A Russian Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M landed early this morning at Bamako airport, after passing through Syria, Libya and Sudan. Onboard, about thirty Wagner mercenaries and Russian officials.
For a company that’s not supposed to be in Mali, that’s starting to mean a lot. According to our information, about thirty mercenaries from the Russian paramilitary company Wagner, accompanied by some Russian officials, landed this morning at 6:48 a.m. at Bamako airport. According to the same procedure as the previous “arrivals”, they were deployed by the Russian Air Force, in a Tupolev Tu-154M of Air Detachment No. 223, whose arrival was recorded by the Flightradar24 site. The aircraft, which left Moscow on January 27, first-served the Russian base in Latakia, Syria, before passing through Sudan (Khartoum), then Libya (Benghazi), two theaters where Wagner is very present, and therefore Mali.
The plane, registered RA-85041, is well known to American and European intelligence services. It had already been used for Wagner deployments in recent years. In March 2021, a report by a UN panel of experts on the situation in Libya explicitly referred to the device as a traditional means of transport for Wagner. “The panel has established that Tupolev Tu-154Ms of Air Detachment No. 223 (registration RA-85041 and RA-85155) were used to airlift Wagner and its subsidiaries on several operations,” the report said. The Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, had indicated at the beginning of 2019 that these planes had transported more than a thousand Wagner fighters in 2018, in particular in Sudan and in the Central African Republic.
