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The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The day after Netanyahu ]

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

He said he felt a wave of disbelief, as if he were getting away with something. “I had to pinch myself,” he told me. He had been marching in the streets against Netanyahu. Now he was giving press conferences behind a lectern that said PRIME MINISTER on it. Would anyone notice the reversal? “I was wondering at what point people were going to clock that the person now speaking on TV for the Israeli government had until recently been protesting against it.”

“There was complete pandemonium,” he said, with foreign-media requests coming fast and just a tiny crew to field them. “We were operating on pure adrenaline.” In practice, that meant saying yes to all reasonable requests, and offering regular “White House–style” press conferences from the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters. Levy’s time at the podium and on news shows made him famous, or notorious, depending on one’s view of the Gaza war. Israeli comedians lightly lampooned him in sketches. His eyebrows became world-famous when he raised them, theatrically, at a Sky News presenter who had asked a question so bizarre and pretzeled in its logic that it must be seen to be believed. (She suggested that Israel had traded 150 Palestinian prisoners for only 50 Israeli hostages because Israel undervalues Palestinian life.)

As the war proceeded, and Gaza suffered more death and destruction, Levy’s resolute refusal to accept blame for civilian misery earned him the hatred and distrust of many. He maintained that opinion polls revealed that Hamas “represents the Palestinians.” His own language tended to be civilized and diplomatic. But when Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter used language (Nakba) guaranteed to make Palestinians think they were about to be ethnically cleansed, rather than repudiate those words, Levy seemed to relish the challenge of rising in their defense. And he treated other concerns about ethnic cleansing, which did not come from nowhere, as simply “outrageous and false accusations.” (“As a government official,” Levy told me later, “there is a limit to the amount you can repudiate statements by members of the government, even when they’re supremely unhelpful.”)

Levy’s performance was “indicative of what is wrong with a lot of Israel’s PR efforts,” Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a British translator and analyst who knew Levy when they were Oxford undergraduates, told me. He expressed doubt that Israel’s ideal representative would be a recreational contrarian with an accent straight from the Oxford Union. Levy, Al-Tamimi said, “treated his spokesman position as though it were a debating competition.”

In late November, after a brief pause for a successful prisoner exchange, the Israel-Hamas war resumed, and the government started facing intense domestic criticism for failing to engineer another swap. Around that time, the team handling Israel’s shambolic public-diplomacy operation started to get hints of an effort to purge those with suspect politics. “Something changed,” Shirona Partem, another erstwhile protester who had joined the government’s press team after October 7, told me. In addition to Levy, whose job was to speak on the record to foreign outlets, the government had hired a small crew of press liaisons to take media requests and coordinate interviews. “We were building something professional, not political,” she said. Partem emphasized that they spoke only to foreign media, so nothing they did could have been construed as undermining the government against its domestic opposition.

By December, though, her unit was told to stand down. Partem and others had developed relationships with reporters, and also with various Israeli experts and government offices from which those reporters were seeking information. Many of them kept replying to media requests—showing up for work, in effect, after having been fired. But officially, their positions were left empty. The prime minister’s office is known to be jealous of power and credit, and it had begun ensuring that no professional operation would succeed the apolitical team it had shut down.

Levy was exempt from the December purge, and for the next months was even unleashed to speak to Israeli media. He had recently gone viral for the eyebrow incident, and the government liked having someone with a little brio in front of the cameras, in contrast to the ministers who were still either shy or gaffe-prone. But he says he soon began to sense a chill in his relationship with the prime minister’s office. On January 17, he was told to share the podium more—a request that went against his instincts, as he had been trying to build a personal relationship with viewers and media, and also because he is a diva. He suspects that his protester past had become an issue, even though he maintains that it did not affect his work. “I don’t think that anyone who watched any of the interviews or press conferences I gave could say I injected personal opinion,” Levy said. Soon, someone in the prime minister’s office was briefing the media against him. He stressed that he has no direct knowledge of who was responsible, though multiple sources told me Sara Netanyahu had become irate over perceived political disloyalty.

The British foreign minister’s alleged complaint about Levy came in March, according to the BBC and Israeli media. That began the terminal phase of Levy’s spokesmanship. In a tweet, Cameron had urged the passage of more aid into Gaza. Levy countered that the channels for aid were unimpeded, saying, “There are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment”—a claim at odds with the extreme scarcity of all of those items in Gaza. Cameron’s office allegedly sent an arch inquiry to the prime minister’s office, to see if Levy was freelancing. Levy was soon suspended, though he denies that Cameron ever intervened to have him sacked. Levy said the supposed complaint was in fact just a single WhatsApp, sent from a Foreign Office employee to the prime minister’s office. (Cameron’s own spokesperson said, “We wouldn’t comment on the domestic appointments of another government.”) But he soon found his position untenable, and by April, he had resigned completely and was back in front of a camera at home, representing Israel pro bono.

Levy is in some ways understanding about the return of politics. “Cracks emerged,” he told me. He rattled off a number of bitter divides among Israelis: whether to prioritize the destruction of Hamas or the return of hostages; whether Netanyahu should resign now or later; whether the military should invade Rafah. These are all hard questions, he admitted, and it is to be expected that they would be divisive. “But my job was to keep politics aside,” he says. “And it’s sad to see that politics can infect what should be a national mission.”

Partem, his colleague, is now back in private life too. She told me she worries about how poorly Israel has waged its PR war—especially compared with Iran and Russia, both anti-Israel maestros. “We’re on the right side of history, but it feels like we weren’t able to convey that message,” she said. Her time as a mouthpiece for the government gave her hope, she added, “because she found that Israelis of all political persuasions were willing to work together—even if the government itself was too focused on its survival to join the effort. “Anybody who is in power for too long gets a bit delusional,” she told me. “We know there are people up for the task. But this current government is really a unique set of people who shouldn’t be there.”

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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.

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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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