DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare, by John Lechner
PUTIN’S SLEDGEHAMMER: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos, by Candace Rondeaux
When Russian troops attacked Ukraine in February 2022, top figures in the Kremlin thought that the country would quickly collapse. They had not prepared for a long war and the inevitable toll in treasure and blood that breaks families and endangers governments. But when Ukraine’s defenders put up a formidable resistance, it became clear that Russia was going to need help.
In the years leading up to the full-scale invasion, the Russian president Vladimir Putin had come to rely on private militaries, especially Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. Battalions of mercenary soldiers could be used as a scalpel to fulfill foreign policy goals in places like Sudan and Syria, where Russia had an interest in resources like gold or could count on political support from autocratic leaders. Prigozhin, who had spent time in a Soviet prison cell in the 1980s before becoming a restaurateur and one of the Kremlin’s preferred caterers in the 2000s, sourced many of his soldiers from Russia’s jails. Those who went to the front had in some sense already been taken away. When the body bags came back, Putin and his generals figured, they would not get flak.
For a long time, Wagner attracted little notice, but, as the journalist John Lechner writes in “Death Is Our Business,” an excellent new book on Russia’s private militaries, Ukraine would thrust Prigozhin and his army into the spotlight. Less than a month after the invasion, the ex-con got to work, eventually deploying some 50,000 men with call signs like “Zombie” to win battles against Ukrainian forces. “Almost immediately,” Lechner observes, “he and Wagner Group were everywhere.”
The use of mercenaries helped to hide the brutality of war from many Russians, and seemed like a good deal for Wagner’s armed contractors too. Prigozhin promised convict-soldiers freedom and a decent salary in return for six months at the front. In reality, a Ukrainian soldier tells Lechner, they were used as a swarm of human “meat” against Ukrainian defenses.
Wagner boasted the sledgehammer as its symbol, a rune that denoted Russian power. But the group also used it as a tool of execution against deserters, inadvertently showcasing the brittleness of a regime that had to use fear to motivate even its mercenary soldiers to stay in the fight.
The system was fragile in more ways than one. When Prigozhin started to enjoy success in eastern Ukraine, Russian military commanders began to see him as a threat and tried to rein him in. Prigozhin, never one to be outdone, turned his troops on Moscow, culminating in an abortive assault on the capital and a negotiated retreat. Two months later, his private jet was blown from the sky above Russia.
“Death Is Our Business” is not the only new book to chart Prigozhin’s meteoric rise and fall. “Putin’s Sledgehammer,” by the international affairs expert Candace Rondeaux, places his life story within a wider view of Russian history. Her detailed analysis shows how the country’s restructuring under Putin provided fertile soil for Prigozhin to graduate from woman-strangling street thug to catering star and mercenary prodigy.
In the mess of gangsterism and “shock therapy” capitalism that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin made a name for himself as a hot dog peddler. By the 2000s, he had nurtured ties with Putin and graduated to serving fine food to oligarchs and heads of state, including, in 2006, President George W. Bush. (“I survived,” Bush recently recalled.)
In 2014, the year Putin’s forces took Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and pro-Russian militias established breakaway states in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin partnered with Dmitri “Wagner” Utkin. (How they met is unclear, though Rondeaux floats connections made by Russia’s military intelligence, where Utkin served.) They were an unlikely pair: Prigozhin had a Jewish father and Utkin was a neo-Nazi with an SS tattoo. The ex-con was looking to assist the separatist rebels across the border as a way of brown-nosing Putin, and Putin’s generals were eager to use the new company to carry out arm’s-length operations.
Where Rondeaux offers broad analysis, Lechner blends beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. An enviably talented linguist — he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the lingua franca of the Central African Republic — the author interviewed more than 30 Wagner fighters and associates, as well as people who fought with and against the group across war zones in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. “The bullets fly by so fast,” one Wagner soldier tells him near Bakhmut, “you don’t have a chance to lift your head.”
Lechner’s book is particularly good at focusing on the way Wagner became embroiled in foreign wars after the conflict in eastern Ukraine died down. It was in Syria, fighting with the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, that Prigozhin’s men first filmed the sledgehammer execution of a Syrian deserter.
The only time Wagner fighters engaged U.S. forces head-on, they suffered a humiliating defeat. In early 2018, a Wagner unit attempted a strike on a gas facility in Syria guarded by American and Kurdish soldiers and was almost wiped out. Prigozhin would blame Russian military command for not passing on warnings, but the fault just as likely lay inward; his outfit was as venal and shot through with corruption as his master’s regime. Prigozhin was “mercurial,” Lechner explains. “The most successful in his orbit tended, over time, to be sycophants.”
Western complacency, meanwhile, stoked Russian imperial ambition. Though rich in resources, Rondeaux notes, Russia still relies on the rest of the world to fuel its war machine. Wagner’s operations in Africa burgeoned around the same time as their Syrian operation. In 2016, the French president François Hollande “semi-jokingly” suggested that the Central African Republic’s president go to the Russians for help putting down rebel groups. “We actually used Hollande’s statement,” Dmitri Syty, one of the brains behind Wagner’s operation there, tells Lechner.
“Death Is Our Business” provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments. Wagner is accused of massacring hundreds of civilians in Mali in 2022, and of carrying out mass killings alongside local militias in the Central African Republic. “Their behavior mirrored the armed groups they ousted,” Lechner writes. As a Central African civil society activist whispers to Lechner, “Russia is no different” from the sub-Saharan country’s former colonial power, France.
Both books are particularly interesting when they turn their focus toward Europe and the United States. In Rondeaux’s words, the trans-Atlantic alliance does not “have a game plan for countering Russia’s growing influence across Africa.” Lechner, who was detained while reporting his book by officials from Mali’s pro-Russian government, is even more critical. He notes that, whatever Wagner produced profit-wise, the sum would have “paled in comparison to the $1 billion the E.U. paid Russia each month for oil and gas.”
And, while Wagner was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century’s conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. “The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,” Lechner writes. “But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.”
Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow’s mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn’t matter if he’s around to swing it or not.
DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare | By John Lechner | Bloomsbury | 261 pp. | $29.99
PUTIN’S SLEDGEHAMMER: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos | By Candace Rondeaux | PublicAffairs | 442 pp. | $32
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