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Six Supreme Court justices attend President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. | Shawn Thew/Pool/AFP via Getty Images The justices are quietly quitting their day jobs as judges, even as they become more and more political. Young John Roberts was a funny guy. “The generally accepted notion that the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term,” the future chief justice wrote while he was an early-career lawyer working in the Reagan White House, “gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the court in July, when we know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.” Roberts, of course, wrote this at a time when Republicans could not rely on the federal judiciary to advance its policy goals — something that Roberts has done much to change in his current job. The justices are in the middle of an unusually political term, fraught with cases that tweak many of America’s most bitter divides on issues like guns or abortion, and that seek to fundamentally restructure who wields power in the United States. That includes two cases — one already decided, the other still pending — which seem engineered to shield Donald Trump from any meaningful consequences from his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The coming weeks will see decisions in two cases that are likely to shift an extraordinary amount of policymaking authority away from an elected president and toward an unelected judiciary. Yet, while the justices seem eager to be the final word on America’s most intractable political divides, they’ve increasingly stopped doing the traditional work of judges — resolving often technical, boring legal disputes that arise between litigants whose names will never be mentioned on cable news. The Supreme Court used to do this work. But it avoids it more and more now. Indeed, one striking thing about Roberts’s Reagan-era quip about the Court’s docket is that he describes a Court that “can only hear roughly 150 cases each term.” Now, the Court is hearing barely more than 60. Consider this chart, which was produced by Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who publishes empirical work on the Supreme Court. Although slightly dated (it ends with the Court’s 2016–17 term), the chart shows the total number of cases that the Court handed down in each of its annual terms on its merits docket — the cases that typically receive full briefing and oral argument before the justices: Adam Feldman/Empirical SCOTUS Feldman’s data shows a steady decline in the Supreme Court’s workload since the 1960s. By the mid-2010s, the Court was deciding fewer cases than it had since the Civil War and Reconstruction. And this trend is continuing. In the Court’s 2013 term, it decided 79 cases on its merits docket. This term, assuming that none of the Court’s pending cases are dismissed, it will only hand down 61 decisions. Because the size of the Court’s docket has been in steady decline for many decades, there’s been a great deal of scholarship examining why this decline is happening. The striking thing, however, is that the size of the Court’s docket continues to shrink, even after many of the most likely explanations fade into the past. Many scholars, for example, point to the Supreme Court Case Selections Act of 1988, a federal law that gave the justices more ability to turn away cases they don’t want to hear, as a significant driver of the Court’s reduced caseload. Yet, while a 1988 law can certainly explain why the Court is hearing fewer cases today than it did in the early 1980s, it does little to explain why the Court heard about 23 percent fewer cases in its 2023 term than it did in its 2013 term. It is unlikely that there’s a single explanation for the Court’s shrinking docket. Scholars and other legal experts have all proposed numerous overlapping explanations for the reduced caseload. One thing is clear, however. The overall decline in the Court’s docket does not appear to be matched by a decline in the number of political cases heard by the justices. That is, while the justices are hearing fewer total cases than they used to, they are avoiding the kind of technical legal disputes that rarely garner headlines — all while vacuuming up more power to decide the kind of political disputes that divide Democrats from Republicans. The many explanations for the Court’s diminished docket Until the late 19th century, the justices had very little control over their docket. Litigants who lost in a lower court typically could bring their case to the Supreme Court whether the justices wanted to hear that case or not. This changed in 1891, when Congress enacted legislation creating mid-level courts that would hear most federal appeals and gave the Court discretion to turn away at least some cases. Two subsequent laws, enacted in 1925 and 1988, further reduced the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction. The justices now have the freedom to turn away nearly all of the cases that are brought to their attention. Today, in the overwhelming majority of cases, four justices must agree to hear the case or the lower court’s decision stands. Beyond this 1988 law, an internal change in the Court’s process for deciding which cases to hear may contribute to its reduced caseload. In a typical year, the Court receives thousands of petitions — known as petitions for a “writ of certiorari” — asking it to hear a particular case. Prior to the 1970s, at least one law clerk in each of the nine justices’ chambers would typically review each of these petitions and advise their justice on whether the petition should be granted. After