The Mali file’s most-cited numbers do not survive a close reading
A published count of Russian combat engagements, a tanker tally and a map of who controls Mopti and Gao are all circulating as settled fact. None of them is.
Africa Defense Forum reported in March 2026, citing ACLED, that battles involving Russian fighters in Mali fell from 537 in 2024 to 402 in 2025, and described this as “a reduction of more than 33%.” The arithmetic does not work: 537 to 402 is a fall of roughly 25 per cent. Either the percentage or one of the counts is wrong in that rendering, and the figure has since travelled. The underlying thesis may still hold. Héni Nsaibia, ACLED’s senior analyst for West Africa, told the Institute for Security Studies that the handover from Wagner to Africa Corps was partly a shift from battlefield engagement toward regime stabilisation, infrastructure protection and strategic influence, while combat operations continued. Wagner announced its departure from Mali on 6 June 2025; France 24 reported two days later that Mali had relied on an estimated 2,000 mercenaries over the preceding decade, per United States figures.
The same problem runs through the territorial record. France 24’s live file of 25 April 2026 reported that the Front de Libération de l’Azawad declared it had taken positions in Kidal and Gao, that four security sources said JNIM was also involved in that day’s attacks, and that JNIM had not immediately claimed the attack reported by the Malian army. Claims made that weekend about Mopti, Sévaré and Gao have since been absorbed into open trackers as control, without evident confirmation. The fuel file is thinner still: a widely repeated figure that Mali imports about 95 per cent of its fuel by road has no publisher of record the desk could establish, and the count of 300-plus tankers destroyed since the blockade began on 3 September 2025 rests on a tertiary tracker.
Assessment: This is not a complaint about sloppy sourcing for its own sake. Every one of these numbers is load-bearing for a policy argument — that Russian engagement is falling, that the insurgency holds terrain, that Bamako is strangled — and each argument is being made by people who did not generate the data. The four indicators that would actually settle the blockade question are mundane and checkable: pump prices, EDM load-shedding hours, school closures, and whether carriers departing Bamako are still tankering fuel through Ouagadougou, as Jeune Afrique reported them doing in late 2025. Until someone publishes those, treat the Mali map as a record of claims.