Falling Russians, India's Balancing Act, and the Sahel's Shifting Alliances

It was a cold, wintry day in early March 2025 when a body was found on Minsk Street in Moscow. A janitor discovered the motionless middle-aged man and laid him on wooden boards while a nearby concierge summoned an ambulance. He was critically ill and not long for life as paramedics ushered him into intensive care at the nearby Zhadkevich hospital, where he died of his injuries shortly afterward. Because of the frosty conditions, no one had witnessed what had happened.

Had anyone been passing by, both his fate and his identity would have caused a stir.

The man was Buvaisar Saitiev, a three-time Olympic champion and one of the greatest freestyle wrestlers of all time. His death joined a grim and lengthening list. Across Russia over the past several years, a striking number of high-profile figures have plunged from windows, balconies, and stairwells, their deaths variously logged as heart attacks, suicides, or simple accidents. The pattern is impossible to ignore, even where the motive is impossible to pin down.

Key Takeaways

A wave of fatal falls from Russian high-rises has continued since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with victims spanning oil executives, judges, officials, an Olympic wrestler, and an 82-year-old economist, most officially ruled suicides, heart attacks, or accidents.
The pattern suggests foul play, but the absence of a consistent target profile undercuts any single explanation, and even where coercion seems likely, victims may have been pressured into ending their own lives rather than physically thrown.
India has thrown military weight behind the Philippines against China in the South China Sea while preparing to confront a China-Pakistan axis, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans his first visit to China in more than seven years.
Washington’s 25% tariff on Indian goods, imposed to punish India’s Russian oil purchases, has pushed New Delhi back toward its long-standing doctrine of strategic autonomy.
Mali has welcomed high-level US delegations to security-focused talks, a quiet rebuke of its Russia-backed Sahel confederation with Niger and Burkina Faso, as Russia’s security guarantees fail and Turkey expands its own footprint.
Ghana has surged troops into the northern town of Bawku to contain a reignited chieftaincy conflict, straining a tiny, underequipped military and creating an opening the JNIM insurgency is poised to exploit.

That story is one of four flashpoints WarFronts examines in this analysis, each a window onto how power is being contested in 2025. From Russia’s mysterious falls, the focus widens to India’s delicate maneuvering between a rising China and an unreliable Washington; to Mali, which expelled French and American forces only to begin quietly courting the United States again; and finally to northern Ghana, where a decades-old tribal conflict is reigniting at the worst possible moment, in the shadow of an expanding jihadist insurgency.

The thread that binds them is the same force reshaping the whole international system: established alliances are wearing thin, and nations large and small are recalculating where their interests truly lie.

Russia’s Falling Men: A Pattern Without a Profile

When Buvaisar Saitiev died in March 2025, the official account pointed to his heart. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, close to the wrestler, issued condolences and declared three days of mourning. State outlet TASS quoted Makhmud Magomedov, executive director of the Wrestling Federation of Dagestan, attributing the death to a heart attack, possibly an adverse reaction to medication Saitiev took for an existing lung condition. Kadyrov echoed the cardiac explanation in his own tribute.

Yet Baza, a Telegram channel linked to Russia’s security services, quoted Saitiev’s brother saying Buvaisar had accidentally fallen from his third-floor apartment while doing household chores. His widow Indira told Moskovsky Komsomolets that his injuries, though severe, were not enough to kill him on their own, and the paper suggested he may not have been fully aware of his actions because of his medication. It concluded that the fall was not the cause of death, seemingly backing the heart-attack theory.

Born in Dagestan but of Chechen origin, Saitiev had served as an acting deputy for Dagestan in the State Duma from 2016 to 2021 and held the post of President of the Chechen Wrestling Federation for a decade until his death.

An Endless Procession of Names

Saitiev’s case would be unremarkable were it not for how many others mirror it. One month earlier, in Petrozavodsk, capital of the Republic of Karelia, antitrust official Artur Pryakhin plunged five stories from his apartment window on February 4, 2025. The head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Karelia, his death was ruled a suicide; The Moscow Times reported that a note found in his office apologized to his wife, gave instructions about their finances, and asked that no one be blamed.

