DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS

Account of the rise of the Wagner Group and other private armies fighting Russia’s war in Ukraine—and many other conflicts.

Lechner, a journalist specializing in Africa, notes that Russian proxies have been popping up all over the continent in places like Mali, the Central African Republic, and Niger, propping up strongmen here and overthrowing them there. These private armies, he writes, are hardly new, having been a fixture of the medieval battlefield and enjoying a resurgence “when European powers competed to carve up the world.” During World War II, Stalin freed prisoners from the Gulag and placed them in the worst sectors of the front to redeem themselves by dying for the motherland. Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, borrowed a page from Stalin, using the same promise: “Prigozhin, or one of his representatives, visited every minimum- and maximum-security colony except for those in Chechnya and the far-eastern region of Kamchatka.” Survive six months of the Ukrainian war, Wagner promised the prisoners, and you’d be sprung with a clean record and a pocketful of cash—and so it is that the ranks of Russia’s fighters in Ukraine have swelled with soldiers who have no stake in the war except to survive. Prigozhin fell afoul of Vladimir Putin and died in a mysterious 2023 plane crash that was no mystery at all: “Every member of Wagner, every Russian citizen, and the rest of the world were convinced the Russian state had assassinated Prigozhin.” Though largely absorbed within the regular Russian army, Wagner fights on, and it’s not alone; as Lechner writes in this eye-opening exposé, “the world is filled with Prigozhins.”

For those who want to know the ugly truth of war fought for rubles—or dollars.