Justice Lewis Powell joined the Court in 1972, he decided that this process was needlessly inefficient, and urged his colleagues to pool their chambers’ resources. The result was the “cert pool.” Under this process, petitions asking the Court to hear a case would be randomly assigned to just one clerk among all the justices who participate in the pool. These justices would all rely on a memo drafted by that one law clerk to advise them on whether to hear the case. Initially, five justices joined the pool, though that number has fluctuated, and it now includes every member of the Court except for Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Several court-watchers have blamed this process for the Court’s reduced docket. As Ken Starr, the former federal judge and US solicitor general best known for investigating President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, wrote in a 2006 essay, “this efficiency-driven device has been inadequately studied, but what is commonly understood is that the prevailing culture within the pool is to ‘just say no.’” That is, law clerks are reluctant to recommend that the Court hear a case because they don’t want to be embarrassed if the case turns out to be a dud. And with so many justices participating in the pool, many justices’ decisions will be influenced by a single timid clerk. Yet, while policy changes like the 1988 law and the implementation of the cert pool might explain why the Court hears fewer cases now than it did in the 1970s, they cannot explain why the size of the Court’s merits docket continues to decline to this day. These are, by now, well-entrenched, decades-old reforms. Whatever impact they might have had in the past is now baked into the Court’s year-to-year work. Other scholars point to changes in the Court’s personnel to explain the shrinking docket. In a 2010 essay, David Stras, a former law professor who Trump later put on the federal bench, argued that, in the early 1990s, three justices who voted to hear a relatively large volume of cases were replaced by justices who wanted the Court to hear fewer cases. The most dramatic shift was the replacement of Justice Byron White, who believed that the Supreme Court had an obligation to resolve disagreements among lower courts very quickly, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to Stras, White voted to hear a case an average of 215.6 times per Term between 1986 and 1992. When Ginsburg joined the Court, by contrast, she voted to hear only 63 cases during the 1993–94 term, “or 29.2% as often as her predecessor.” Yet, again, while these personnel changes might explain why the Court’s docket shrunk in the mid-to-late 1990s, they do not explain why the trend continues nearly four years after Ginsburg’s death. In a 2012 essay, scholars Ryan Owens and David Simon offer another explanation for the diminished docket. For much of the post-1960s period when the Court’s docket steadily declined, the justices were ideologically divided. As a result, any individual justice would “be less sure of outcomes and will anticipate more dissents and internal strife” if they agree to hear many cases. Owens and Simon argued that “such a Court will decide fewer cases” because justices will be reluctant to hear a particular dispute if they cannot predict how their colleagues will view the case. This thesis made a lot of sense in 2012, when the Court was divided 5-4 between conservatives and liberals, and when the balance of power had long been held by “swing” justices like Powell or Justices Sandra Day O’Connor or Anthony Kennedy, who were relatively moderate conservatives who frequently made common cause with the Court’s more liberal bloc. But the Court in 2024 is vastly different from the one that existed a dozen years ago. Now, Republicans enjoy a 6-3 supermajority on the Court, and moderate Republicans like O’Connor and Kennedy are an increasingly distant memory. The Court is far more ideologically cohesive than it was in 2012, and yet its docket continues to shrink. When I asked Owens and Simon if their views have evolved since they published their 2012 paper, Owens pointed to the Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), an LGBTQ rights victory authored by the Trump-appointed Gorsuch, as evidence that there are still “sufficient differences among the conservatives that nothing is guaranteed.” But even though real divides do exist among the Court’s Republican appointees, the Court certainly has not become less ideologically coherent than it was a dozen years ago. And yet the size of the merits docket continues to shrink. So a complete explanation for why Court’s caseload has almost relentlessly declined over the course of the last six decades remains elusive — although, as Owens said to me over email, there is probably a good explanation for why the Court is unlikely to reverse course. “A small docket has become the new norm.” he told me. “It’s been so small for so many years now that going back to > 100 would be really odd.” Inertia is a powerful force, and increasing the size of the docket today would require a critical mass of new justices to break with a well-established status quo. The increasingly partisan Supreme Court appointments process may explain the Court’s behavior One area where Owens and I seem to agree is that, while the overall size of the Court’s docket is in decline, the Court continues to hear at least as many politically contentious cases as it did in previous decades. As Owens put it in his email to me, “the Court has decided to hear fewer cases—but a greater percent of cases with national importance.” Even if the current term, which has been mired in the giant sucking vortex that is Donald Trump, is an outlier, the last several terms have featured an array of highly partisan cases that have fundamentally reworked some of the most contentious areas of US law. Roe v. Wade is gone. So is affirmative action at nearly all universities. