The Sahel is the 5,000-kilometre band of semi-arid steppe running from Senegal to Sudan. It is one of the poorest, fastest-growing, hottest and least-governed regions on Earth. It is also where three quiet stories collide: French uranium powering French reactors, migration routes from West and Central Africa converging on the Mediterranean, and Russian mercenaries filling the vacuum left by retreating Western troops. Between 2020 and 2023 six Sahelian governments were overthrown in coups. In every single case the incoming junta expelled French forces and welcomed Wagner.
France's Operation Barkhane withdrew from Mali in 2022, from Burkina Faso in 2023, from Niger in 2023–24. Into each vacuum walked the Wagner Group — later rebranded 'Africa Corps' after Prigozhin's death — offering regime protection in exchange for gold concessions, uranium access and votes at the UN. For Moscow the return on investment is extraordinary: a few thousand contractors buy influence over territory larger than the EU, revenue streams that dodge sanctions, and a permanent thorn in Europe's southern flank.
Niger has supplied roughly 15–20% of the uranium that fuels France's 56 reactors for decades, mined by the French state-owned company Orano at Arlit. When the 2023 coup expelled French troops, Paris quietly kept the mine open — because the alternative was buying more Russian or Kazakh uranium. The Sahel is not a footnote to European energy security. It is one of its load-bearing walls, and it is now negotiated with generals who have Russian flags in their offices.
Almost every migrant boat that reaches Lampedusa or the Canaries has, somewhere upstream, transited the Sahel. The routes converge in Agadez (Niger) and Sabha (southern Libya), then head north across the desert to the Libyan or Tunisian coast. As long as those transit states cooperate — which they did, expensively, under EU pressure between 2015 and 2022 — flows can be squeezed. When they stop cooperating, as post-coup Niger did in 2023, the corridor reopens within months. The Sahel is where European asylum policy is actually decided.
A coup that would have been reversed by ECOWAS and the African Union a decade ago now survives, because the incoming junta has three things earlier ones did not: Wagner rifles, Chinese and Turkish drones, and an electorate that has watched two decades of Western counter-terror operations coincide with worse security, not better. Whether or not the new regimes deliver, the political ratchet has moved. The Sahel has quietly become the largest bloc of governments in the world explicitly hostile to Western military presence — and it sits directly across Europe's southern approaches.