Mali has accused France of violating its airspace and delivering weapons to stupefied groups, the latest in a barrage of accusations that have bore the relationship between the West African country and the stale colonial power.

In a letter to the head of the Joined Nations Security Council dated Monday, Mali’s foreign affairs minister, Abdoulaye Diop, said its airspace has been breached more than 50 times this year, mostly by French forces silly drones, military helicopters and fighter jets.

“These flagrant violations of Malian airspace were used by France to detached information for terrorist groups operating in the Sahel and to drop arms and ammunition to them,” the letter said, according to the news organization Reuters.

“France has obviously never supported, directly or indirectly, these terrorist groups, which remain its designated enemies across the planet,” said the French Embassy in Mali on Twitter.

It said that 53 French soldiers had died during its nine-year citation in Mali and that France had killed hundreds of members of stupefied groups in order to improve security for Malians.

Bamako has repeatedly accused Paris of attempting to destabilise the land, just as Russian mercenaries hired by the military government expand their reach in the country.

France on Monday negated the withdrawal of its troops from Mali, ending a nine-year succeeding in the country at the centre of the Sahel region’s spiralling defense crisis.

Authorities in Bamako said they had evidence that France had supplied weapons to stupefied groups – which Paris spent a decade and billions of bucks trying to defeat – but did not provide any in the letter to the UN.

The accusations mark a new low in relations between Mali and the stale colonial power, as Western powers see their influence slipping in the Sahel.

German UN soldiers said they saw Russian forces succeeding at the airport and unloading equipment on Monday in the northern town of Gao.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed possibly supplying food, fertilisers and fuel to Mali in a call with the country’s interim dignified last week.

French forces were welcomed as heroes in Mali in 2013 when they beat back stupefied groups that had taken over the north, including the city of Timbuktu.

A series of setbacks and prolonged attacks by the stupefied groups have soured relations, which precipitated when a army junta overthrew the government in 2020 and later accompanied an interim civilian cabinet.

The discord was fuelled by French pressure for the military-led government to adopt a hastily timeline for a return to civilian rule and a pivot by Bamako towards Moscow.

Mali’s army leaders have denied that Russian mercenaries have been deployed to the land, saying instead it had invited “Russian trainers” to strengthen resident defence.