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On March 2, 2026, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) did something unprecedented: it sanctioned not just individual Rwandan commanders, but the Rwanda Defence Force itself - as an institution. Four senior officers were named alongside it: Major General Vincent Nyakarundi, Major General Ruki Karusisi, General Mubarakh Muganga and Brigadier General Stanislas Gashugi.

Human rights organisations cautiously welcomed the move. Human Rights Watch called it 

"a significant effort to enforce the Washington Accords" 

while immediately noting that the US and other governments should go beyond sanctions and press for accountability for war crimes." Sanctions, in the diplomatic vocabulary, signal resolve. They signal that consequences exist. And in a conflict that has dragged on for years with near-total impunity for Kigali, any signal of consequence is significant.

But signals are not solutions. If the history of this war teaches us anything, it is that Kagame’s regime has proven extraordinarily adept at absorbing international pressure - diplomatic, economic, and legal - without fundamentally changing course. To understand why these sanctions matter, and why they may not be enough, we need to look honestly at the architecture of Rwanda's involvement in eastern DRC, the economic incentives that sustain it, and the structural gaps that even well-designed sanctions cannot close.

Let us start with what is genuinely significant about Monday's action. Sanctioning the RDF as an institution - not merely naming individual officers - means that any U.S. person or entity is now legally prohibited from conducting transactions with Rwanda's military. Arms sales, training contracts, financial transfers: all blocked. Any company or financial institution anywhere in the world that engages in certain dealings with the RDF now risks exposure to U.S. secondary sanctions. The ripple effect of that legal liability, in a globally connected financial system, is not trivial.

This matters because Rwanda is not economically self-sufficient. Over 40 percent of Rwanda's national budget is funded by international donors. The United States alone provided over $175 million in assistance to Rwanda in fiscal year 2023. While the bulk of that is development aid - health, food security, education - the designation of the RDF under these sanctions creates legal friction that extends well beyond the battlefield. It complicates procurement. It creates liability for banks. It signals to Rwanda's other partners that association with the RDF now carries reputational and legal risk.

The precedent also matters. The United States has sanctioned Rwandan individuals before - Brigadier General Andrew Nyanvumba in August 2023, and then retired General James Kabarebe in February 2025. The European Union followed in March 2025, sanctioning three RDF commanders - Ruki Karusisi, Eugène Nkubito, and Pascal Muhizi alongside the head of Rwanda's Mines Board and Gasabo Gold Refinery. Each round of sanctions has tightened the net. Monday's action closes a gap that had been left conspicuously open: the RDF as a whole.

The timing of these sanctions is as revealing as their content. On December 4, 2025, Presidents Kagame and Tshisekedi sat beside Donald Trump in Washington and signed the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity - a U.S.-brokered peace deal that Trump declared a "great miracle." Within days, M23 captured Uvira, the last major city in South Kivu still under Congolese control. At least 400 people were killed. Over 200,000 were displaced.

There are only two interpretations available. Either Kigali could not stop M23 from advancing even after signing a peace deal - which would suggest that Rwanda does not have absolute control over M23 that it has long been accused of exercising. Or Kigali chose not to stop it - which confirms exactly what the UN, the EU, and now the U.S. Treasury have formally concluded: that the RDF and M23 operate as a coordinated force, not as independent actors.

Both interpretations are damning. The first reveals a Rwandan regime that signed a peace agreement it knew it could not enforce - which is dishonesty. The second reveals a regime that signed one it had no intention of enforcing - which is worse.

A Congolese journalist who traveled to Uvira days after the signatures described what she found on the road:

 "The world's decision-makers know nothing about what is happening in my country," 

a resident told her. The Washington Accords, in other words, may have been less a peace deal than a diplomatic performance - one that served everyone at the table except the Congolese people who were not seated at it.

Here is the harder truth: sanctions on the RDF will not remove a single Rwandan soldier from Congolese soil. Not automatically. Not imminently.

This is not because sanctions are ineffective in principle. It is because Rwanda's military operation in eastern DRC is not primarily financed by Western aid. It is financed by mineral extraction.

The numbers are staggering. After seizing the coltan-rich Rubaya mining area in April 2024, M23 was generating at least $800,000 per month from taxing coltan production alone. According to UN experts, M23 fraudulently exported at least 150 metric tons of coltan to Rwanda in 2024 - an "unprecedented" contamination of the regional mineral supply chain. Rwanda officially produced 350 tones of tantalum in 2024 but exported an estimated 715 tones - exporting more than twice what it mines. The gap is Congolese minerals, laundered through Rwandan certification systems and sold into global markets as "Product from Rwanda."

Between 2017 and 2024, Rwanda's mineral exports increased by nearly 500 percent - from $373 million to $1.75 billion. 

"Mineral exports from Rwanda are now over a billion dollars a year," Jason Stearns, a former UN investigator, noted. "That's about double what they were two years ago. And we don't know how much, but a fair chunk of that is from the DRC."

Freezing the bank accounts of four generals and blocking arms sales to the RDF does not interrupt that revenue stream. The minerals keep moving. The laundering continues. The war finances itself.

