How Russia became a franchise of the Wagner Group

New Statesman​

a day ago

For several years, during a season of boredom in the West, the Wagner Group, Russia's private military company, became a pet obsession for the media. This was a story of Vladimir Putin's shadowy 'army of cut-throats', plundering Africa of its gold and diamonds while upending Europe's influence in its former colonies. Western audiences were hooked.
In 2022, Wagner became a key tool in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its previously hidden founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former St Petersburg restaurateur, finally emerged from the shadows. The narrative became even riper: Prigozhin led a short-lived mutiny against the Russian regime in June 2023. But it ended abruptly when his private jet exploded not far from Putin's dacha on Lake Valdai two months later.
The story is far from over. The group continues to wage vicious campaigns in the Sahel region, now rebranded as the 'Africa Corps'. In Mali, it helps the regime fight Tuareg and Islamist insurgencies, and was accused of executing civilians. Two recent books shed light on Wagner's role in ushering in a new era of modern warfare: Death Is Our Business by the American journalist John Lechner and Our Business Is Death by the Russian reporters Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov.
If Wagner's business was death, then it meant a good deal of its own mercenaries dying, too. This was true even back in the 2010s when Wagner was still viewed as an elite and secretive force, the most prominent case in point being the infamous Battle of Khasham in February 2018. In an episode that became the closest, if indirect, US-Russia clash of the 21st century, Wagnerites tried to capture an oil field in north-eastern Syria controlled by American-backed Kurdish fighters. The Kurds fought back, supported by the US from the air, and the mercenaries were mowed down. Some 80 Russians were killed in just a few hours.
All the previous Wagner losses, however, were overshadowed by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the transformation of the mercenary group into a vehicle to recruit convicts. Lifted out of prisons and put through short and superficial training, some 50,000 of them, by Prigozhin's own estimate, were sent to storm the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut. Barabanov and Korotkov's book presents accounts of convicts forced to fight under the fear of execution. Those refusing to take part in the 'meat storms' were reportedly shot as deserters. Some 20,000 Wagner fighters died in Bakhmut alone, according to Prigozhin's count.
Shocking as it was, this practice was not new. Penal battalions were introduced in the Soviet army during the Second World War, guarded by anti-retreat detachments with orders to shoot deserters. Allowing for huge losses to advance on a battlefield was another tradition from Soviet times that was resurrected in Putin's Ukrainian 'special military operation'.
'The special military operation was, in many respects, one giant World War II re-enactment, and everyone got to don a costume and play a character,' Lechner observes. All of this, however, came later. Before 2022, Wagner was less of a cosplay enterprise and more of a private military company with operations in Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya and Africa's Sahel region. Nobody was forced or encouraged to fight for it – but thousands volunteered to.
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What made so many Russian men risk their lives in faraway countries? Barabanov and Korotkov grapple with this question, drawing from personnel files included in a vast archive of Prigozhin's corporate empire that was leaked to them, as well as their interviews with mercenaries. The fact that Wagner offered the kind of salaries these men would never get anywhere else loomed large. In 2017, the Wagner salary of Rbs250,000 a month was worth around $4,300 – six times the national average wage in Russia at the time. Even by Moscow standards, such salaries were very high indeed; outside of Moscow, unheard of.
The dramatic culmination of Prigozhin's story, too, is a testament to a broader trend. His rebellion against the system was triggered by bureaucratic pressure. The Russian state wanted to control all those fighting against Ukraine, forcing private military companies and volunteer units to sign contracts with Russia's Ministry of Defence (MoD). Moscow did not need the plausible deniability of Wagner, Cossacks and ragtag nationalist militias any more. It was now openly and brazenly invading Ukraine under the pretext of 'denazification' and wanted to have full military control.
