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Book Review: Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

An engrossing look at Yevgeny Prighozin’s soldiers-for-hire.

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos is a gripping, research-tome-sized account of the origins and ascent of Russia’s infamous private-military company, easily one of the world’s most notorious mercenary outfits (after Blackwater, of course). Aptly titled, the book makes the cogent argument that such “private” companies can be (and are) wielded by the state, as long as that collusion remains veiled in plausible deniability.

Author Candace Rondeaux, an award-winning journalist, public-policy scholar, and director of Future Frontlines at the New America Foundation, gives us in Putin’s Sledgehammer an expansive chronicle, making connections few have traced, some gained by analyzing 130,000 leaked files from the many shell companies of Yevgeny Prighozin, Wagner’s former head, who died in a suspicious 2023 plane crash. The detailed analysis reads more like a breathless spy thriller than an academic exploration, owing not only to Rondeaux’s brilliance but also to her personal connection to the material: She was a student in St. Petersburg around the time Prighozin first met Putin, then mayor of the city.

The narrative begins in 1991, after the collapse of Russia’s Communist Party-led government. The planned economy of the post-Soviet state is in freefall, and a new and violent market logic (aka neoliberalism) is wreaking financial havoc. Mafia rules the streets, and oligarchs form behemoth, Frankenstein-esque companies in the chaos of widespread privatization.

Following the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1991, the Kremlin cut its military roughly in half. Soldiers returning home found almost no services to help them transition back to civilian life. “The downsizing created a huge pool of disillusioned and unemployed men trained to kill,” explains Rondeaux. Many of Russia’s future mercenaries met in informal, non-state-created veterans unions. Some became security for oligarchs, some worked for the mafia, and some ended up in prison — all spaces which would become important vectors for Russia’s nascent mercenary industry. The intricate jockeying for power at the state and private level birthed the Wagner Group.

Putin’s Sledgehammer really stands apart from other books on Wagner in its thorough, nuanced take on Prighozin. The public perception of him comes in disparate, singular labels: a former small-time criminal; a wildly successful hotdog salesman; a restaurateur-turned-government-caterer fondly referred to as “Putin’s Chef”; an internet-disinformation maverick; and, finally, leader of a formidable global mercenary group that eventually marched to Moscow, posing a first-of-its-kind threat to Putin’s rule.

And, indeed, Prighozin was all those things, but Rondeaux truly fleshes out this complicated, mercurial character. We ultimately come to see Prighozin as a marketing and entrepreneurial master (a doggedly hardworking one, at that), an image that belies the brash, uniformed strongman seen most recently before his death.

For example, Prighozin’s culinary acumen is often overlooked, his success as “Putin’s Chef” chalked up to favoritism. But the book tells a different story. In writing about the now-famous Russian state dinner at the Peterhof Palace on May 31, 2003, that hosted George W. Bush and other G8 leaders, Rondeaux paints the scene in mouth-watering detail:

“Sumptuous blinis stuffed with caviar and cream were served. Prighozin had spent nearly two years planning the menus and training the waitstaff on the intricacies of silver-service catering for heads of state. It was all part of the artful diplomatic ballet that Putin and the Kremlin had choreographed as part of Russia’s bid to return to the center of the world stage.”

But that return came to a halt after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Putin’s Sledgehammer’s argues that although this was a turning point in lifting the veil on the state’s global backstage-military maneuvers, Putin had begun to see Russia as pitted in a Cold War 2.0 against the U.S., and private military companies were the most expedient means of waging it.

“There is always a [mercenary-for-hire] middleman [like Wagner] in the US-Russia conflict,” Rondeaux writes. “The central tension had always been over who in Russia would reap the greatest share of profits and political rewards from Prigozhin’s successes and who would pay the price for his failures.”

In 2016, U.S. and E.U. sanctions began to bite at the Russian economy. Putin had long been fixated on the idea that oil and gas were his country’s pathway back to wealth and to a commanding place in the world order. As Rondeaux narrates in the cleverly titled chapter “Guns, Gas, and Oil” (a satirical nod to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, a 1997 book challenging notions of Eurasian superiority), the Wagner Group emerged as the perfect solution for evading sanctions. By embedding itself in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali, Wagner enabled the Russian oil-and-gas industry to expand outward. Similarly, Russia is a prime exporter of arms in the world, second only to America. Wagner, with its plausible-deniability cover of not being a state actor, made sure Russia had arms clients in the Middle East and Africa, sanctions be damned.

