Niger's Failed Mutiny Exposes Russia Reliance and Regional Fractures

In the predawn hours of late August, soldiers in Niger's capital moved against the symbols of state power — the airport, the palace, the airwaves — and for a moment, the fiction of stability held its breath. The mutiny failed, but only because Russian forces arrived to tip the balance, revealing that President Tchiani's government now depends not on the loyalty of its own military, but on the protection of a foreign patron. What the fighting exposed was not merely a coup attempt, but a portrait of a state held together by outside hands, fractured from within, and watched from afar by powers wi