When Prigozhin pushed back against the MoD takeover, the palace intrigue ran out of control. He questioned the Kremlin's justification for the invasion, criticised the rampant corruption of Russian elites and even suggested that a certain 'grandpa' in charge of Russia could be 'a dickhead'. Grandpa was the opposition's nickname for Putin, popularised by Alexei Navalny. A showdown was imminent, and Prigozhin blinked first, launching his mutiny before abruptly aborting it. Shortly afterwards, he was dead.
[See also: Death of a warlord]
But having dispensed with Prigozhin, the Putin regime appears transformed by its former enforcer. Practices he pioneered have been adopted and taken to another level. Recruitment of convicts is now run at such a scale that entire prisons have been hollowed out. And bribes to entice Russian men to fight keep growing. Recently, regional governments started offering new recruits 'staggering sums' with sign-up bonuses of up to $40,000, a BBC investigation revealed.
Moreover, the mercenary group changed the very way Russia executes its war. Wagner's tactics at Bakhmut 'led to the systematic adoption of assault groupings, and expendable convict-staffed formations across the Russian military', wrote Michael Kofman, a leading expert on the Russian military. He called the process the 'Wagnerisation of the Russian army'. With up to a million Russians having signed contracts to fight in Ukraine, it may be time to consider the Wagnerisation of Russia. Being paid to kill Ukrainians is today among the highest paying jobs in the country.
But for its owner, Wagner was never a golden goose the way, for example, his food catering services in Russia were. Instead, Lechner places the private military company in the broader context of Prigozhin's attempts to ingratiate himself with Putin, the case of the troll factory meddling in the US elections being another prominent example. It was about status, the restaurateur-turned-warlord being 'hell-bent on joining the elite', the author suggests.
In the process, he helped bring about the new age of private warfare. Private military companies 'helped usher us into the 17th century with 21st-century technology – onto a battlefield in which the distinction between soldier and mercenary is close to immaterial', Lechner writes, drawing parallels between the likes of Blackwater founder Erik Prince and Prigozhin and the condottieri of Italian city states. In the new era of conflicts between global and regional powers, the mercenaries have returned. There was initial hesitation: Western leaders' thinking was shaped by the post-Cold War 'peace dividend', with Russia humbled by its defeat in Afghanistan and the Cold War in general, while America was still haunted by the spectre of Vietnam. In the era of liberal interventionism and the war on terror that followed, policymakers offered elaborate justifications and set tight rules for use of force.
Their justifications later proved bogus, and all rules were trespassed. But disillusionment with war has not sparked a pacifist revival. All around the world, not just in Moscow, there is less hesitation about using military force – and less need to hide behind private contractors. The US support for Israel's war in Gaza is an open-ended commitment, as is Nato's intelligence-sharing, weapons supplies and training of Ukraine's armed forces. Israel and Iran, for the first time in their history, have exchanged direct blows. Reasons for going to war are framed in terms of 'existential threats' and therefore require no further explanation.
Mercenaries are still in high demand, but their role is changing. What started as a bespoke service provided by highly skilled, well-paid ex-soldiers has turned into mass recruitment of cannon fodder from poor and conflict-torn regions and countries. These include thousands of Colombians fighting in Ukraine, Yemen and Sudan; hundreds of Nepalese serving as the first line of attack for Russian troops; and Syrians being recruited to kill and die in Azerbaijan, Libya and Niger.
For this new age of private warfare, the transformation of Wagner is a useful case study. Founded as an elite group providing security, military training and guarding installations – a business model based on the American example of Blackwater – it grew into dispensable shock troops managed directly by the Russian state. If the US's overseas campaigns made the modern mercenary industry a lucrative career path for army veterans and well-connected hustlers, Putin's wars helped transform it into a global form of human trafficking for men from poor regions of Russia.
That in 2025 Russian men are as keen as Colombians and Syrians to fight for money in distant lands is perhaps the best indicator of the desperation, hopelessness and nihilism in Russian provinces after a quarter century of Putin's rule, despite all the talk of Moscow's economic resilience.
Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare
John Lechner
Bloomsbury USA, 288pp, £23
Our Business is Death: The Complete History of the Wagner Group
Ilya Barabanov and Denis Korotkov
StraightForwardFoundation, 291pp, $9.99
[See also: Trump's nuclear test]
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