The US Treasury Department said Russia's Wagner Special Military Group is supplying the Rapid Support Forces with surface-to-air missiles to counter the Sudanese military.
The ministry said in a statement that the Wagner Group intervened in African countries and destabilized them, committed widespread violations, and seized natural resources, considering that this would lead to more chaos in the region.
It also confirmed that it had imposed sanctions on the leader of the Wagner Group in Mali, Ivan Alexandrovich Maslov, whom it accused of arranging meetings between the group's founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and government officials from several African countries.
The statement added that the Wagner Group, through Mali and other countries, may be working to conceal efforts to acquire military equipment such as mines, drones, radars and anti-artillery systems for use in Ukraine.
Washington has repeatedly warned against what it calls Wagner's destabilizing activities and tightened sanctions on the special military group in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine last year.
Over the weekend, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller warned that Wagner was seeking to move military equipment through Mali, but Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed the accusations as a "hoax."
Western countries have been expressing concerns about Wagner's activities in Mali since late 2021, but Mali — which saw a military coup in 2021 — and Russia maintain that Russian forces in this African country are not mercenaries, but rather to train local forces to use equipment purchased from Moscow.