(Yevgeny Prigozhi in Saint Petersburg in 2016)
In June 2023, it appeared for the first time there was a clear threat to the rule of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. This risk to Putin’s reign was fostered by the inability of Russian forces to achieve a quick victory after it invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and was unable to overthrow and replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The danger Putin faced was the work of the Wagner Group, under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin, his former chef and caterer who led the armed rebellion against the Russian government. This rebellion, which lasted for about a day, was a culmination of simmering tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defense and the fact that the fighting had reached a World War I type of stalemate. Prigozhin accused the Russian military of shelling Wagner positions, refusing to resupply his troops, and also criticized the Russian leadership for their “maximalist positions” in the war in Ukraine. It is interesting to analyze Putin’s response to Prigozhin and his private army since it was Russia’s most effective fighting force against the Ukrainian army. The rebellion ultimately failed, as Prigozhin got cold feet as his army marched toward Moscow. Prigozhin turned his forces away from the Russian capital and reached an agreement to move Wagner forces to Belarus. However, in the end Prigozhin went the way of others who opposed Putin as he died in a plane crash on August 23, 2023. Despite the death of their leader, the Wagner group lives on with its political business and military ventures as a pillar of the Russian government’s operations the world over.
As the bloody conflict continues to play out in Ukraine journalist John Lechner’s latest book, DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: RUSSIAN MERCENARIES AND THE NEW ERA OF PRIVATE WARFARE has been published at a propitious time. Lechner’s excellent monograph is an education describing the origins of the Wagner group, its methods, and operations. We witness how the Wagner group gains a foothold in fragile nation states, gains access to a country’s natural resources, removes peacekeeping forces, all to cash in on the instability of weak states that possess resources that are viewed as vital for Russian strategic interests, and the profitability of the group itself.
(The US says the Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties)
Lechner points out in his introduction that after a two hundred year hiatus, private warfare has returned, albeit in new ways. For most of history private armies and mercenaries were the norm, nevertheless at the end of the Thirty Years War (1660) European rulers saw the advantage in recruiting public standing armies within their borders. By the 19th century, the nation state was largely responsible for the prosecution of warfare on the continent. However, private armies were employed by colonial powers to subdue far-flung regions and governments would outsource the exploitation of colonies to private companies. Once decolonization made headway following World War II and late in the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union began to relax its financial and military support from previous colonial regions, they would partly turn to privatization both internally and externally. Newly independent countries would outsource their security requirements to private military companies, and the United States would turn to the privatization of warfare following 9/11. By 2010, private contractors outnumbered American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most famous of which was Blackwater. Lechner describes two types of private military companies. First, mercenary companies are private armies that conduct autonomous military campaigns. Military enterprises, like Blackwater, augment a powerful state’s regular armed forces and embed with one government. Secondly, the two types were merged into a new novel private military company. This new organization was cultivated and advanced by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Lechner delves into a number of Private Military Contractors (PMC) providing details on recruitment, operations, geographic involvement, and important personnel. However, the author’s most important focus is the Wagner Group under the direction and tight control of Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 2014, on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Prigozhin linked up with Dmitry Utkin, a career soldier a member of an intelligence unit, and carried out training and proxy wars for the GRU to create the Wagner Group which would prove to be an effective fighting force with brutal enforcers in the rear. By 2015, working closely with the Ministry of Defense in Syria, and autonomously in northern and central Africa the group spread its influence and profitability. By 2018 Wagner forces seemed everywhere from Madagascar to Mozambique, in addition to becoming the “tip of the spear” of Russian assertiveness. By August 2022 Wagner mercenaries were fighting in eastern Ukraine and successfully reached the outskirts of Bakhmut. Prigozhin’s success rested on his ability to recognize opportunity in unstable situations, bringing a team together to take advantage of the situation in a nation’s capital and on the ground, especially in Africa which had over 100 million refugees, and employing social media highlighted by misinformation to enhance his reputation and ego.
