PUTIN'S SLEDGEHAMMER

A history of the now-suppressed Wagner Group, once a key element in Vladimir Putin’s private army.

In a sense, writes global security analyst Rondeaux, the rise of the Wagner Group fit in seamlessly with the way of war during the last decades of the Soviet Union, “a time of big armies and small wars fought by proxies under the long shadow cast by the prospect of global nuclear annihilation.” As the Soviet Union fell apart, Yevgeny Prigozhin, “an ex-convict turned hotdog salesman and serial entrepreneur,” used his street-gang smarts to build an empire that embraced real estate, construction, restaurants, casinos, and, in time, that private army, staffed by both ex-convicts and disaffected veterans of the Soviet military. The concurrent rise of Putin to power found the Wagner Group in a position to be of great use: It could serve as a projection of Russian power while keeping the government protected from international sanctions. Indeed, with many of its fighters now folded into a group called the Africa Corps, the Wagner Group operates all over the African continent while serving as a “crucial test case for the defense ministry’s efforts to reassert control over its paramilitaries.” Therein, of course, lies a rub, for Prigozhin attempted to buck the control of the Kremlin to freelance his own way across the Ukraine—and then threatened mutiny when he ran afoul of the generals. The result: Rondeaux suggests that the plane crash that ended Prigozhin’s life was the result of a planted bomb. (Putin blamed it on Prigozhin, “high on cocaine and playing with live hand grenades before the plane exploded.”) Rondeaux places Prigozhin and other paramilitary warlords, who had been active in fighting Ukraine long before the 2022 invasion, in the context of contemporary Russian politics, with Putin betting that the West had no strategies to counter them—correctly, she adds.

An illuminating look at a nationalist army that, now apparently in harness, was once an outsize geopolitical force.