The same day in Moscow, Colonel Alexey Zubkov, a forensic investigation specialist with the Russian Investigative Committee, fell 12 meters from a bathroom window of the committee’s office building. He survived but, though lucid and alert, could not explain the fall. Colleagues theorized stress, noting a board meeting with his superiors was scheduled the next day. The Telegram channel that broke the story, VChK-OGPU, was deleted in early April; on a reserve channel it claimed Telegram had removed it under pressure from Russian authorities, following an unspecified assassination attempt on its founder that left him hospitalized for two months.

The roll call extends back years and across professions. In late 2024, Vladimir Shklyarov, a 39-year-old Honoured Artist of Russia and stalwart of the Mariinsky Theatre, died at the foot of his Moscow building. He had criticized the war in Ukraine in a March 2022 Instagram post, writing that politicians “should be able to negotiate without shooting and killing civilians,” then deleted it and stayed silent. A Mariinsky colleague, Irina Baranovskaya, called his death a “stupid, unbearable accident,” saying he had gone onto his balcony for air, lost his balance, and fell.

Oil, Courts, and Gravity After the Invasion

The deaths cluster, conspicuously, around the period since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In October 2024, Mikhail Rogachev, former Vice President of the oil company YUKOS, died in a ten-story fall in Moscow; his death was ruled a suicide, a claim his family called baseless. YUKOS once accounted for 20% of Russia’s oil output before the state dismembered it in 2006. In July 2024, Valentina Bondarenko, an 82-year-old research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences and a leading economist, fell from her Moscow window and died instantly; TASS quoted an emergency services representative saying the death was “not of a criminal nature” and that “the woman had been ill for a long time.”

The energy sector features heavily. In September 2022, Lukoil chairman Ravil Maganov, admitted to Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital after a reported heart attack, fell from a hospital window and died, with TASS reporting suicide. Lukoil, Russia’s third-largest company, had called for an end to the conflict shortly after the invasion. Maganov’s death came one day after that of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, 91, in the same hospital, where Vladimir Putin had paid Gorbachev a personal visit.

Before 2022 was out, Anatoly Gerashchenko, former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, died falling down stairs at 72. Krasnoyarsk administrator Alexander Lapin died in a seventh-story fall in an Investigative Committee building. Billionaire Dmitry Zelenov fell over a stair railing at a boat party on the French Riviera and died of head injuries. State legislator Pavel Antov fell from a hotel window in India.

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The deaths kept coming. Federal Judge Artyom Bartenev fell 12 stories below his Kazan apartment in June 2023; Judge Natalia Larina died similarly in Moscow a year later. Two more senior Lukoil executives and former board members died in between. Most recently, in July 2025, Andrei Badalov, 62, vice president of oil pipeline company Transneft, was found dead at the foot of his Moscow building, his death labeled suicide.

Thrown, or Pushed to the Edge?

The volume of nearly identical incidents invites the obvious suspicion: that these are undesirables heaved over the parapet after running afoul of the state. Yet the choice of victims rarely follows any decipherable logic. Set aside Shklyarov, whose only apparent offense was a tempered critique of the Ukraine intervention. Others, like the octogenarian economist Bondarenko, seem guilty of nothing at all.

And the official accounts strain credulity. It is hard to picture a world-class dancer losing his balance on his own balcony, or so many people taking their own lives with no prior signs of depression or erratic behavior.

But even granting that foul play is involved, it does not follow that the victims were physically thrown. Saitiev’s case illustrates the distinction. Forcing a three-time Olympic wrestling champion out of a window would be a ferocious undertaking, and his wrestler brother and children were present in the apartment when he died, presumably capable of dispatching any intruder. That makes an unexpected assailant implausible. It does not, however, tell the whole story.

