OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — The military leaders of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger gathered in the Burkinabe capital on Sunday to sign a sweeping security and economic protocol that deepens their alliance and accelerates their break with the regional bloc ECOWAS, in a closing communique that pointedly omitted any reference to a return to constitutional rule.

The one-day summit, hosted by Burkinabe head of state Captain Ibrahim Traore, produced a 14-point declaration creating a joint counterterrorism command, a shared customs regime and a common identity document that will allow free movement of citizens between the three Sahel states beginning in July. Officials said the protocol also lays the groundwork for a single regional currency, provisionally called the Sahel, to be piloted in cross-border trade by the end of the year.

“This is the response of sovereign African peoples to the failures of an order imposed from outside,” Traore told delegates in a 40-minute address broadcast on state television. “We are building, brick by brick, the institutions that our former partners refused to let us build.”

The new pact, formally titled the Confederation of Sahel States Charter, replaces a looser mutual-defense arrangement the three countries signed in September 2023. Diplomats who reviewed the text said it goes well beyond that earlier framework, binding the signatories to coordinated foreign policy, a unified visa regime and an explicit rejection of “any external mediation” of their internal political timetables.

ECOWAS, the 15-member West African economic bloc that suspended Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger after their respective coups, issued a terse statement from its Abuja headquarters describing the Ouagadougou declaration as “a matter of grave concern” and reiterating its call for “a credible and time-bound transition to civilian government.” Commission President Omar Alieu Touray said the bloc would convene an extraordinary ministerial session in early May to weigh “all available instruments,” language widely understood in West African capitals to include the possible reimposition of targeted sanctions lifted last year.

France, which has lost military access to all three countries since 2022, was not invited to send observers. A French foreign ministry spokesperson, Camille Bouchard, said in Paris that France “takes note” of the new charter and “remains attentive to the trajectory of fundamental freedoms in the Sahel,” but she declined to characterize the pact as a hostile act.

Russia, by contrast, sent a senior delegation. Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov was seated in the front row at the signing ceremony alongside the heads of state, and Russian state outlets carried live coverage. Two Sahel diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the talks, said Moscow had offered expanded training programs for the new joint command and was negotiating a long-term grain supply agreement to be settled outside the dollar system. Africa Corps personnel, the rebranded successor to the Wagner Group, already operate in all three countries.

The summit also produced a sharp rhetorical pivot toward what Traore called “civilian normalization,” though the document contains no firm timetable for elections in any of the three states. The Burkinabe leader, who took power in October 2022 and has since postponed two scheduled transition deadlines, said only that constitutional referenda would be organized “when the security situation permits” — language echoed by Malian leader Assimi Goita and Nigerien General Abdourahamane Tiani.

The economics of the pact have drawn particular attention from analysts. The three countries together produce roughly 7 percent of the world’s gold and significant volumes of uranium and lithium. Under the new charter, mining royalties will be pooled into a shared sovereign fund to finance infrastructure, with a target of allocating 40 percent of receipts to a Sahel-wide rail and road program.

“What we’re seeing is the institutional consolidation of a model that has been improvised since 2020,” said Fatoumata Diallo, a Dakar-based political economist at the Timbuktu Institute. “Whether it can deliver on its promises depends almost entirely on whether the security picture stabilizes — and on that front, the trend lines are not encouraging.”

Jihadist violence across the central Sahel has worsened over the past 18 months, with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimating more than 4.2 million internally displaced people across the three countries as of March. A joint operation by Burkinabe and Malian forces in the Liptako-Gourma border region this month killed dozens of fighters affiliated with the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, military spokespeople said, but attacks on civilian convoys have continued almost weekly.

Civil-society groups inside the three countries have expressed unease at the lack of any democratic horizon. In a joint statement issued from Niamey on Saturday, a coalition of Sahelian rights organizations called the new charter “a permanent emergency dressed in regional clothing” and warned that the abolition of internal political opposition under the guise of security cooperation could “freeze entire generations out of public life.”

Coastal West African states — Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Nigeria — have watched the consolidation with growing alarm. Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who has positioned himself as a bridge between ECOWAS and the Sahel states, said in a Dakar press conference that he would seek direct talks with Traore “in the coming weeks” to explore narrow areas of cooperation, particularly on cross-border insurgency.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in Brussels that the bloc would maintain humanitarian assistance to the populations of the three countries but signaled that no new development financing would flow until “verifiable steps toward democratic transition” were undertaken.

Officials in Ouagadougou said the next summit of the new confederation would be held in Bamako in October, by which point the joint command is expected to be operational.