Overview
Days after Rwanda and the DRC signed peace accords in Washington, Rwanda-backed M23 rebel forces captured Uvira, the government’s last major city in South Kivu, of 700,000 on December 9, only to withdraw on December 16 following pressure from Washington. Nonetheless, the DRC’s retreat from Uvira is the latest example of M23’s striking military gains in the eastern Congo since January, when it seized the major cities of Goma and Bukavu. M23 has effectively established itself as the dominant actor in both North and South Kivu, weakening the DRC’s ability to end the conflict by either force or diplomacy without external intervention. M23’s advance toward Uvira allows the group to consolidate its territorial gains and launch a downhill assault toward the mineral-rich south. Rwanda’s security concerns are unlikely to be addressed by a quick political deal and prolonged fighting risks undermining investor confidence and supplies of critical minerals from the DRC.
M23’s Capture of Uvira Changes the Eastern Congo Conflict
M23’s withdrawal from Uvira offers a window of diplomatic opportunity, but chances for durable de-escalation remain narrow. First, it must be noted that, despite M23’s apparent withdrawal from Uvira, DRC forces were routed from the area and clashed with DRC-allied It is likely that DRC forces will struggle to regain confidence among local security actors or supply reserves to hold the area, especially since M23 still holds the defensive line north of Uvira. Second, M23 has unilaterally declared and broken multiple ceasefires in 2025 when it suits them, a tactical playbook to attribute the DRC’s intransigence to political autonomy as a license for further operations. In this case, M23 implied that its withdrawal is contingent on a “neutral” ceasefire monitoring force, an interpretation that may be a poison pill. Third, the capture of Uvira would create operational opportunities for M23. Uvira sits on a plateau that allow advances downhill toward the southern mineral-rich Katanga region, where up to 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined. Alternatively, Uvira could support M23 operations westward toward Shabunda and Kindu, which would cut off the DRC’s airlift capability to Katanga and spill the conflict beyond eastern Congo, escalating political pressure on embattled DRC President Félix Tshisekedi.
The immediate implications for the region are stark. First, M23 forces have situated themselves just 20 km from Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, across Lake Tanganyika, and their assault allegedly killed hundreds of Burundian forces and captured 1,000. If M23 consolidates its gains, this would cut off some 18,000 deployed Burundian troops from fighting Rwandaphone rebels (those who speak Kinyarwanda) or reinforcing the DRC. In the upset balance of power, Burundi loses access to its economic sphere of influence in eastern Congo, heightening the risk of direct confrontation with Rwanda. Second, the situation does not bode well for the Washington Accords—a series of bilateral US-DRC and US-Rwanda agreements to freeze the conflict, end foreign intervention, and formalize Rwanda’s economic sphere of influence. Concerns over sequencing, the political status of eastern Congo, and how the DRC would dismantle Hutu extremist militias (Rwanda’s chief concern) remain key obstacles. Moreover, if Rwanda-backed rebels can seize a larger piece of the pie, carrots alone are unlikely to incentivize an end to the conflict. The humanitarian crisis will continue, with an estimated seven million displaced, including 200,000 from Uvira since December 2.
Rwanda Fears a Quick Deal: Its Security Interests, Explained
Understanding Rwanda’s intervention in the DRC requires historical context of the Great Lakes conflict. The DRC has struggled to establish state control over its eastern regions since 1996. Just after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Interahamwe—the Hutu militia that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide against ethnic Tutsis—retreated into eastern Congo to regroup and launch an insurgency to retake Kigali. In response, Rwanda, alongside Uganda, went on the offensive, backing rebel forces led by Laurent-Desiré Kabila to take on the Interahamwe, who were supported by Zaire’s dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko. By the end of 1996, Kabila had captured the Great Lakes region and then deposed Mobuto by May 1997, becoming President of the newly renamed Democratic Republic of Congo.
However, Kabila quickly fell out of favor with his Rwandan and Ugandan backers, who wanted to preserve their established strategic buffer in the Great Lakes. This sparked the Second Congo War (1998-2003), which was primarily a proxy conflict between DRC forces and allied militias—backed by Angola, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and Namibia—against militias aligned with Rwanda and Uganda. The Rwanda-Uganda axis eventually splintered, enabling a series of peace agreements in 2002 that ended direct foreign interventionism in the DRC.