Investigative journalist Karim Zidan, writing for his site Sports Politika, pointed to the case of Chechen MMA fighter Abdul-Kerim Edilov, once a trusted confidant of Kadyrov who died mysteriously in December 2022 after falling from favor. Kadyrov has been implicated in a string of extrajudicial killings since rising to power in the early 2000s, including the 2006 assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in a Moscow stairwell. Zidan argued that Saitiev, an icon who had restored prestige to Chechnya early in Kadyrov’s rule, was no longer useful to his former ally, and as a public figure with his own political trajectory, his uselessness may have hardened into a tacit threat. Conceivably, he was coerced into ending his own life rather than face whatever else awaited him or those close to him.

Whether that logic explains the broader pattern is unclear. It is hard to imagine Kadyrov’s motive for killing octogenarian economists with no Chechen connection. What is beyond doubt is that something strange is happening around Russia’s high-rises, something triggered by the Ukraine war and its fallout, whether a state assassination program, a wave of suicides, or some combination not yet understood.

India Between Two Giants: The South China Sea Gambit

India occupies a difficult position in 2025. It is gathering power and influence rapidly but remains far from able to challenge China, the rising superpower on its doorstep, on its own. China funnels money and weapons to India’s sworn enemy, Pakistan, forcing New Delhi to prepare for confrontation sooner than it would like.

India has long pursued strategic non-alignment, charting its own course, but must weigh that domestic pride against the military and economic benefits of partnering with a West that waits with open arms. Complicating everything is a maverick leader in Washington threatening tariffs while pressuring India to change its relationship with Russia before it is ready.

Over the course of a single week, the world learned a great deal about how New Delhi intends to navigate these waters, beginning literally on the ocean’s surface. On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, India announced it had upgraded ties with the Philippines. As part of a broader bilateral agreement covering trade, tourism, space exploration, and digital infrastructure, India agreed to throw its military weight behind Manila: supplying large numbers of its BrahMos supersonic cruise missile systems, conducting joint naval exercises with the Philippines for the first time, and reinforcing Philippine positions in surrounding waters. Modi declared that India and the Philippines were “committed to peace, security, prosperity and a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region.”

The phrase “rules-based order” had precisely one intended recipient: China. Beijing has worked for years to demonstrate maritime power in the South China Sea, especially since the summer of 2023, when it released and began enforcing its own map adding disputed territory to the waters it claims. Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, and Taiwan all hold contested claims there, but the China-Philippines dispute has drawn the most attention.

The Philippines, lacking the means to match China’s navy, lay claim to uninhabited shoals and stationed positions, patrolling as best they can despite aggressive Chinese action. Over recent years, China’s navy, coast guard, and shadowy maritime militia have harassed Philippine vessels, blockaded shoals, and rammed ships repeatedly.

Why India Changes China’s Calculus

For India to back the Philippines not merely in principle but with exercises and weapons is a major rebuke to China in a largely symbolic contest Beijing genuinely cares about. India’s navy is still far smaller than China’s, which sails over a hundred combined destroyers and frigates, fields massive coast guard vessels, and can deploy hundreds of militia boats for legally dubious encounters. But against what the Philippines alone could muster, India is a far more serious challenge. It sails two aircraft carriers, including the indigenously built INS Vikrant, plus more than a dozen destroyers, more than a dozen frigates, and the support ships needed to sustain a deployed combat group, hypothetically even in the South China Sea.

More importantly, China must weigh escalation differently against India. Were China to ram a Philippine trawler in half and kill its crew, Manila’s only recourse would be diplomatic reparations; Beijing need not fear military retaliation. India, however, is a fellow nuclear-armed state with a recent record of border skirmishes with China and intense short conflicts with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

China cannot bully India the way it bullies the Philippines, and it knows it. Tellingly, in the wake of the joint exercises, China accused the Philippines, not India, of undermining regional peace by drawing in outside powers, insisting disputes be resolved directly without outside intervention. The introduction of India as a new X factor went publicly unremarked, while Manila absorbed the blame.

The Philippines play is not India’s only move. It has stepped up rare-earths mining to challenge China’s near-monopoly on elements vital to tech and renewable energy. It has accused China of providing real-time intelligence to Pakistan during a recent four-day South Asian conflict. And it has announced major pushes on military development and procurement at levels suggesting New Delhi now treats China and Pakistan as a unified front, an assessment reinforced by Pakistan touting air-to-air successes against Indian aircraft using Chinese kit.

