The Wagner Group
Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
“At once deeply-researched and as readable as a thriller.”—Mark Galeotti • “An important book about the world’s most dangerous mercenary outfit. Margolin unearths new details that will surprise readers.”—Sean McFate • “Margolin takes readers deep into the shadowy underworld. . . . A must read.”—Clarissa Ward, CNN
“A tale of violence and political intrigue that reads like a Tom Clancy novel written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Riveting. . . . It’s a vital window onto the weird world of secretive, privatized modern warfare.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An eye-opening, terrifying history of this notorious and widely influential mercenary group.
This book exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before. Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in the group’s wake, Jack Margolin traces the Wagner Group from its roots as a battlefield rumor to a private military enterprise tens of thousands–strong that eventually comes to threaten Putin himself. He follows individual commanders and foot soldiers within the group as they fight in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa, sometimes alongside fellow military contractors from the United Kingdom and the United States. He shows Wagner mercenaries committing atrocities, plundering oil, diamonds, and gold, and changing the course of conflicts from Europe to Africa in the name of the Kremlin’s strategic aims.
In documenting the Wagner Group’s story up to the dramatic demise of its chief director, Evgeniy Prigozhin, Margolin demonstrates that Wagner was not an aberration, but a manifestation of the new geopolitical order of global capital, global crime, and of the entrepreneurs that thrive in it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Margolin debuts with a riveting history of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military corporation, and its founder Evgeniy Prigozhin, who was likely assassinated by Russian security services after leading a failed coup attempt in 2022. Margolin traces Wagner from its shadowy origins as a paramilitary unit deployed in Ukraine in 2014 through its metastasis into something bigger and less easily definable. More than just another example of the ongoing "mercenary renaissance," wherein wealthy countries back private armies to avoid culpability, Wagner was also "a cultural phenomenon"—a clandestine global criminal network with hundreds of shell companies that developed an online youth fan base which reveled in its "edginess." Tracking Wagner's involvement in African and Middle Eastern countries where, in addition to fighting, it became involved in mining, lumbering, and the import of alcohol, Margolin paints a surreal picture of the group's self-mythologizing, which had a half-corporate, half-mafioso flair (the group produced a series of eight interlocking films that Margolin calls "the Wagner Cinematic Universe," featuring fictionalized versions of real soldiers; but despite this and other extensive merchandising, the group maintained a strict code of silence). Margolin builds to a fascinating portrait of a modern Russian political sphere governed by symbolism and performance (Prigozhin's dramatic killing in a private jet explosion was meant as a response to his "theatrical statements") and a global order in which violence easily permeates civil society by posing as mere business. It's a vital window onto the weird world of secretive, privatized modern warfare.