And once again, Prighozin, ever the diligent employee (and employer), ensured that natural resources kept flowing freely. When the group took over the Hayan gas plant in Syria, says Rondeaux, “Wagner didn’t just deploy fighters: they also flew in geologists, engineers, and fire control experts.” Prighozin also hired anthropologists and other “academic types” when he launched the now-infamous Internet Research Agency, the entity behind the 2016 U.S. election interference and a worldwide-disinformation campaigner of unrivaled sophistication and influence. To dismiss the IRA as a “troll farm” would be a gross mischaracterization; the book tells of Prighozin’s recruitment of bright young polyglots from Russia’s top schools, who had a keen understanding of the issues du jour and knew how to amplify prejudices.

With the war in Ukraine, Prighozin would become even more important: The Wagner Group was an expedient solution to Russia’s manpower problem. “For Putin to call for a full mobilization would have been tantamount to admitting failure, that the war was a war, not a special military operation, and that victory would not come as swiftly or cheaply as he had promised,” Rondeaux explains. Until its downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 — which left 298 civilians dead — Wagner had been mostly a (fearsome) battlefield rumor. Soon after, it sledgehammered its way into notoriety, helped by Prighozin’s ability to deliver pithy, fiery speeches on social media.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a seminal work of incisive insight not only about the Wagner Group and its late charismatic leader but also about modern mercenaryism and why we should care about it. Rondeaux draws parallels few others have, the kind that could only come from a Russophile like herself. The famous quote of sociologist Charles Tilly that “war made the state, and the state made war” is borne out in her riveting story of the murky, byzantine ties between the state and its mercenaries (or, perhaps, the mercenaries and their state).

 

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Focus on Care at Home and Abroad

Renowned scholar and President of the New America Foundation, Anne-Marie Slaughter, visited SIS as part of the Dean’s Discussion lecture series. Titling her talk, Revaluing Care, at Home and Abroad, Dr. Slaughter spoke about a broad range of issues, domestic and foreign. The revaluing of care is a reference to a feminist theory called ethics of care; one of the relevant tenets of that theory is valuing actions in the private sphere equally to those in the public one.
In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter published an article in The Atlantic entitled Why Women Still Can’t Have It All; she wryly remarked that, to this day, this article keeps being referenced as the article amongst the myriad of pieces she has authored in her 20+ year academic career.  In outlining the evolution of her thinking since the article was published, Dr. Slaughter said, “I don’t think the problem alone is discrimination against women, although that is not to dismiss that as an ongoing problem facing women, especially low-income women.” The severe underrepresentation of women in positions of power is, in a sense, baffling considering the much-rosier statistics of women graduating college. “The deeper problem that unites the many facets of the symptoms we see is less about women per se and more about not valuing the kind of work that women have traditionally done. We don’t value care; we value competition and consumption.”

“There is a deep unconscious bias on the part of men in the academy. We need more women in senior professorial positions. So much of advancing in the academic requires being selfish and saying ‘no’ as what is valued are big ideas and a body of scholarship. This often works against women who mentor students and are asked to contribute to the community.”

Dr. Slaughter suggested that until we are able to value care as much as earning an income and until we learn to support care-givers, not much headway can be made. She has been using Twitter (and the hashtags #wherearethewomen and #foreignpolicyinterrupted) actively to raise the profile of women in international affairs. “There is a deep unconscious bias on the part of men in the academy. We need more women in senior professorial positions. So much of advancing in the academic requires being selfish and saying ‘no’ as what is valued are big ideas and a body of scholarship. This often works against women who mentor students and are asked to contribute to the community.”
Taking her care vs. competition framework to a grander scale, Dr. Slaughter said, “We should place an equal weight on human interest and government interest. What happens to people in a country should be of as much value as what happens politically.” Referring to the ongoing civil war, she stated, “I have been very passionate about the need to do more in Syria.” Invoking the principle of “responsibility to protect” is relevant in the case of Syria which is committing crimes against humanity on its own territory. “Syria is the Rwanda of our time. An estimated 150,000 people have already died in this conflict; the entire region surrounding Syria has become majorly destabilized.” Dr. Slaughter expressed outrage and dismay that Assad is still allowed to operate from the air, a capacity she feels could have easily and swiftly been disabled by intervention. “I wish the President had used force as soon as the chemical weapons use by Assad, with the approval of international bodies.” Talking about Russia, Dr. Slaughter felt that Putin is being given way too much power by the second-Cold-Water rhetoric. “His approval ratings are not that great at home,” she added.
You can watch a video of her talk here.