The Modi Visit and the Tariff Shock

Against this backdrop of rising tension, Modi’s next step toward China is, surprisingly, a visit, his first in more than seven years, planned for the end of August. Indian sources leaked the news the day after the Philippines agreement. The relationship is not black-and-white: China and India are both BRICS members, share extensive bilateral trade, and live alongside a two-thousand-kilometer border.

They reopened official channels only last year after a four-year freeze following a 2020 border clash. These are nations that cannot simply ice each other out and start a Cold War the way the Soviets and Americans did. What India can do, and appears to be attempting, is ensure that when its dignitaries meet Chinese counterparts, they meet as equals, a rising power China would be wise to respect rather than a mere counterweight to Pakistan.

The urgency is sharpened by upheaval from India’s Western partners. On August 6, 2025, the same day the China visit leaked, the Trump administration slapped a 25% tariff on Indian goods atop pre-existing duties, pushing some as high as 50%. The stated rationale was to punish India for buying Russian oil despite the sanctions regime meant to cripple Russia over Ukraine.

The blow is severe: the United States is India’s largest export market, and the move marks Trump turning his back on a previously close relationship with Modi. The administration could still reverse course before a late-August implementation date, but the decision had been made.

Washington’s conduct stung all the more because China, a US adversary that also buys Russian oil, went unpenalized while US ally India was singled out. The United States simultaneously welcomed Pakistan’s highest-ranking general and de facto leader to Washington and gave Pakistan a more favorable bilateral trade deal. India and the US had just completed five rounds of trade talks that seemed to be going well, with Indian leaders hoping to cap tariffs at 15% and expecting an announcement weeks earlier.

Worse, only a couple of years before, under Biden, Washington had encouraged India to buy Russian crude within certain rules, seeing those purchases as a way to make Russia dependent on India and extract concessions. For a partner that relies on stable, decades-long American decision-making, the reversal was a lesson: the path forward should be one of India’s own choosing. China appears willing to accept a more confident, relatively equal India despite favoring Pakistan, while the United States looks increasingly untrustworthy, reaffirming decades of Indian strategic autonomy.

Mali Reopens the Door to Washington

In the African Sahel, the nation of Mali is besieged by not one but two jihadist insurgencies that massacre Malian soldiers regularly, prey on civilians, and build momentum the state has proved unable to stop. Mali still is not winning. But the more consequential development is the return of the United States.

The recent history matters. In 2021, Mali’s military overthrew the civilian government in a coup, and neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger followed shortly after. The three split from the regional bloc ECOWAS to form a mutual defense pact, banding together after seizing power by force, and disengaged from the Western powers that had served as security guarantors. From 2014 to 2022, France, the region’s historical colonizer, led the international Operation Barkhane against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other insurgencies; the United States ran a parallel intervention based in Niger until its complete withdrawal in the summer of 2024.

After the West was expelled, the three nations turned to Russia, first welcoming the mercenary Wagner Group, then its nominal successor, Russia’s Africa Corps, to fill the gap. The arrangement was framed as a rebuke to colonial legacy and a demonstration that these regimes could stand on their own, while Russia seized the chance to expand its influence. The results have not matched the rhetoric.

The Sahel’s insurgencies, and especially the al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM, are running wild, carrying out frequent mass-casualty attacks on military targets across all three nations and even striking Russian paramilitaries with impunity. Neither the Sahel governments nor Russia will admit failure, but neither has been able to stop the bleeding.

America’s Quiet Overtures and Russia’s Faltering Grip

Against that backdrop, news broke in late July that Mali had welcomed a US delegation. Mali’s foreign minister received a senior State Department official and other dignitaries in the capital, Bamako, where the two sides discussed Mali’s fight against JNIM and the Sahel branch of the Islamic State. They explored renewed economic cooperation, including a possible surge of American investment and facilitation of private US business ventures.

The US delegation stressed identifying and dismantling terrorist financing networks and raised the prospect of renewed intelligence-sharing to give Mali an advantage against the jihadists. It was the first high-level, detailed discussion of US-Mali security arrangements since the West was asked to leave.

The meeting did not happen in a vacuum. American figures have visited Bamako since nearly the start of Trump’s second term, with military legal representatives traveling there in February for the first direct military engagement in half a decade. Mali’s foreign minister met the US ambassador, a counterterrorism adviser, earlier in July to discuss intelligence, logistical support, training, and recognizing and dealing with improvised explosive devices. American overtures have extended to Mali’s neighbors, with Niger’s prime minister visiting Washington in April and accepting an ambassador in May, and Burkina Faso invited to a US-led conference of African defense leaders.

Those efforts have hit friction elsewhere. In late July, the US paused visa processing in Niger, citing only unspecified concerns with the government. In Burkina Faso, Washington remains skeptical of 37-year-old strongman Ibrahim Traoré, who rails against Western neocolonialism. Mali is different; its leaders appear genuinely interested in closer US ties.

Barriers exist on the American side too: US law prohibits military assistance to countries whose security forces commit gross human rights violations, of which Mali’s military has been credibly and repeatedly accused. But with Republicans in full control of US foreign policy, enforcement of those prohibitions is uncertain.

What Mali’s Pivot Means for the Sahel

A renewed US-Mali relationship would carry weight in three directions. First, it would signal Mali’s doubts about its own confederation. The alliance with Niger and Burkina Faso has always been partly a matter of convenience: shared dislike of Western intervention, shared international backlash over their coups, shared insurgent enemies, and a shared Russian patron.

Beyond that, the three regimes have little in common, holding different visions and carrying old wounds, and their collaboration has produced constant setbacks. It is more convenient for each to blame the others for porous borders and broken collective-defense promises, critiques that are legitimate in every direction. Their grander goals, common markets, new currencies, shared industry, and eventually a unified sovereign state, look very difficult to achieve.

For Mali to restart ties with Washington without its partners is a quiet but direct rebuke of those shared ambitions.

Second, the pivot is a blow to Russia. For years, Russia was supposed to guarantee security, provide training, logistics, and intelligence, and help defeat JNIM and IS-Sahel. Instead, the situation has only devolved. Malian soldiers have adopted Wagner’s brutality toward civilians without managing to defend bases against major attacks.

Wagner suffered direct defeats, including a devastating one at the Battle of Tinzaouaten in 2024, and has been pulled out, replaced by an Africa Corps contingent reportedly less willing to do the dirty work. Mali’s government now appears to believe it must re-engage Washington despite backlash from its own people and from Russia.

For the United States, the move fits the second Trump administration’s broader approach: engaging regional leaders regardless of their record to facilitate business deals and, above all, resource extraction. Mali offers plenty, with massive gold mining potential in the south, major iron deposits, ample uranium, and smaller deposits of lithium, manganese, and bauxite. In exchange, Washington would likely provide intelligence and logistical support and could conduct airstrikes to back Malian soldiers, as it has done in Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere in 2025. Uniformed ground troops appear unlikely under Trump, beyond a possible special forces detachment, but Trump’s ties to private military contractors could open avenues for non-uniformed personnel.

Russia, for its part, has stepped up efforts to secure its place, strengthening ties with Togo and Benin, potentially adding Togo to the confederation, and engaging Mali on defense, energy, and mining cooperation. But Russia faces another rival: Turkey. Over recent months Turkey has positioned itself as a foil to Russia across the Middle East, Africa, and the Caucasus.

In the Sahel it has supported Mali and Niger for years, including with its affordable, effective drones. Mali has worked with a Turkish military training mission since mid-2024, with elite Turkish soldiers alleged by the outlet Jeune Afrique to have embedded in units loyal to Mali’s leader. Turkey already embeds its own mercenaries across several African nations in a style similar to Wagner.

As a NATO ally whose leader, Tayyip Erdoğan, grows ever closer to Trump, Turkey could enhance whatever offer Washington brings. Any realignment will take time, if it happens at all, and Mali could still recommit to its old course, but welcoming American delegations to explicitly security-focused talks does not happen by accident.

