Russia vetos UN resolution extending sanctions and keeping experts in Mali

United Nations sanctions in Mali are ending after Russia vetoed extending them and maintaining a team of United Nations experts there, after they claimed that foreign forces were involved in abuses – a reference to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group.

United Nations forces in Timbuktu, Mali, in September 2021. The UN security council has failed to extend sanctions on Mali after Russia vetoed a resolution that would extend a panel of experts that has been critical of the Wagner mercenary group working in the country. © Moulaye Sayah/AP

Russia was the only of the UN Security Council's 15 members to veto a French and United Arab Emirates-led proposal that would have extended targeted sanctions in Mali by a year and kept the panel of independent monitors in place. China abstained from the vote.

Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Wednesday that the sanctions had first been put in place in 2017 to support a peace agreement, and extending them would get the Security Council involved in politics.

"It is fundamentally important that UN Security Council sanctions…not be used as a means of foreign influence on Mali, and that is something that the panel of experts of the Security Council has been involved in," he said.

Independent UN sanctions monitors reported to the Security Council this month that Malian troops and its foreign security partners, believed to be Russia's Wagner mercenary group, are using violence against women and other "grave human rights abuses" to spread terror.

Western powers said Russia’s veto was retaliation to these comments.

The sanctions that expire Thursday ban travel and freeze the assets of violators of a 2015 peace agreement. So far, only eight people have been implicated.

Russia had accepted an extension of the sanctions but insisted it would be for the last time and it sought an immediate end to the expert panel.

Deputy US ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told the council that sanctions without experts to monitor them would make the entire effort "ineffective”.

"Russia seeks to eliminate the panel of experts' mandate to stifle publication of uncomfortable truths about Wagner's actions in Mali which require attention," he said.

Mali has depended on Russian support after two coups in 2020 and 2021, which installed a military junta that forced out French forces who were implemented in the country to fight jihadists.

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Wagner – whose leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a plane crash last week – has about 1,000 fighters, and was behind the junta’s request in June to shut down a UN peacekeeping force which has been in operation for a decade.

(with newswires)