The M23 rebel group has pulled back from Sange and the surrounding area of South Kivu, a security source within the movement confirmed to AFP this week. Fighters are “returning to the positions we held before taking Uvira,” the source said. The Rwanda-backed insurgency continues to control Kamanyola, 70 kilometres north of Uvira, and pro-Congolese government forces have kept clashing with M23-aligned militia around Minembwe and in the southern Masisi district of North Kivu. By the standard of eastern Congo, this is what diplomats call good news.
The withdrawal is the latest test of the ceasefire that the Trump administration midwifed in Washington in late 2024 and which Kigali, Kinshasa and M23 have been quietly violating ever since. Under the Washington framework, M23 was meant to retreat from its 2023–2024 conquests, the DRC was meant to grant the Tutsi communities of North and South Kivu broader political representation, and Rwanda was meant to withdraw its troops and intelligence personnel from Congolese soil. Twelve months in, none of the three has been done in full.
President Félix Tshisekedi told the international press in early May that he is considering extending his term and delaying the next general election, citing the security situation in the east. Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, in turn, has accused the DRC of dragging its feet on integrating M23 leaders into government structures. M23 itself has carved out a parallel administration in the parts of North Kivu it still controls, complete with tax collection, customs, mining licences, and a uniformed police force.
What changed in May was less a breakthrough than a managed retreat under pressure. After the United States sanctioned senior Rwandan military commanders in March and former DRC president Joseph Kabila for his alleged ties to M23, the cost of being seen to violate the December agreement rose for everyone. Rwanda, which depends on continued access to US Treasury markets and on a quiet Washington defence relationship, leaned on M23 to perform a visible concession. Kinshasa, in turn, eased pressure on some of the Tutsi political prisoners it had been holding. The result is the partial pullback announced this week — not because the war is ending, but because the diplomatic cost of refusing to pretend it is ending was, for the moment, too high.
The economic logic underneath all of this remains unchanged. M23’s de facto territory sits on top of some of the densest concentrations of coltan, tin, tungsten and gold on the African continent. Rwanda’s extraordinary export performance in tantalum — Kigali consistently exports several times more than it can plausibly produce domestically — has long been understood by mining analysts as evidence of cross-border laundering. The Trump administration’s announcement that the DRC will establish a US- and UAE-backed paramilitary guard for its eastern mining sites is a tacit acknowledgement that the formal Congolese army cannot secure those mines and that the global supply chain for electric vehicles and consumer electronics has decided it cannot wait for Congolese state-building to succeed.
For East Africa, this matters. The East African Community admitted the DRC as its seventh member in 2022 and has since hosted the East African Community Regional Force on Congolese soil; the force was withdrawn in 2023 after Kinshasa complained it was tolerating M23. Kenya, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania have all backed competing political processes for the east. Burundian forces are reported to still be operating inside South Kivu, fighting M23 directly. Uganda’s troops are deployed in Ituri under a separate bilateral arrangement. The result is a region whose militaries are entangled in a war they cannot collectively call by a single name.
Kenya’s own position is now the most awkward. The Nairobi Process for the DRC was a major foreign-policy investment under President Uhuru Kenyatta and a continuing one under President William Ruto. Yet the actual diplomatic action of 2025 and 2026 has happened in Washington and Doha, not in Nairobi. The risk for Kenya is becoming a marginal voice in the regional crisis closest to its commercial interests, while Rwanda and the DRC negotiate over Kenyan heads with American intermediaries.
What to watch next: whether M23’s reported withdrawal actually translates into freedom of movement for civilians in Sange and the surrounding villages; whether Tshisekedi proceeds with his hinted-at term extension, which would invalidate much of the international goodwill the DRC currently enjoys; and whether the US-backed paramilitary mine guard ever actually materialises, or remains an unfunded press release.
For the people of eastern Congo, none of this is academic. A partial M23 pullback means the difference between a market opening tomorrow and a village burning tonight. The political class in Kinshasa, Kigali and Washington has the luxury of treating the war as a managed problem. The civilians of South Kivu and North Kivu do not. They are still living, in May 2026, inside Africa’s longest-running, least-resolved war — and a quiet retreat by armed men past their houses is the closest thing they have had to peace in a year.