Ghana’s Bawku Crisis and the JNIM Shadow

A couple hundred kilometers south of Mali, Ghanaian troops are streaming into the country’s northeast, where a decades-old minor conflict risks spiraling out of control. Ghana rarely features in this kind of survey, but the stakes have changed.

At the very northeast tip of Ghana’s territory, where its borderlands meet Togo and Burkina Faso, sits Bawku, capital of the Bawku Municipal District, home to about seventy thousand people. Most of the time it is quiet, unless the two dominant local ethnic groups are at odds. The area is home to the Bawku Chieftaincy Conflict, which first broke out in 1957 between the Mamprusi and the Kusaasi, rival clans that each believe they should anoint the chief of Bawku and its surroundings.

The two have lived in proximity for centuries while sharing little common ground, and old colonial systems deepened the divisions by elevating friendly tribal leaders into local administrators, handing one tribe’s leader power over the others. That system remains in place, and both clans must navigate it.

For decades the conflict has followed a predictable rhythm. When the chieftaincy falls vacant, both clans push their candidate, one gets snubbed, and violence often follows before peace is restored. Generation after generation of that cycle has bred deep bitterness and mistrust, so that violence is now the expectation. The 21st century has seen several rounds of fighting, with a cumulative death toll well into the hundreds; in 2024, dozens died after yet another dispute, setting the stage for the current flare-up.

According to local media, the present round began midway through July, when gunmen killed a Kusaasi chief who also served as a local administrator. Gunmen also killed three teenagers at a pair of local high schools, all of them Kusaasi, with one dragged from his dormitory and executed and the other two apparently deliberately targeted. Ghana’s ceremonial ruler, Osei Tutu II, tried to mediate directly but failed, and violence between armed Kusaasi and Mamprusi spread rapidly. Ghanaian soldiers surged in, imposing curfews and swelling deployments to undisclosed numbers, but tensions remain sky-high with no clear way to keep fighting from reigniting once federal troops leave.

A Weak Military Stretched Too Thin

The reason a small-scale dispute matters now is its timing. Ghana is one of the last parts of the Sahel still mostly exempt from JNIM’s growing insurgency, but not because the group ignores it. JNIM is strongest fighting Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, inflicting mass casualties and seizing civilian areas to recruit, raise money, and build hideouts and logistical networks.

As its offensives push southward, Benin, Togo, and the Ivory Coast face rising risk. Ghana, for now, serves a different purpose: a prime recruitment territory where disaffected young men with few prospects are vulnerable to extremism, and a haven where porous northern borders let fighters hide, regroup, and slip back into Burkina Faso to attack. The Africa Report called Ghana the “nerve center” for JNIM’s effort to steal cattle from farming and herding communities, convert them into funds, and finance the insurgency.

This is feasible because Ghana’s military is weak and badly underequipped for an asymmetric threat tied to organized crime. The force fields only about 15,000 active-duty personnel. Its army has no tanks, fewer than forty infantry fighting vehicles, and roughly a dozen meaningful artillery pieces.

Its air force has no fixed-wing combat aircraft, though it is training pilots on a handful of Brazilian-made Super Tucano light-attack propeller planes. Underfunded, undertrained, and poorly supported by border and policing agencies, the military is stretched too thin to root out JNIM. Compounding the crisis, on June 2, 2025, Ghana’s defense minister, Edward Omane Boamah, was reported killed in a military helicopter crash along with his Deputy National Security Coordinator, the environment minister, and five others.

Boamah had been the point man for Ghana’s efforts against JNIM, making his death, if confirmed, a significant blow.

How the Insurgency Could Exploit Bawku

There is never a good time for a simmering tribal conflict to erupt, but rarely a worse one than now. Ghana has been cagey about troop numbers in the north, but the figure is likely in the multiple hundreds at least. No military can devote all its troops to one crisis; many are training, serving as support, or holding posts nationwide, and the air force and navy are of little use as inland peacekeepers. With only 15,000 troops total, Ghana cannot siphon much to Bawku even in ideal circumstances, and it is now pulling critical forces away from the patrols, guard posts, and checkpoints meant to keep JNIM from entrenching further in the north.

