In his famed 16th-century tract The Prince, the Florentine diplomat and author Niccolò Machiavelli warned that mercenaries are “dangerous,” for they are “disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful and valiant before friends” while being “cowardly before enemies.” Soldiers of fortune, Machiavelli claimed, “have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men.”
Such men fill the pages of the journalist John Lechner’s new book, Death is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare. Lechner spent years studying and interviewing members of the infamous Wagner mercenary group, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin. A former convict-turned-restaurateur, Prigozhin’s humble origins gave way to an astonishing, if unlikely, ascent.
The man who had once served as chef to Vladimir Putin would use his connections to the Russian leader to form one of the most successful and influential mercenary organizations of the modern era. As Lechner observes, in the early 2000s, Prigozhin was serving meals to President George W. Bush and other guests of the Kremlin. A decade later, Prigozhin would find himself leading Wagner and vying for power with rivals like the Russian minister of defense.
“Those who worked with Prigozhin during his restaurant years described him as ‘aggressive, manipulative, and violent,’” Lechner notes. He displayed an aptitude for ingratiating himself with powerful men. As one businessman told the Guardian, “He always looked for people higher up to [be]friend. And he was good at it.”
One of Wagner’s members would later observe that “a defining feature of Prigozhin was his unshakable belief that any decision he made in any situation was correct. Even when he encountered negative consequences of his actions, he managed to turn what happened into another victory, a result of carefully thought-out plans.” Indeed, the chef-turned-mercenary would later display a keen appreciation for public relations, presenting his organization as the tip of Russia’s spear.
By most accounts, Wagner was formed in May 2014, launched by around 10 or so people. The group’s charter, signed by Prigozhin and a man named Dmitry Utkin, called for a “director” to oversee the weapons, financing, employment, and other managerial matters, as well as a “commander.” Prigozhin took the former role, while Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer and unrepentant neo-Nazi, became Wagner’s commander. The group took its name from Utkin’s call sign, a nod to the German composer Richard Wagner, a favorite of Adolf Hitler.
Wagner, appropriately enough, was born amid the ashes of Russia shattering the post-Cold War consensus. In February and March of 2014, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine, illegally annexing it and marking the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Putin’s ambition to remake the map of Europe was arguably first signaled with the Russo-Georgian War six years prior. The 2014 invasion cemented what some had long feared: Russia was once again a revisionist power. The “holiday from history” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was over; great power competition had returned with a vengeance.
And Wagner would be at the forefront. The mercenary group was launched, in part, due to the perceived poor performance of some Russian forces during the invasion. From the very beginning, Wagner developed a reputation for barbarism and savage fighting. But the group would have to expand its operations beyond the Ukrainian frontier to really prove its usefulness to the Kremlin.
Prigozhin began to look for ways to make Wagner profitable and to increase the private military company’s influence. Russian intervention in Syria to prop up the dictator Bashar Assad provided an opportunity. The optimism of the Arab Spring gave way to the Syrian civil war, and Moscow wasn’t about to allow its longtime ally, Assad, to be ousted. The Kremlin “understood there was little appetite among the Russian public for sending Russian soldiers to distant Syria,” Lechner observes. “The death of contractors would be far quieter” and outsourcing the war “lowered the political costs.” The decision was made not to include Wagner casualties in official statistics.
Russian intervention in Syria led to the first instance of combat between Russian and American forces in decades, something the two superpowers had sought to avoid (even at the cost of hugely deadly proxy wars) during the Cold War. Prigozhin, hoping to increase Wagner’s holdings, attempted to take the Conoco gas facility, which produced hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. Wagner outgunned and outnumbered the Americans and Syrian Defense Forces who tried to prevent the takeover. But the “Americans’ targeting was far more accurate,” and their equipment, including night vision, was superior to that fielded by Wagner. Not for the last time, Prigozhin had gambled and lost. Undeterred, he tried his luck elsewhere.
Africa has long been subjected to foreign empires harvesting its resources. To Prigozhin, the continent offered opportunities to demonstrate its usefulness and achieve his long-standing ambition to become one of the select few power brokers that surround Putin. Prigozhin wanted to “graduate from an ‘implementer’ in Putin’s regime to one of the president’s ‘friends and associates.’” He was tired of being “on the outside looking in.” Russian influence in Africa had waned since the fall of the Soviet Union. Africa offered Prigozhin both a freer hand, with less competition from the Russian Ministry of Defense, as well as a chance to claim more of the credit for any success.
Lechner ably details Wagner’s efforts in Africa — efforts that met with mixed success. His on-the-ground reporting paints a picture of a group whose imperial efforts were exploitative, yes, but one that is also far removed from the “all powerful, all capable” portrait conjured by many salacious Western media reports. “The secret of Prigozhin is that he learned how to sell Putin a dream about the rise of Russian influence in the world,” one insider observed.
Wagner would eventually return to where it all began: Ukraine. Prigozhin and his men would be called on to help Moscow’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. But success got to Prigozhin’s head. In June 2023, Wagner was ordered to sign contracts with the military, effectively ending the group’s independence. Prigozhin responded by doubling down on his populist critiques of the general staff and defense ministry, blaming them and the Russian elite for the failure to decisively win in Ukraine. Eventually he decided that Wagner would launch a “march for justice,” turning their forces on Russia itself and mutinying.
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Marches on Moscow are typically ill-fated. From Napoleon to Hitler, those who have sought to conquer the Russian city tend to fail. While Western analysts looked on in astonishment, Wagner’s rebellion met with initial success, rapidly gaining ground. But the planned endgame — Prigozhin allegedly intended to assassinate the minister of defense and take his place while a somehow beneficent Putin looked on — was always a nonstarter. The rebellion ended shortly after it began, with a negotiated truce that sent Wagner forces to Belarus. But the chef was cooked. Prigozhin had sealed his fate, and both he and Utkin would meet their end during a mysterious plane explosion two months later. Machiavelli had been proven right about the dangerous nature of mercenaries.
The whole bloody story is compellingly recounted by Lechner. But ultimately Death is Our Business is about more than Wagner. It is also about a world in which mercenaries feast on increasing chaos.
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.