris.

Mali’s leaders further expelled United Nations peacekeepers who were helping to maintain a fragile truce between the government and Tuareg separatists. When only Russian mercenaries were left, Mali’s mandate for Wagner expanded to quashing that separatist rebellion.

In July, the mercenaries and the Malian soldiers set their eyes on one of the separatist’s remote strongholds, the town of Tinzaouaten, on the border with Algeria.

As a convoy of about two dozen vehicles made its way north carrying the soldiers, Mr. Fedyanin, the Wagner propagandist, turned on his body camera.

Mr. Fedyanin, 29, was the administrator of the Grey Zone, a Telegram channel that flooded more than 500,000 subscribers with content promoting Wagner’s ruthless image and glorifying atrocities. After his death in the July battle, Tuareg separatists retrieved Mr. Fedyanin’s camera footage and published it online — turning him into a chronicler of one of the group’s greatest failures.

One of his videos, filmed as Wagner moved toward Tinzaouaten, gives a rare firsthand look at the group’s cruel treatment of civilians. The footage shows mercenaries in a Tuareg town, speaking Russian and French, using an interpreter to threaten a resident. They say they will strip her naked if she does not provide information.

The convoy continued and captured several villages and towns, but the easy gains, according to more than half a dozen separatists who spoke to The Times, were all part of a plan. They tracked Wagner’s every movement, waiting for the right moment to strike.

On July 24 and 25, the convoy hit two improvised explosive devices and was forced off a main route through rougher terrain. Near the outskirts of Tinzaouaten, sand dunes bogged down the advance of Wagner’s heavy armored vehicles.

As the fighting raged and Wagner suffered its first losses, its troops quickly called for two helicopters to evacuate their wounded and dead. But one helicopter crashed after suffering damage from Tuareg fire, several separatists told The Times. Their statements were consistent with similar accounts posted on Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels.

A sandstorm began sweeping the area. Separatist fighters seized the opportunity to close in.

By the next day, the separatists had the mercenaries pinned down. Mr. Fedyanin’s footage captures chaos in Wagner’s ranks, including one fighter struggling with a grenade launcher that appears to malfunction. Elsewhere, a mortar is seen abandoned out in the open.

The footage also shows Russian and Malian armored vehicles sitting idle and supplies strewed haphazardly all over the ground.

The sandstorm also hampered Wagner’s ability to call in reinforcements from helicopters and armed drones.

“They overplayed their hand,” said Beverly Ochieng, an analyst with Control Risks, a security consulting firm specializing in the Sahel and global power competition in Africa. “They didn’t take into consideration the terrain. They had no logistical support and no direct response.”

Eventually, the separatists forced the Russian and Malian convoy to retreat south away from Tinzaouaten.

“We trapped them,” said Oumayta, a Tuareg commander who agreed to speak to The Times on the condition that only his first name be used. “And we decided that they shouldn’t withdraw in any way.”

Throughout the battle, Wagner had suffered from poor coordination with government forces and underestimated their adversary, according to two Malian security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss military tactics publicly.

The mercenaries had no way out. Some sent final text messages, which recipients later shared on Wagner Telegram channels.

“Everything is ending very foolishly,” one fighter wrote. Another fighter’s message read: “I’m not afraid to die. What hurts me is that everything ends this way — disgracefully, surrounded, and I’ll forever remain on this African soil.”

That same day, Tuareg separatists and Islamist insurgents began posting footage of the burning convoy with dozens of bodies of Russian mercenaries and Malian soldiers lying out in the open.

In addition to the fatalities, two Russians and nine Malians were captured by the separatists, and 12 of the corpses in footage from the scene were unidentifiable. A senior military adviser to the separatists told The Times that 18 separatists were killed and 45 were wounded.

‘What did they die for?’

On the last day of the battle, thousands of miles away in Russian-occupied Ukraine, a girl celebrating her eighth birthday waited for a call from her father, Ilya Baboshkin, 33, who had left to fight in Mali.

The call never came, her mother, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisals for talking to Western media, told The Times.

The next day, videos showing Wagner’s defeat spread across social media channels and laid bare the group’s tactical mistakes for a mass audience. But for many families, including Mr. Baboshkin’s, this was the only reason they knew what had happened.

As Wagner’s leadership remained silent about the defeat, many families who once strongly supported the group began lashing out in online forums. They accused Wagner, and even the Russian state, of withholding information about their relatives’ fates.

One mother wrote that local Russian officials had suddenly arrived to confiscate her son’s hunting rifle. They said he had died and so his gun license was revoked. “Why does the weapons permit office know about his death, but we don’t???” she wrote on Aug. 16, three weeks after the ambush.

Scores more messages like hers filled social media channels that once glorified Wagner.

The Times translated the messages from Russian and confirmed their authenticity by contacting the senders directly. If they did not respond, their identities were corroborated by matching their profiles on Russian social media and other online sources.

The son of another Wagner fighter told The Times he had received no information about his father. So he resorted to looking through footage of the dead mercenaries for any sign of his father’s fate. One body looked “somewhat” like his father, he said, but he was not sure it was him.

While the relatives lashed out at Wagner, the group redoubled its efforts online to fill its ranks in Africa. Pro-Wagner social media channels announced a “massive recruitment drive to fight international terrorism in Africa.”

Russia’s defense ministry has begun a parallel recruitment campaign for its own fighting unit in Africa, Africa Corps, which is more directly under the control of Moscow.

Leaving Mali is not an option for the Kremlin, said Candace Rondeaux, a senior director at New America, a Washington think tank. Russia is keen to keep earning money from Malian gold mines to help finance the war in Ukraine.

“Sending more troops is the obvious answer, and these troops are expendable,” Ms. Rondeaux added about Moscow’s strategy going forward.

But the debacle in Tinzaouaten highlights a deeper problem for Russia: Three years after its mercenaries moved into Mali, the situation has not improved.

“They have shifted the balance of fear: Civilian populations are now more scared of being arrested or killed by Wagner than jihadist and other armed groups,” said Héni Nsaibia, a senior analyst with ACLED, a nonprofit group that tracks data on conflicts in Africa. “But they haven’t affected the jihadists groups’ capacity to operate.”

Three months after the battle for Tinzaouaten, Wagner and its government allies have not made another attempt to take it. In early October, a new convoy, nearly twice the size of the first one, visited one of the sites of July’s battle, some 30 miles from the town.

The separatists quickly posted videos and reports as they tracked the mercenaries’ every movement.

The convoy retrieved the remains of some Malian soldiers killed in the fighting but went no further, according to the two Malian military officers. On Wagner’s Telegram channel, the group said the bodies of its own fighters were also recovered during the mission. The Times could not independently verify either the Russian or Malian claims.

The Malian officers added that frustration with Wagner’s behavior was growing within the country’s military, and that they wanted partners who were more professional and disciplined.

Michael Schwirtz, Ishaan Jhaveri and Dmitriy Khavin contributed reporting. Aaron Byrd, Gray Beltran, Jenni Lee and Alexander Cardia contributed visual production. Sarah Hammuri provided translation.