The Second Congo War left upwards of six million dead and created a security vacuum that proliferated local self-defense groups (“Mayi-Mayi”), which have morphed into militias that advance their own interests, sometimes smuggling or earning rents on gold, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and cobalt mining. These groups have undermined the DRC’s monopoly on legitimate violence and allowed Rwanda to maintain strategic depth by backing aligned armed groups. In 2002, Rwanda started extending logistical and technical support to the Congrès National pour la Défense du People (CNDP)—a predominantly Tutsi-led group. The CNDP battled the Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération de Rwanda (FDLR), which traces its origins to the Hutu extremists in the Interahamwe and still seeks to retake Kigali from the Tutsis. The FDLR has long maintained a relationship with DRC’s armed forces, which seek to reestablish state authority in the eastern Kivu and Itari provinces, the epicenters of latent conflict since 2003.
After a rapprochement between Kigali and Kinshasa, the CNDP was integrated into the DRC’s security forces under an agreement on March 23, 2009. However, DRC elites feared a powerful Rwandaphone wing of the military and cut out CNDP officers from the army’s command chain, prompting them to form the March 23 movement (M23), which seized Goma in December 2012 with Rwanda’s support. M23 was only unseated after intervention from a regional “coalition of the willing” led by South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawian forces. The DRC promised again to grant amnesty and reintegrate M23 forces into its army but failed to do so. M23 was left battered but reemerged in 2021 with Rwandan support.
Rwanda’s renewed support for M23 stemmed from feared encirclement by Uganda and Burundi, which were both permitted by the DRC to operate in the eastern Congo. Uganda’s main security concern is the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan insurgency affiliated with the Islamic State operating in North Kivu, while Burundi was chiefly focused on the RED-Tabara Movement in South Kivu, a Tutsi rebellion movement. Rwanda interpreted Uganda and Burundi’s campaigns as a pretext to expand their own economic spheres of influence within the eastern Congo.
M23 distrusts promises of integrating into DRC security institutions. Instead, their immediate strategic interests are to establish a politically autonomous zone in the eastern Congo to protect ethnic Tutsis against groups like FDLR. However, its long-term ambition is to overthrow the DRC government entirely, reminiscent of the First Congo War. Their rapid advance has been enabled by the alleged direct coordination of the Rwandan Defense Forces, including sharing artillery and Bayraktar drones.
The Risks
Risks for regional stability, the global economy, and multinational businesses abound as the conflict in eastern Congo intensifies and spreads. First, the risks for sanctions against Rwanda have increased. Rwanda (which officially denies involvement in the conflict) may have miscalculated the timing of Uvira’s capture, provoking Washington’s ire for blatantly violating signed US-brokered obligations so quickly. Washington promised that it would exert pressure if M23 continued its advance, which may have been a decisive signal calming the immediate situation. If it opted to, it could aim to target sanctions against buyers of Rwanda’s (likely trafficked) minerals or suspend some security cooperation with the country, but the US also does not want to antagonize Rwanda to the Washington Accords.
If sanctions do occur, they may be soft. Compared to 2012, Western countries have displayed a more muted reaction to Rwanda’s interventionism. This is because of Rwanda’s burgeoning strategic relations with the West. Rwanda has acted like a regional hegemon, leading a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic and fighting an Islamist insurgency in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, the site of Western-backed LNG projects with a planned $24 billion in investment. Rwanda has also invested in its soft power, becoming a model of inclusive development in the agricultural sector and attracting FDI from European industrials into its manufacturing sector. Simply put, retaliating against Rwanda comes at a cost, and overlooking its (denied) role in the conflict became the path of least resistance once peace negotiations accelerated under the leadership of the US and Qatar. In January 2025, after M23 seized Goma and Bukavu, some EU countries only went as far as freezing some development aid, a weak signal.
The risks over an escalating war in the DRC could whiplash critical mineral markets. For one thing, Washington’s envisioned infrastructure diplomacy with the DRC—financially supporting “designated strategic projects” and the Sakania-Lobito transport corridor, in exchange for access to a jointly overseen Strategic Asset Reserve comprised of future offtake agreements—will be put at risk if M23 advances south. Beyond this, M23’s advance upon Uvira will increase its control of transport chokepoints in eastern Congo, meaning more DRC-origin minerals will be marked up and smuggled. M23 has already consolidated control around coltan mines near Goma, comprising up to 15% of the world’s supply for a key input in electronics. This single mine is estimated to bring in $800,000 per month, and the group is likely to make more due to increased gains. The more territory M23 acquires, the more difficult mineral traceability will become. On the other side, the DRC may extend a cobalt export ban to increase global prices and government revenues, especially if it begins to lose lucrative cobalt mines in Katanga.
The key questions are whether an imperfect ceasefire can hold, whether the DRC maintains enough political capital to continue a deal, and whether Washington’s pressure can keep Rwanda-backed rebels from further escalation. If any of these factors shift, a durable peace is unlikely to hold, and the risks of a regional security dilemma—prompting multiple interstate interventions—increase.