(“I had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the 1990s,” Vladimir Putin recalled)
Lechner is clear that today there is little distinction between soldiers and mercenaries in large part because of globalization. When one examines Russian recruitment of PMC and those in other countries it is clear that Lechner is correct. Russian mercenaries presented as “little green men,” many on “vacation” and began appearing in 2014 in Crimea and the Donbas. Lechner accurately explains Putin’s motivations involving the expansion of NATO, western plots against Russia, and his desire to recreate the Russian empire. Putin was supported by the growth of domestic nationalist Russian ideologues witnessed by the number of volunteers who came to fight in Ukraine believing that Ukraine belonged to Russia harkening back to Catherine the Great and Lenin who artificially designated Ukraine and Belarus.
The turning point for Prigozhin came with the invasion of Crimea as his contacts with the Ministry of Defense provided a degree of access to Putin who allowed him to become the handler of mercenaries in the Donbas – it is here that he and Utkin created the Wagner Group. Slowly they were able to do away with other mercenary leaders and centralize other separatist militias into one. This would be accomplished for the most part in 2015. Prigozhin was an entrepreneur who envisioned a PMC like Erik Prince’s Blackwater. He would get his start in Syria, supported the regime of Bashir Assad and helped arm, train, and participate in the brutal civil war designed to overthrow the murderous government in Damascus.
Russia formally intervened in Syria in 2015, and the first Wagner fighters entered the conflict in September of that year. Lechner describes the brutality of the civil war, highlighted by Assad’s use of poisonous gases, cluster bombs, and doing anything to remain in power. He could not have done so without the Wagner Group. The key for the group is that it developed its own esprit de corps. Their soldiers were mercenaries, but they were also Russian patriots, men willing to fight and die for the motherland, more so than the Russian military. Their success provided Prigozhin with greater access to Putin directly to circumvent the Ministry of Defense.
(Yevgeny Prigozhin (left) pictured serving Vladimir Putin (centre) at a dinner in 2011)
Lechner carefully lays out the structure of the Wagner Group and breaks it down into its military and business components. Prigozhin would create a corporate structure, first called Evro-Polis from which he negotiated contracts with governments and gained access to their natural resources, provided military services, and protection. The group drew from varying ideologies and priorities, most of which were various degrees of nationalists and white supremacists. Much of the group’s strategy was designed to seize oil and gas fields, mineral mining, and other lucrative opportunities in the countries they were involved.
The Wagner Group proliferated across central and northern Africa feasting on the resources of the Central African Republic, Libya, Chad, Sudan, Mali, Syria, and Niger. Most people think of the Wagner forces as it relates to the Donbas, but Lechner spends a good part of his monograph detailing how Prigozhin penetrated Africa, the contracts he signed, the coups and counter coups he was involved in, and the many personalities he dealt with, many of course were as ruthless as he was – perhaps that was why he was so successful. By 2021 Prigozhin and his PMC were truly global. The threat he represented for the west was proof to the Kremlin that his initiatives were a worthy investment. Their effectiveness was less important than the west’s reaction to them.
In developing his material, Lechner relied on interviews with the relevant government officials and soldiers, especially 30 members of the Wagner Group. Lechner’s success rests on beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. Further, the author is an exceptional linguist as he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the language of the Central African Republic. His interviews saw him travel across war zones in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the point he was almost kidnaped. Lechner witnessed the viciousness and cruelty in which the Wagner Group operated, a group that would eventually morph into a 50,000 man private army.
(Prigozhin became most vocal in a series of video statements from Bakhmut where he criticised the defence establishment)
Prigozhin’s forces were initially deployed after the annexation of Crimea, a year later the Wagner Group was sent to the Donbas region to support the pro-Russian separatists. They would participate in destabilizing the region, taking control of key locations, and directly engaging in combat. A major component of their actions was to eliminate dissident pro-Russian commanders, potentially through assassination. The Wagner Group’s actions contributed to the escalation of the Donbas conflict and the overall instability in eastern Ukraine. By 2022 and onward they played a significant role in the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, even recruiting prison inmates for frontline combat operations – estimated to number between 48-49,000. These men would die by the thousands in the Donbas meat grinder, but for Prigozhin they served their purpose. Eventually Prigozhin let his substantial ego get in the way and threatened to march on Moscow, as stated earlier it did not go well.
In the end, according to Nicolas Niarchos in his May 13, 2025, review in the New York Times, the Wagner Group “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.”
(Yevgeny Prigozhin says he was required to “apologise and obey” in order to secure ammunition for his troops)
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