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), gun regulations of all kinds are now in jeopardy. The Court keeps inching us closer to a world where religious conservatives can simply ignore anti-discrimination laws. The Court’s current majority has flooded the zone with decisions remaking the law in areas that the Republican Party cares deeply about. Just one month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Court, for example, the Court handed down one of its most significant religion cases in three decades — giving religious conservatives a broad new right to ignore state laws they object to on religious grounds. And this decision was only the first in a wave of cases revolutionizing the Court’s approach to religion. As I wrote in a 2022 article, the Supreme Court heard only seven religious liberty cases during the Obama presidency. By contrast, it decided just as many religious liberty cases before Barrett celebrated the second anniversary of her confirmation to the Court.it’ One possible explanation for why political disputes dominate so much of the Court’s docket, even as the volume of ordinary legal cases diminish more and more with each passing year, is that the process for selecting justices has become far more political — and far more partisan — than it used to be. When you consider just how much power is wielded by the Supreme Court, it’s astonishing how little thought many US presidents put into their judicial appointments. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, appointed Justice James Clark McReynolds — a lazy, tyrannical jurist that Time magazine once described as a “savagely sarcastic, incredibly reactionary Puritan anti-Semite” — in large part because the president found the future justice, who previously served as attorney general, to be so obnoxious that Wilson promoted McReynolds to get him out of the Cabinet. Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower complained in 1958 that appointing Justice William Brennan, a titan of American liberalism who was extraordinarily effective in moving the law to the left, was one of the two biggest mistakes he made as president (the other was appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren, another highly consequential liberal appointee). But the Eisenhower White House did very little to vet Brennan ideologically, and Eisenhower selected him in large part because Brennan was Catholic and Ike wanted to appeal to Catholic voters. To this day, many Republican judicial operatives still use the battle cry “No More Souters” to describe their approach to Supreme Court nominees, a reference to Justice David Souter, a George H. W. Bush appointee who turned out to be a moderate liberal after he was appointed to the Court. Since Souter’s appointment, both political parties have grown far more sophisticated at vetting potential nominees to ensure that they won’t stray from their party’s ideological views after their elevation to the bench. On the Republican side, organizations like the Federalist Society begin to vet potential nominees almost as soon as they enter law school. And it's notable that every Republican justice except for Barrett served as a political appointee in a GOP administration, where high-level Republicans could observe their work and probe their ideological views. The Democratic vetting operation, meanwhile, is more informal but no less successful. None of President Clinton’s, Obama’s, or Biden’s Supreme Court appointments have broken with the Democratic Party’s general approach to judging in the same way that Souter broke with Republicans. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that justices chosen largely because of their political ideology, rather than because of their records as neutral and impartial jurists, appear to be more interested in deciding political questions than they are in resolving legal disputes. A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Seconds into talking about their new movie, Jane Schoenbrun cannot help but bring up Freddy Got Fingered. Back in 2001, the comedian Tom Green’s sole directorial effort—a work of avant-garde grossness meant to capitalize on his unlikely fame as an MTV talk-show host—was so universally despised that it essentially killed his career. “As a child of irony-poisoned internet culture, it’s a personal favorite,” Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, told me. They joked that Green’s mindset while making the film must have been “My stock is really good right now, so I’m going to spend it all.”Right now Schoenbrun’s stock is also really good. I Saw the TV Glow, their second feature, is being released by A24—a big step up from their micro-budgeted debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. “It’s like I’m aware of what the sellout options are, and then I’m also aware of what the Tom Green–suicide-mission options are—and I feel like I’m constantly trying to do both at the same time,” they said.I predict there will be no Golden Raspberry trophies (Green won five for Freddy Got Fingered) in Schoenbrun’s future. I Saw the TV Glow is a major work—a frightening and complex exploration of childhood nostalgia, adult regret, and the ways our identity is shaped by pop culture. But it retains all of the creepy specificity that made Schoenbrun’s debut so electrifying, with uncommon human tenderness bumping right up against mutated, half-formed