The recent killings suggest this round will be especially bad. Targeting three high school students marked deliberate, premeditated violence against civilians, when fighting is usually confined to adult combatants, a far deeper wound likely to be avenged in blood. Peacekeeping troops have not helped; smaller contingents have failed to protect buses ambushed even under military escort and have earned a poor reputation.

According to women, children, and elderly residents speaking to the global press in March, soldiers responded to earlier flare-ups by targeting and beating civilians. One local leader told DW, “Men were attacked, women were attacked, old men were attacked and even their limbs broken, properties were destroyed.” That violence followed the killing of a military officer, yet soldiers came after civilians rather than restoring order.

Ghana’s troops have also faced accusations of arbitrary detention, extrajudicial execution, and bias against both major tribes.

Worst of all, JNIM almost certainly knows what is happening in Bawku, and regional experts fear it will capitalize. The group could seize on the ethnic divisions, appealing to people who feel disenfranchised by their government and offering an outlet for their fury. Even if it fails to exploit the hatred directly, it can exploit the distraction, expanding operations in an under-patrolled environment.

As the flare-up worsens, the government response will have to persist and may draw in an even larger share of the military. If that happens, expect JNIM to thrive, potentially strengthening its infrastructure in Ghana, using the country as a launchpad for transnational attacks, or turning on Ghana itself.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were Russia’s high-profile falls necessarily the result of people being physically thrown?

Not necessarily. The volume of nearly identical deaths strongly suggests foul play, but in cases like Saitiev’s — a three-time Olympic wrestling champion whose wrestler brother and children were present in the apartment — physically forcing the victim out would have been implausible. It is conceivable that some victims were coerced into ending their own lives rather than physically thrown. The inconsistent target profile, which includes an 82-year-old economist with no apparent enemies, undercuts any single explanation.

Why did India’s military agreement with the Philippines matter so much to China?

India agreed to supply BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, conduct its first joint naval exercises with the Philippines, and reinforce Philippine positions in the South China Sea. Unlike the Philippines, India is a nuclear-armed state with two aircraft carriers and a record of confronting China and Pakistan, so China cannot apply the same bullying tactics. India introduces a serious new challenge into a maritime contest Beijing genuinely cares about, which is why China publicly blamed the Philippines for drawing in outside powers rather than acknowledge India’s role.

Why did the United States impose tariffs on India in August 2025, and why did India see it as unfair?

Washington imposed a 25% tariff on Indian goods — pushing some to 50% — to punish India for buying Russian oil despite Western sanctions. India saw it as unfair because China, a US adversary that also buys Russian oil, went unpenalized, while the US simultaneously welcomed Pakistan’s de facto military leader and offered Pakistan a more favorable bilateral trade deal. Years earlier, under Biden, Washington had actively encouraged India to buy Russian crude within certain rules as a way to extract concessions from Moscow.

Why is Mali, which expelled Western forces, now quietly courting the United States?

After 2021 coups in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, the three nations expelled French and US forces and turned to Russia’s Wagner Group and later Africa Corps. But security has only worsened, with JNIM running wild, Wagner suffering defeats like the 2024 Battle of Tinzaouaten, and the Africa Corps reportedly less willing to do the dirty work. Mali’s leaders now appear to believe they must re-engage Washington for intelligence, logistics, and investment, while the US is drawn by Mali’s massive gold, iron, and uranium deposits.

How could the Bawku conflict in northern Ghana benefit JNIM?

The Bawku Chieftaincy Conflict — a dispute between the Mamprusi and Kusaasi clans dating to 1957 — has flared again, forcing Ghana’s 15,000-strong military to divert troops to the northeast and away from patrols designed to keep JNIM from entrenching. JNIM could exploit the ethnic divisions by appealing to disenfranchised young men, and even if it fails to recruit directly, it can expand operations in an under-patrolled environment, potentially strengthening its infrastructure in Ghana or using the country as a launchpad for transnational attacks.