Africa Corps: Russian cluster munitions found in Malian village despite national ban
Russian cluster munitions have been found in a Malian village. Mali is a signatory to the cluster bomb convention, though Russia is not. Russia’s mercenary group Africa Corps is currently operating in the west African state where a civil war is taking place.
Investigative group Bellingcat identified the munitions in a 26 May report:
Unexploded Russian-made cluster munition bomblets, as well as damage consistent with bomblet impacts, have been found in a village in northern Mali – despite the West African country being a state party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) which prohibits their use.
Radio France International first reported the story, but Bellingcat sought to verify further through social media analysis:
social media footage posted on May 17, and since analysed by Bellingcat and our publishing partner, Jeune Afrique, shows unexploded Russian manufactured ShOAB-0.5 submunitions (bomblets).
Africa Corps — Wagner 2.0 on the ground
Russia’s paramilitary group Africa Corps, which replaced the Wagner Group, is operating with the Malian government.
The outlet said:
The footage geolocated by Bellingcat shows the unexploded submunitions near buildings, alongside multiple small craters, consistent with submunition explosions.
The buildings and landmarks visible in the footage allowed us to geolocate where it was taken.
The Arms Control Association (ACA) says:
Cluster munitions, also called cluster bombs or CBUs, are gravity bombs, artillery shells, and rockets that fragment into small bomblets or grenades.
According to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, “Cluster munition” means a conventional munition that is designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions each weighing less than 20 kilograms, and includes those explosive submunitions.
Russia has also been accused of using the munitions in Ukraine. Israel has used them in Lebanon. Russia is not a signatory to the cluster munition treaty. Mali is a signatory.
The bombs are dropped by Russian-made aircraft. Mali has had no such aircraft in service since 2023. However:
An Su-24M model has since appeared in satellite imagery captured at Modibo Keita International Airport in Bamako. The imagery was first published by France 24 in April 2025, although it was unclear if this aircraft was, or has been, operated by Africa Corps or Malian forces.
Human rights lawyer Brian Finucane told Bellingcat that Mali is:
subject to its prohibitions and requirements. These include not only prohibitions on the use of cluster munitions, but also obligations to clear and destroy such munitions on its territory.
Russia’s private military are clearly deeply embedded in Mali’s civil war. There is more than an echo of the UAE’s role in Sudan on the other side of the continent — and a sense of a new foreign carve-up of Africa. And once again, the ultimate losers will be Africans.
Featured image via the Africa Report
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Might have been a more balanced article to mention that the “insurgency” is a Western proxy terrorist force intending to destroy the Malian state through mass terror, break up the new Sahel alliance that is reversing the Colonial-era imposed and destructive boundaries intended to keep the region locked to Western elite interests and exploitation, and that the Russian forces were invited there after the local revolutionary Govts realised that the West was deliberately playing both sides for their own nefarious ends, and kicked them out… with bloodthirsty threats from the Western powers when they did so, incl trying to create an African-wide civil war in which 10s of millions would have died.
But that wouldn’t quite have fit the insanely reductive and simplistic good/evil narrative that certain Canary writers like to employ to hide their Russophobia, would it?
It is heartbreaking to live in Africa, and see what this once proud and wealthy continent has been turned into, their history erased quite deliberately, the people barely surviving one step ahead of a natural disaster – many of which are coming down the line from climate change.
Oh, and Joe – check your “facts”, such as they are. Wagner was disincorporated, and the “Africa Corps” – invited BY THE GOVTS – is actually part of the formal Russian military.
Wagner, and other Russian mercenary outfits (And wouldn’t it be GREAT if the canary pulled its fingers from their arses and investigated what the several BRITISH mercenary outfits are up to?), do not have access to levels of equipment such as large bombers and cluster munitions.
IF this claim is true, and frankly anyone who believes a word out of Bellendcat and the French (post)Colonial authorities is straightforwardly intellectually and morally retarded by this point (See Aaron Maté’s dogged and groundbreaking work on Bellendcat’s lies over Syria fx) – then it is an atrocity. An atrocity that has to be balanced by the tens of THOUSANDS of civilians, women and children, already brutally butchered by these Western extremists. And incomprehensible levels of suffering if the terrorists achieve their goals.
Who would cry if Hamas got their hands on cluster munitions and used them against the IOF invaders?
Not I.
Exactly.