monstrousness. Scale has not smoothed out Schoenbrun’s idiosyncratic wrinkles—and whatever the future holds for them, “selling out” does not seem to be part of it. “Mattel asked me for a meeting at Sundance, and I was like, ‘I value my life and dignity,’” Schoenbrun said with a laugh, remarking on the toy giant’s post-Barbie expansion into cinema, which includes planned movies based on toys such as Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels. (“I don’t think they’d make my Candy Land,” they added, referring to the popular board game, which is actually owned by Hasbro. “My Candy Land has a lot of milky, creamy fluids.”)In an era when every buzzy indie director could be a meeting or two away from making a superhero movie, this disdain for modern Hollywood blockbusters is refreshing. Though Schoenbrun’s style can be challenging, their films feel alive and contemporary; We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, for instance, taps into the disquieting world of online “creepypasta” communities and manages to viscerally capture the experience of late-night YouTube browsing. It’s no wonder a company such as Mattel might be intrigued; for all the distancing strangeness of Schoenbrun’s films, they’re current in the exact way that would perk up an executive’s ears.I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps a little more accessible and straightforward—a tale about Owen (played by Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), disaffected teens who bond over their obsession with a ’90s genre TV show called The Pink Opaque. Slowly, their reality begins to blur as villains and metaphysical concepts from the program seep into the real world. The dreamy narrative was directly influenced by Schoenbrun’s own experiences. World’s Fair, which is about a character seeking to transform her body through a strange online game, was written before Schoenbrun came out as trans. I Saw the TV Glow was written during their early months on hormones, and is powered by those specific, unsettled feelings. Spencer Pazer / Courtesy of A24 “By the time I made [I Saw the TV Glow] … I was in love for the first time in my real body,” Schoenbrun said. “That’s the thing about transition … and I mean this quite literally: I wrote [the movie] as a child, I made it as a teenager, and I’m releasing it as not-quite-a-grown-up.” Schoenbrun is in their late 30s, but transition often means going through a second coming-of-age, and they joked that their current mental age is around 24: “I’m trying to figure out how to be an adult.”In the film, Owen has a tenuous grasp of his own identity—a sense that’s further stirred up by The Pink Opaque. But I Saw the TV Glow is not the kind of perfunctory narrative of self-actualization that Schoenbrun might get pitched in a studio meeting. “Owen’s arc in the movie is one of deterioration, [to] a point where maybe he can start to become a thing that he briefly noticed in childhood but then lost for half of his life,” Schoenbrun said. Owen’s narrative isn’t digestible or triumphant, and his investment in The Pink Opaque is more disturbing than empowering. Though Schoenbrun knows they’re considered part of what they called “the LGBTQ umbrella,” they still don’t want to forget that trans people often face an unwelcoming reality in America. “I’m very cautious of assimilation,” they said, acknowledging the tensions that artists must navigate in the industry.[Read: Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse]Schoenbrun is working outside the kinds of traditional structures that define so much of Hollywood storytelling; at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the external influences that come knocking with any bigger production. So how does someone like Schoenbrun make something particularly radical on the scale demanded by mainstream moviemaking? “The narrative of the sellout looms,” Schoenbrun said. “Having to be in some way a shill for a system is expected of any level of artist.”That balancing act feeds into the story within the film, where a show airing on network TV (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many other cult shows from the ’90s) is parsed for secret, perhaps unintended messages by its most devoted fans. I Saw the TV Glow adds further layers of wink-wink self-awareness. It features a Buffy actor (Amber Benson) in a small role, as well as the Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst—an early-aughts musical star and an avatar of that era’s gendered toxicity—as Owen’s disdainful father, Frank. “I’m always thinking about the era of popular culture that … I was first exposed to—that post-Tarantino Scream era,” Schoenbrun said. “Even Buffy is incredibly self-referential; it’s genre that’s aware of itself as genre.”“I don’t want to say that TV Glow is watered down or speaking in a commercial vernacular that I’m uncomfortable with,” Schoenbrun continued. “But I definitely was like, I’m making this teen-angst thing; I’m looking at the Donnie Darkos of the world for reference.” At the turn of the millennium, Donnie Darko managed to be an instant cult hit, arriving as a small studio release in an era of Hollywood bombast. Still, for a moment, as they calibrated the tone of their movie, they wondered if they were pushing too far into the territory of a show such as Stranger Things, which is almost excessively reverential of the 1980s. To Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow embodies a sort of “identity crisis”; it uses the narrative language of more commercial film and TV shows while striving to avoid formulaic conclusions.Though I Saw the TV Glow was inspired by Schoenbrun’s life, they believe it’ll speak to viewers in unpredictable ways. And for all their suspicion of Hollywood’s more corporate side, Schoenbrun can’t help but fantasize about new ways to mess with audiences’ expectations. “I said no to the Mattel meeting, but then I was like, ‘Wait, actually, if you give me Barbie 2, I'll consider it,’” they said. They brought up the end of Greta Gerwig’s film, where the title character, having transformed from doll to human, makes her first appointment at the gynecologist’s: “That is a deeply trans place to be; let’s talk about what that looks like. Mattel, I’m open to it.”

