The Foreign Ministry of Senegal has condemned the Ukrainian embassy for supporting a terrorist attack on government forces and Russian military contractors in Mali last month. The ministry accused Kiev of attempting to “destabilize” the “brotherly” nation of Mali.
Tuareg insurgents attacked a convoy of Malian soldiers and members of the Wagner private military company near Mali’s Algerian border in late July, killing dozens. Earlier this week, Andrey Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, claimed that his agents helped the jihadists plan the attack.
“The rebels received necessary information, and not just information, which enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals,” Yusov told Ukrainian television. Yusov did not say whether Ukrainian personnel took part in the attack, but vowed that “there will be more to come.”
Ukraine’s embassy in Dakar posted the interview on its Facebook page, along with a comment from Ambassador Yuri Pivovarov, who declared that “there will certainly be other results. The punishment of war crimes and terrorism is inevitable.” The video has since been deleted.
In a statement on Saturday, the Senegalese Foreign Ministry said that it “cannot accept… comments and gestures aimed at apologizing for terrorism, especially when the latter aims to destabilize a country, a brotherly one like Mali.”
Senegal, which maintains a position of “constructive neutrality in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict,” also “cannot tolerate any attempt to transfer the media propaganda underway in this conflict to its territory,” the ministry continued.
According to the statement, Pivovarov was summoned to the ministry to explain himself, and was reminded “of the obligations of discretion, restraint and non-interference which must accompany the seriousness and solemnity of his mission.”
Mali has been embroiled in a jihadist insurgency since 2012, with attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda and Islamic State factions killing thousands and forcibly displacing over 375,000 people, according to UN estimates. A decade-long French military operation failed to quell the violence, which has spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. Both of these countries and Mali are now led by military governments after their pro-Western leaders were ousted in a series of coups d’etat since 2020.
Earlier this year, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso established a confederation aimed at helping each other combat the jihadist threat, while all three have also sought increased security cooperation with Russia. Wagner fighters are believed to be operating in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Senegal is not a member of this alliance, and its government is considered friendly to the US and France. Nevertheless, Senegal maintains friendly relations with Mali, which borders it to the east.