The rise of private military companies across the world's battlefields is a return to history's norms--and it's not going away any time soon, contends journalist John Lechner in Death Is Our Business. "Private armies and mercenaries were the norm" until nation-states took over the work of warfare for the past two centuries, but Lechner argues that "private warfare is back." And to understand how soldiers of fortune are integrated into state-run wars, Lechner utilizes intrepid on-the-ground reporting to explore private military company the Wagner Group.
Through dozens of interviews with Wagner members, Lechner delves into the group's murky beginnings and the military undertakings of its "bulldozer" leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former restaurateur and government contractor known as "Putin's Chef." Formed in 2014, the Wagner Group was sent into Ukrainian breakaway provinces to support local militias before moving on to flare-ups in Syria, Mali, the Central African Republic, and Ukraine again in 2022. Among Lechner's surprising revelations is Prigozhin's illegal recruitment of 26,000 Russian convicts to fight in Ukraine, and the 20,000 men who died in the "Bakhmut meat grinder" under Prigozhin's command. Prigozhin became "the greatest threat to Putin's twenty-year rule" when he turned his convoy toward Moscow in June 2023. He died in a plane crash in August 2023 that "every member of Wagner, every Russian citizen, and the rest of the world were convinced" was an assassination by "the Russian state." Death Is Our Business is a trenchant assessment of the Wagner Group's ongoing influence and impact around the globe. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver