In July 2023 the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take control of Moscow. The last person to attempt such a venture was Adolf Hitler. Wagner's power began from patronage, then grew from international theft and extortion, until it was so great it exposed the weakness of Russia's conventional military and became a threat to the Russian state, one that was not demonstrably eliminated until a private jet containing Wagner's core commanders was blown up in midair. That Yevgeny Prigozhin, a local criminal thug, was able to build a private army that was on the threshold of overwhelming the world's second largest country seems incredible. In fact, it was inevitable following the hollowing out of the Russian military, the creeping use of contract groups for murky foreign missions, power struggles inside the Kremlin, and the ability of the new militias to corner and exploit the black economy. Told with inside sourcing, Putin's Sledgehammer is an account of a superpower that contracted its soul to a pitiless militia.
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.
