Putin’s Sledgehammer, by the international affairs expert Candace Rondeaux, places his life story within a wider view of Russian history. Her detailed analysis shows how the country’s restructuring under Putin provided fertile soil for Prigozhin to graduate from woman-strangling street thug to catering star and mercenary prodigy.
A gripping, research-tome-sized account of the origins and ascent of Russia’s infamous private-military company ... Cogent ... 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 ... Putin’s Sledgehammer really stands apart from other books on Wagner in its thorough, nuanced take on Prighozin ... 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 ... 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).
Rondeaux offers vivid journalistic clarity and unbiased academic reflection ... Nuanced ... Rondeaux concentrates on the abhorrent behaviour of Russia’s mercenary forces in Ukraine and carefully distinguishes between these contract soldiers and the raw, barely-trained conscripts who found themselves in the front lines ... Rondeaux’s academic research and old-fashioned journalistic doorstepping, delving into Wagner’s involvement in the massacres of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha and Irpin, is a key section of the book ... A welcome addition to the growing library on Putin’s Russia.
An illuminating look at a nationalist army that, now apparently in harness, was once an outsize geopolitical force ... Rondeaux places Prigozhin and other paramilitary warlords, who had been active in fighting Ukraine long before the 2022 invasion, in the context of contemporary Russian politics, with Putin betting that the West had no strategies to counter them—correctly, she adds.
