ACCRA, Ghana — West African heads of state on Saturday tightened the screws on the three military-ruled Sahel states, agreeing in principle to a graduated package of secondary banking sanctions that could take effect within six weeks unless juntas in Ouagadougou, Bamako and Niamey commit to a phased return to civilian rule.

The decision, reached on the closing day of an emergency Economic Community of West African States summit, marked the bloc’s sharpest pivot in nearly a year and came as Russian security contractors continued to expand their footprint across Burkina Faso, including a newly disclosed training compound roughly 90 kilometers north of the capital.

“The patience of this region is not limitless,” Ghanaian President Nana Boateng told reporters after the closed-door session. “We are no longer willing to allow the Sahel to drift, year after year, into a permanent state of exception. Either there is a credible calendar or there are credible consequences.”

The communique, read out by ECOWAS Commission President Hadiza Sani, gave the three governments until May 18 to submit binding transition timetables. Failure to do so, she said, would trigger Phase One measures: the freezing of correspondent banking relationships between the bloc’s clearing institutions and roughly two dozen named state-linked entities, a step short of the sweeping 2024 sanctions that backfired politically but considerably more disruptive than the symbolic travel bans imposed last autumn.

Burkina Faso’s foreign ministry rejected the move within hours. In a statement carried by state broadcaster RTB, the ministry called the threatened measures “an act of economic aggression coordinated from Paris and Washington” and reaffirmed that the country, along with Mali and Niger, remained committed to the parallel Alliance of Sahel States, the bloc the three juntas formed after walking out of ECOWAS in early 2024.

Diplomats present in Accra acknowledged that the summit’s tougher line reflected a shift in calculation rather than a breakthrough. The Iran-Israel war, now in its sixth week, has consumed Western diplomatic bandwidth and pushed oil prices into territory that has squeezed every importer in the region. Several coastal states, led by Senegal and Ivory Coast, argued that ECOWAS could no longer afford to treat the Sahel as a frozen file while jihadist violence pushed steadily southward along the Gulf of Guinea littoral.

“There is a recognition that drift is itself a policy, and it is a bad one,” said Aminata Diallo, a Dakar-based analyst with the West Africa Policy Institute. “What changed in Accra is not the affection for sanctions, which remains low, but the assessment that the security situation in northern Togo, northern Benin and northern Ghana is now severe enough that the cost of doing nothing has overtaken the cost of acting.”

Attacks attributed to the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, or JNIM, killed at least 47 soldiers and civilians in the tri-border area in March alone, according to figures compiled by the regional Conflict Observatory in Lome. Two separate incursions into Benin’s Atacora province in the last 10 days prompted Cotonou to declare three northern communes military operational zones.

Against that backdrop, the expansion of Russian paramilitary activity in Burkina Faso has hardened views in several capitals that once preferred quiet engagement. Satellite imagery reviewed this week by the Sahel Open Source Collective, a Brussels-based research outfit, showed earthworks, vehicle revetments and what analysts described as a probable rotary-wing pad at a site near Ziniare. The collective’s director, Pierre Marchetti, said the layout was “consistent with a forward operating base rather than a training camp,” though he cautioned that the imagery alone could not establish the nationality of personnel on site.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Volkov, asked about the report at a Moscow briefing on Friday, said only that Russia maintained “cooperation partnerships” with the three Sahel states at their request and would not comment on operational matters. Burkinabe Information Minister Boukari Soulama similarly declined to confirm the site’s purpose but said any presence on Burkinabe soil was “by sovereign invitation.”

France, whose long shadow over the region remains a defining political variable, has kept a deliberately low profile in the latest cycle. French Foreign Minister Catherine Levert told the National Assembly on Thursday that Paris supported ECOWAS as “the legitimate regional voice” but would not “lend its name to measures whose authorship would only be used against them.” A French diplomat in the region, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, put it more bluntly: “We have decided that being absent from the conversation is, for now, the most useful thing we can be.”

Washington, by contrast, signaled at least conditional support. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Marcus Hill, who attended the summit as an observer, told reporters in Accra that the United States would “review measures aligned with ECOWAS decisions” and continued to view the three juntas’ counterterrorism trajectory as “deteriorating, not improving.”

Inside the summit, several leaders pressed for an off-ramp clause that would allow rapid suspension of any sanctions package if transition timetables were submitted in good faith. That language survived into the final text. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who chaired the session, emphasized in closing remarks that the bloc “has no quarrel with the peoples of the Sahel” and that any measures would be calibrated to avoid the food and fuel shocks that discredited the 2024 push.

Whether the May 18 deadline produces movement or merely another round of brinkmanship is, as one Ghanaian official put it, “the entire question.” ECOWAS technical teams are expected to begin drafting the specific sanctions list at meetings in Abuja next week, with foreign ministers scheduled to reconvene on May 4 to review compliance and finalize the measures should the juntas decline to engage.