The videos began appearing on Telegram in November. One showed a pair of white mercenaries raising a black flag emblazoned with a white skull over a mud-brick fort in the Malian-desert outpost of Kidal. In another, a bearded white soldier moved through the town on a motorcycle, weaving among locals who chanted, “Mali! Mali!”The troops belonged to the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary outfit founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin a decade ago and best known for its role in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now reportedly under the control of a Russian military-intelligence unit, Wagner troops are showing up in impoverished countries within and just south of the Sahel region of Central Africa.[Read: Russia’s favorite mercenaries]Most of Wagner’s clients in the Sahel are former French colonies, and all have been struggling for years against Islamist terrorists and other insurgent groups. For a decade, the French, with some support from the United Nations and the United States, took the lead in battling jihadists in the Sahel. But one by one, the military juntas that run these countries have booted out the French and the multilateral peacekeepers and hired Wagner, or, as its Sahel branch has renamed itself, Africa Corps.Some of the Russian fighters got their start protecting commercial vessels from Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and battling the Islamic State in Syria a decade ago. Now they are tools in a great geopolitical realignment: Onetime client states of Western liberal democracies have repudiated their former colonizers and embraced Wagner, giving Russia political leverage across Africa—as well as new sources of wealth, including gold mines, as it pursues its war in Ukraine.White mercenaries have propped up—or brought down—beleaguered African regimes in the past, but Wagner is different. It has direct ties to a national government with expansive geopolitical ambitions. And as Wagner grows its presence in Africa, it is forcing imperiled governments to make a Faustian bargain: The regimes get help in putting down the insurgencies that threaten their existence, but in return, they’re compelled to surrender a measure of their sovereignty and resources to a foreign army that heeds no laws except its own.Prigozhin’s soldiers first showed up in Africa in 2017. They trained troops for the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was overthrown two years later. In Libya, they backed the rebel commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army is struggling for power and territory against the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. The Central African Republic, an impoverished former French colony just south of the Sahel, invited about 1,000 Wagner fighters to help stanch a rebellion in 2018. Within three years, they had taken back a good deal of territory and stopped a rebel advance on the capital. In the process, Wagner troops seized a Canadian-owned gold mine, Ndassima. The U.S. Treasury Department valued the gold deposits there at more than $1 billion, and John Lechner, the author of the forthcoming Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Private Warfare, says the mine is ramping up operations and could soon generate “about $100 million a year” for the mercenaries.Then came Mali. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a jihadist group operating in the Sahara and the Sahel, had allied with a faction of Tuareg separatists and taken over two-thirds of the country in April 2012. French troops set about dislodging the militants in January 2013, driving the jihadists from Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, and other northern population centers into the surrounding desert and killing hundreds in a week-long battle that February. For the next decade, a French counterinsurgency force based in Chad precision-bombed al-Qaeda encampments deep in the Sahara.But the French could never fully eradicate the jihadists. Many Islamist fighters fled to villages in the south. The French focused on aerial bombardments in the north, leaving poorly trained Malian troops to raid villages and take hundreds of casualties. The Malians resented this division of labor, and the ground operation made little progress.Meanwhile, the Tuareg separatists, most of them secular insurgents, had moved back into Kidal with the tacit acceptance of the French. They sometimes assisted the French with intelligence to target the jihadists, and the Malians believed that the French were therefore protecting them. Kamissa Camara, Mali’s foreign minister from 2018 to 2020, told me that the dispute was one reason, by 2020, “the relationship between the French and the government was at an all-time low.”Mali’s democratically elected government was toppled by a coup in August 2020, and old allegiances fell by the wayside. Few members of the junta that came to power had studied in France or identified with Mali’s former colonizer. Several, including a minister of defense and an important legislator, had attended military-training