ABUJA, Nigeria — West African leaders pressed Burkina Faso’s military government on Thursday to commit to a firm civilian-transition timetable, warning that further delays could trigger fresh sanctions when the regional bloc convenes in Bamako next week for a long-delayed summit on the Sahel crisis.

The Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS, said in a communiqué from its Abuja headquarters that Ouagadougou’s transitional authorities had so far failed to submit the “credible and dated roadmap” demanded at the bloc’s December meeting. Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who took power in a 2022 coup and consolidated his hold last year, has repeatedly said elections cannot be organized while the country remains under jihadist siege across roughly 40 percent of its territory.

“The patience of the region is not infinite,” ECOWAS Commission President Omar Alieu Touray told reporters in Abuja. “We accept that the security context is grave. We do not accept that it is a permanent excuse for the suspension of democratic life.”

Touray said the bloc was preparing a “graduated response” that could include the suspension of regional development financing, restrictions on travel for senior junta officials and a freeze on a planned $180 million West African Development Bank infrastructure tranche. He stopped short of threatening the broader trade and banking penalties imposed on Niger in 2023, which were widely seen as having backfired by deepening anti-French and anti-ECOWAS sentiment across the Sahel.

The pressure comes as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — the three junta-led states that quit ECOWAS last year to form the Alliance of Sahel States, known by its French acronym AES — have moved to deepen their own integration. Officials in Ouagadougou said the alliance’s new biometric passport had been issued to roughly 90,000 citizens since January, and that a joint AES central bank study would be presented to the three heads of state in May. AES foreign ministers have called the ECOWAS summit “an internal matter for an organization to which we no longer belong.”

Burkinabe Foreign Minister Karamoko Jean Marie Traoré, in a statement carried by state broadcaster RTB, accused ECOWAS of “performing diplomacy for European audiences” while ignoring the deteriorating security picture. He noted that the army had retaken three district capitals in the eastern Est region last month and said elections “in current conditions would amount to an invitation to JNIM,” referring to the al-Qaida-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, which has expanded its operations across the central Sahel.

Independent analysts have largely confirmed the territorial losses. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded 412 violent incidents in Burkina Faso in March, the highest monthly figure since the project began tracking the country in 2017. More than 2.1 million people are internally displaced, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and a March 25 attack on a convoy in Soum province killed at least 47 soldiers and auxiliaries.

“ECOWAS is in a genuinely difficult position,” said Aïssatou Diallo, a senior researcher at the Dakar-based West Africa Policy Hub. “If they push too hard, they accelerate the AES project and push the juntas further into Russia’s orbit. If they don’t push at all, they signal that coups carry no cost. The Bamako summit is going to test whether the bloc can find a middle path or whether it just keeps issuing communiqués.”

Russian and Turkish influence in the region has continued to expand. The Africa Corps, the rebranded successor to the Wagner Group, maintains an estimated 1,500 personnel across the three AES states, according to a French defense ministry assessment leaked to Le Monde last week. Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones have become a staple of Burkinabe and Malian counter-insurgency operations, and Ankara has agreed in principle to open a defense industrial cooperation office in Ouagadougou later this year.

The summit, originally scheduled for February in Accra, was postponed twice and relocated to Bamako at the request of Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who has positioned himself as a potential bridge between ECOWAS and the AES bloc. Faye, who took office in 2024 on a sovereigntist platform, has resisted French pressure to take a harder line on the juntas and has hosted Captain Traoré in Dakar twice in the past year.

A Faye adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said the Senegalese delegation would push for a “reset” framework under which AES states could be granted observer status in ECOWAS while negotiating a longer-term arrangement on free movement, customs and the regional currency. “Treating them as pariahs has not worked,” the adviser said. “We need an architecture that reflects the political reality.”

Western capitals have watched the diplomacy warily, conscious that the Sahel has receded from headlines dominated by the war between Israel and Iran. A State Department spokesperson, asked Thursday about U.S. positioning ahead of the summit, said only that Washington “supports ECOWAS-led efforts” and continued to view the restoration of constitutional order as the long-term objective.

For ordinary Burkinabes, the diplomatic maneuvering has felt distant. In Ouagadougou’s Rood Woko market, traders said inflation on imported staples — much of which still transits through ECOWAS member ports despite the political rupture — had eased slightly in March but remained painful. “We are tired of summits,” said Salif Ouedraogo, a 44-year-old textile vendor. “What we want is for the road to Bobo to be safe again.”

ECOWAS officials said a draft summit declaration would circulate this weekend, and that any sanctions package would be finalized only after Bamako.