Western complacency, meanwhile, stoked Russian imperial ambition. Though rich in resources, Rondeaux notes, Russia still relies on the rest of the world to fuel its war machine. Wagner’s operations in Africa burgeoned around the same time as their Syrian operation. In 2016, the French president François Hollande “semi-jokingly” suggested that the Central African Republic’s president go to the Russians for help putting down rebel groups. “We actually used Hollande’s statement,” Dmitri Syty, one of the brains behind Wagner’s operation there, tells Lechner.
“Death Is Our Business” provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments. Wagner is accused of massacring hundreds of civilians in Mali in 2022, and of carrying out mass killings alongside local militias in the Central African Republic. “Their behavior mirrored the armed groups they ousted,” Lechner writes. As a Central African civil society activist whispers to Lechner, “Russia is no different” from the sub-Saharan country’s former colonial power, France.
Both books are particularly interesting when they turn their focus toward Europe and the United States. In Rondeaux’s words, the trans-Atlantic alliance does not “have a game plan for countering Russia’s growing influence across Africa.” Lechner, who was detained while reporting his book by officials from Mali’s pro-Russian government, is even more critical. He notes that, whatever Wagner produced profit-wise, the sum would have “paled in comparison to the $1 billion the E.U. paid Russia each month for oil and gas.”
And, while Wagner was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century’s conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. “The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,” Lechner writes. “But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.”
Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow’s mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn’t matter if he’s around to swing it or not.
DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare | By John Lechner | Bloomsbury | 261 pp. | $29.99
PUTIN’S SLEDGEHAMMER: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos | By Candace Rondeaux | PublicAffairs | 442 pp. | $32