The EU took a partial step in March 2025 by sanctioning Gasabo Gold Refinery and Francis Kamanzi, the CEO of Rwanda's Mines Board. But that is one refinery and one official in a system involving multiple companies, transit routes, and international buyers - including traders operating out of Luxembourg, Dubai, and beyond.Targeting one node in a network does not shut the network down. It redirects it.

If we are serious about changing Rwanda's calculus in the DRC, sanctions on military commanders are necessary but not sufficient. Several structural gaps remain unaddressed.

First, the mineral supply chain requires comprehensive intervention, not targeted designations. The Dodd-Frank Act's Section 1502 requires U.S. companies to conduct due diligence on conflict minerals. The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation imposes similar requirements on European importers. But the laundering mechanism - mixing Congolese minerals with Rwandan production before export - has rendered these frameworks increasingly hollow.Independent geological verification of Rwandan mineral exports, as the UN has called for, is now essential. Without it, the global tech industry continues to be inadvertently complicit.

Second, the European Peace Facility funding to Rwanda needs to be urgently reconsidered. What we are looking at is not a series of unfortunate coincidences - it is a pattern. Eugene Nkubito commanded Rwanda's Joint Task Force in Mozambique from August 2022 to August 2023, and Pascal Muhizi served as Task Force Battle Group Commander during the same period, both leading an EU-funded deployment while evidence of RDF operations in eastern DRC was piling up. 

When Nkubito returned from Mozambique in August 2023, he was appointed commander of the RDF's 3rd Division - the same division for which the US Treasury Department had, earlier that year, imposed sanctions on Brigadier General Andrew Nyamvumba for leading it into Congolese territory, where it had attacked Congolese army positions alongside M23. Nkubito stepped directly from an EU-funded command into a U.S.-sanctioned one. The EU then sanctioned him in March 2025 for commanding that same division in North Kivu. The officer now sitting in the Mozambique command seat, Major General Vincent Gatama, who took over in October 2025, has a DRC record that goes back further than any of his predecessors. He led the RDF special forces unit that attacked Goma in November 2012, was promoted for it by Kagame, and was overseeing RDF operations in South Kivu in 2022, - the same year European money began flowing in, before Kigali sent him to Cabo Delgado. The Rwanda Classified investigation, to which I contributed as part of a Forbidden Stories partnership, has established these facts. 

The EU has sanctioned Rwandan commanders for what they did in Congo while writing cheques to a mission that keeps cycling in officers from the same operations. That is not a bureaucratic failure. That is a policy contradiction - and it cannot be resolved by looking the other way.

Third, the ICC's renewed focus on eastern DRC requires international support. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced renewed investigative efforts in October 2024.But the Court lacks enforcement power. It depends on state cooperation. Sanctions regimes can and should be coordinated with ICC processes - freezing assets, restricting travel, and building evidentiary records that complement criminal investigations rather than substituting for them.

Fourth, Rwanda's leverage as a peacekeeping contributor cannot continue to function as diplomatic cover. For years, Rwanda's significant contributions to UN peacekeeping missions in Africa have given it diplomatic capital that it has used to deflect accountability. The United States and its allies must be prepared to separate Rwanda's peacekeeping role from its conduct in the DRC - and to hold both simultaneously without allowing one to excuse the other.

None of this is new. In 2012, during the first M23 rebellion, the United States and United Kingdom dramatically cut aid to Rwanda after M23 seized Goma. It worked - Rwanda withdrew its support, M23 was defeated, and a period of relative stability followed.But the lesson Kigali took from 2012 was not that aggression was wrong. It was that aggression needed to be better disguised and that Western partners had short memories.

M23 reemerged in late 2021 with far greater capacity, far more sophisticated equipment, and far deeper institutional ties to the RDF. The current rebellion has seized territory five times the size of Rwanda's own land area. Over seven million people are displaced.The scale of this crisis dwarfs what came before.

The sanctions of March 2, 2026 are, in this context, a necessary escalation. They are also, by themselves, insufficient. They will be felt by the RDF in ways that matter - financial isolation, procurement complications, reputational damage. But the RDF's operations in the DRC will not end because its generals cannot access their U.S. bank accounts. They will end when the economic incentive to be in the DRC - the minerals - is disrupted at scale, and when the political cost of continued occupation exceeds whatever Rwanda is gaining from it.

The people of eastern DRC have been living inside a crisis that the world has repeatedly described as urgent and repeatedly failed to resolve. Peace deals have been signed and violated. Ceasefires have been announced and ignored. Sanctions have been imposed and absorbed.

Monday's action is the most significant international pressure applied to Rwanda's military to date. It should be welcomed - and it should be treated as a floor, not a ceiling.

 Pressure is not the same as peace. And for the millions of Congolese who have spent years watching the world choose diplomatic comfort over accountability, the question is not whether Washington has finally acted.

The question is whether it will keep acting - with the sustained resolve and structural seriousness that this crisis has always demanded, and has so rarely received.