20-05-2025
The Wagner Group's dealings are darker than we thought
The Central African Republic may be Africa's most failed state. Since the 1979 overthrow of its self-declared emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the country has seen coups, insurgencies and full-blown civil wars. It has hosted nearly a dozen United Nations-backed peacekeeping missions, most of which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. None has achieved lasting results.
So when, in 2019, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of Russia's mercenary group Wagner, helped to broker an accord in the CAR, he at least got value for money. Having won a contract to act as military advisors to the CAR's government, Wagner dished out bribes to persuade rebel leaders to end seven years of fighting. One leader received $60,000, a box of Turkish pistols and 200 Android phones. The total price of these sweeteners was only $1 million or so. As the US journalist John Lechner notes in Death is Our Business, his new book on Wagner, 'it was a clear foreign-policy win for Moscow and a boon for Russia's international image.'
Prigozhin was no Russian version of Mandela, however, as Lechner's book makes clear. The one-time street-food seller is best known for Wagner's brutal operations in Ukraine: in 2023, he recruited nearly 50,000 Russian ex-prisoners for the 'meat-grinder' battle of Bakhmut, and around 20,000 of them died. Many would argue that the nearest he came to bringing about world peace was when he launched an armed mutiny against the Kremlin that same summer, during which, for a matter of hours, Putin's regime looked like imploding.
But Prigozhin retreated, having apparently lost his nerve, and died two months later in a plane crash, which was widely blamed on a Putin-sanctioned bomb – a victim, then, of the very thuggery he'd epitomised. Wagner continues to operate today, but it's now under much closer Kremlin control.
Lechner's book covers some similar territory to Downfall, last year's excellent Prigozhin biography co-written by Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan, but where it adds value is in Lechner's journalistic shoe-leather. Not only has he interviewed around 30 ex-Wagner members – itself no easy task – but he has conducted extensive ground reporting on Wagner operations in Africa. This would be a hazardous assignment even for the major news outlets, let alone a freelancer such as Lechner. Wagner's African ventures are, by definition, in places where Western intervention has failed: the jihadist-plagued ex-French colonies of the Sahel, for example. And Wagner doesn't like scrutiny. In 2018, three Russian journalists were shot dead in the CAR while reporting on the group, a hit that some commentators linked to Prigozhin.
But Lechner dives in headlong, visiting the CAR, Libya, Mali and Ukraine. Already fluent in Russian and French, he learns Sango, the CAR's lingua franca, and he interviews everyone from pro-Wagner locals to the head of the group's operations, who holds court in a luxury hotel in the CAR's capital, Bangui. The result is a vivid snapshot of Africa's modern soldiers of fortune, far darker than anything in Frederick Forsyth's novel Dogs of War.
The key to Wagner's success in the likes of CAR and Sahel is brutally simple: it has brought order through the use of what Lechner calls 'extremely harsh but effective military force'. Human-rights groups decry this, but locals tell Lechner that they appreciate being able to travel around their country safely for the first time, unmolested by murderous gangs. 'While there were countless people with good intentions working for the UN in places like CAR,' Lechner writes, 'it was well-known that UN peacekeeping missions often failed to keep the peace and protect.' Prigozhin's 'troll factories' also played a role, churning out online propaganda that depicted Wagner as saviours, righting centuries of French imperial wrongs.
The reality, however, was that Wagner's presence was as rapacious as anything from the colonial era. In exchange for keeping local leaders in power, they have taken concessions on gold and other natural resources. Little thought is given to governance, development or any of the other knotty issues to which more benign partners might attend, nor do human rights remotely figure on their agenda). Lechner cites a massacre in central Mali in 2022, when Wagner and Malian government forces executed 300 villagers on suspicion of being jihadists. He himself was later arrested by Mali's secret police, who didn't want foreign journalists digging into the affair. 'Prigozhin's men,' Lechner writes, 'were often force multipliers; they increased the capacity of governments to commit abuses against their citizens.' In the long term, such violent methods may well backfire.
Lecher's narrative thread is occasionally patchy. This is an occupational hazard of writing about dangerous people in dangerous places, who don't always oblige authors by helping to fill in the gaps. But Death is Our Business is still a fine account of Russia's new private mercenary forces, and deserves a place on the bookshelves not just of military buffs but of diplomats and aid workers in Africa. For, even if Wagner's presence on the continent promises only long-term disaster, its short-term success is owed, in part, to the failure of the West.