school in Russia. They paid attention when Wagner, flush with success in the Central African Republic, made its initial approach. Andy Spyra / laif / Redux “Wagner said, ‘There is a military solution to the return of Kidal and the north, and we’ll help you get there,’” Lechner told me. “They were going to go after both the terrorists and Tuareg separatists. That was their major selling point.”For years, Kidal had served as a sanctuary for both rebel groups. The Malian army had withdrawn in 2014, leaving the insurgents to carry out uprisings and atrocities—among them the kidnapping and murder of two French radio journalists by jihadists, and the execution of six civil servants by Tuareg separatists during an attack on the regional governor’s headquarters. I flew into Kidal on a UN plane a decade ago and was allowed to stay for just 24 hours. I couldn’t leave the UN compound without an escort of two armored personnel carriers full of Togolese peacekeepers.Early last November, a joint force of Wagner mercenaries and Malian troops approached Kidal from an army base about 60 miles to the south. They deployed armed drones, fought various ragtag rebel units on the outskirts of the town, and then stormed Kidal as the rebels retreated into the desert. Hundreds of jubilant people greeted the Russians. But others were wary.“The army is moving through the town with white soldiers—we don’t know who they are,” an elderly resident told the Agènce France Presse as Wagner seized the old French fort in mid-November. “People are afraid of them, so there’s nothing left in the town except people like me, who can’t afford to leave.”The Russians had won the Malian government over not only with the prospect of retaking Kidal but also with the promise of delivering the weapons and other equipment that Mali needed to fight its wars. For instance, Mali wanted to purchase a Spanish-made Airbus to transport troops to bases in jihadist-dominated areas. The Spanish couldn’t sell the Airbus without installing a U.S.-manufactured military transponder, used to relay communications. But the Biden administration, citing the Leahy Law, which prohibits direct military assistance to coup states, blocked the transponder deal and “essentially killed the entire sale,” Peter Pham, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Sahel and now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me. Another obstacle to the transponder sale, according to Corinne Dufka, who covered the Sahel for Human Rights Watch from 2012 to 2022, was the presence of a small number of child soldiers in a progovernment militia. She called the U.S. decision in that regard a victory for “human-rights-based moral diplomacy over realpolitik.” But it was also a tipping point for the Malian government as it decided to embrace the Russians.According to Pham, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov invited a Malian delegation to Moscow, and “they got transponders and everything else.” France began withdrawing its troops from Mali in February 2022; the last soldier was gone by August. The UN peacekeeping force, whose primary mission was to safeguard the French army, was booted out in December 2023.Today, just about the only trace of the French presence in Mali is the colonial architecture in riverside towns such as Ségou, once the site of the Festival on the Niger, an annual three-day concert held on a river barge that was canceled in 2015 and has never resumed. Ségou, friends told me, is now a favored R & R spot for Russian paramilitaries, who strut through the streets and gather in bars after carrying out incursions on jihadist-held villages and bush encampments.For the time being, most Malians appear to welcome the estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Wagner fighters spread across their country. An American friend who has lived in Bamako for decades told me that thanks to the Russians, “we’ve been able to regain our territory and our dignity.” The mercenaries had done “horrible things,” but “war is ugly, and France and the UN were useless. Everybody in Bamako is happy about the situation.”Lechner recalled a similar response in the Central African Republic. “I went by road through the CAR after the 2021 counteroffensive and listened to people saying that they were really happy with the stability,” he told me. “If you go from not being able to travel to the next village without being robbed and killed to being able to move freely, that’s great.”But this stability comes at a price. “The Russian counterinsurgency doctrine is brutal,” Lechner added. “The logic is, ‘We create so much pain that it stifles any support for the insurgents, and it ends the conflict.’” According to a U.S. investigator I spoke with, on more than one occasion, the mercenaries entered villages in the Central African Republic and executed 15 to 20 members of the Fulani ethnic group “because two principal armed groups were Fulani.”Wagner has been even more savage in Mali. One of its first documented atrocities occurred in Moura, near Mopti, over five days in March 2022. According to Dufka, who investigated the case for Human Rights Watch, Wagner soldiers along with the Malian army raided a market and, after a brief firefight, “picked up, tortured, and killed 300 people”—all of them men from the dominant Peul ethnic group, one of the country’s poorest. It was unclear, Dufka said, whether the men were directly involved with the Islamists or whether they’d been rounded up and executed solely because they belonged to an ethnic group that has served as a major source of recruitment. The UN later put the death toll at more than 500. Wagner “has been effective, if you don’t mind [the fact that they’re] shooting down everyone in sight,” Pham said. “They don’t make the distinctions that Western armies make between combatants and civilians.” According to the U.S. State Department, Wagner soldiers have destroyed villages and murdered civilians in the CAR, “participated in the unlawful execution of people in Mali, raided artisanal gold mines in Sudan, and undermined democratic institutions in every country where they have worked.”Three weeks after Wagner’s victory in Kidal last November, I received a WhatsApp message from Azima Ag Ali, a guide and translator in Timbuktu, 600 miles across the desert. I had worked with Ag Ali, a member of the ethnic Tuareg minority, for years, most recently in 2013, after the city’s traumatic eight-month occupation by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.Wagner had set up a base in Timbuktu in 2022 to facilitate its war against the jihadists. But when the mercenaries got to town, Ag Ali told me, they also began pursuing Tuaregs suspected of separatist sympathies, carrying out acts of “extortion and murder” against them. Tuareg separatists have been quiet in recent years, holding Kidal but otherwise doing little to provoke the Malian government and military. But their very presence in the country was considered an affront to the military regime. Masked Russian fighters, Ag Ali told me, had just raided a health center in a village called Hassan Dina, 30 miles north of Timbuktu, and decapitated the director. In Timbuktu, they were seizing mobile phones of Tuareg males on the streets and searching their messages for signs of pro-separatist sentiment. If they find anything suspicious, Ag Ali wrote to me, “you will be taken to their base at the airport, and your fate will be uncertain.” Most of his family had fled to a refugee camp in Mauritania, “and I am thinking of joining them,” he wrote. He asked me to send him a few hundred dollars to help him escape. I had no way to verify Ag Ali’s claim about Hassan Dina, but Dufka, who has visited the region frequently, told me that his account of this attack and of the arrests and intimidation of Tuareg men in Timbuktu sounded plausible. A Human Rights Watch report published in March 2024 documented summary executions by Wagner in villages throughout northern and central Mali, including three villages near Timbuktu.Besides engaging in extrajudicial killings, the Russians have provided an illiberal, antidemocratic model for their African clients to follow. The Malian junta has tightened press censorship and largely sealed itself off from the outside world. Mali was once one of the easiest countries in Africa in which to operate as a foreign correspondent; even after an earlier military coup, in 2012, foreign reporters were generally free to enter the country without being questioned. But these days, I’ve been warned, foreign journalists are likely to be arrested at the airport, jailed, or immediately expelled. Dufka and other observers believe that Russian influence is largely responsible for the crackdown.And yet, across the Sahel, Wagner’s successes in northern Mali have attracted more interest than its abuses. After refusing to deal with the mercenaries for several years, Burkina Faso, which faces a rising jihadist threat, signed a contract this year with the newly named Africa Corps. One hundred fighters are already in the country; another 200 are expected to arrive soon. Russia’s defense ministry is reportedly negotiating with Niger to send an Africa Corps contingent there. Niger’s military junta, which seized power in July 2023, ordered French forces to leave immediately (the last departed in December), expelled the French ambassador, and threatened to shut down a U.S. drone base near Agadez. The regime accused the Americans—who have nearly 1,000 troops in Niger—of violating the country’s sovereignty. In recent months, according to African political sources, Wagner has been talking with a rebel group in Chad about helping the insurgents dislodge the government led by President Mahamat Idriss Déby.For Putin, Wagner’s expansion across Africa has provided an opportunity to stick it to his Western foes. “The Russians are good chess players,” Pham said, “and for an investment of next to nothing, they have dealt France a bitter blow and have gotten us distracted to no end.” But David Ottaway, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent and now a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., told me that Russia may come to regret its growing presence in the Sahel. The latest Western-Russian showdown, he said, smacks of the proxy wars that he covered in Ethiopia, Angola, and other Cold War battlegrounds. Those conflicts were destructive but in the end failed to bring either superpower a definitive advantage in the jockeying for geostrategic superiority. He says that beneath public expressions of dismay, U.S. officials may be watching the growing Russian entanglement with equanimity—or even a degree of satisfaction. “Good luck to the Russians,” he told me. “If they want to take on al-Qaeda in Africa, I suspect that’s fine with us.”After a month-long silence, I asked my former translator, Azima Ag Ali, whether he had decided to flee Timbuktu. He was still there, he answered. The governor had begged the Russian mercenaries “to be more cooperative with the residents,” he texted me, and as a result, “the city is calmer now.” Some of those who had fled to Mauritania had even begun trickling back home. But the Russians still appeared to be operating with impunity in the remote villages of the Sahara, he wrote, and “people are afraid.”

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