Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos - Candace Rondeaux
Published in 2025 by Public Affairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, New York, NY
480 pages
ISBN: 9781541703063
LCCN: 2024035099
LCC: DK510.764 .R643 2025
In June 2023, just under a year and a half after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an armed battalion fighting on the Ukrainian frontlines turned around and began marching on Moscow, aiming to seemingly overthrow the Russian government. Rather than the battalion coming from Ukraine or a Western nation, however, this group of mercenary fighters had long fought alongside and on behalf of Russian interests. Headed by Putin’s former personal chef and hotdog salesman, Yevgeny Prigozhin, this private military company (PMC), named the Wagner Group, marched onward to Moscow. To everyone’s surprise, the group advanced deep into Russian territory, prompting Putin to briefly flee from the capital.
After the stuttered invasion of Ukraine and the fierce resistance that the Russian army encountered on the frontlines, this betrayal by the Wagner group seemed to be a turning point for the ragtag group of fighters. This turn of fortune, however, proved to be short-lived. A few months later, Prigozhin was on a plane heading for St. Petersburg when it exploded midair, killing him, fellow Wagner founder Dmitri Utkin, and everyone else on board. While the official line from Putin is that the explosion was a result of Prigozhin playing with live grenades on board the aircraft, most others suspect foul play.
For years, the operations of the Wagner Group often remained shrouded in mystery. Though US intelligence was aware of various operations in Africa and their activity in arms trading, much about the group was still largely unknown. How did Prigozhin go from a petty criminal and hot dog salesman to Putin's personal chef and, eventually, his attack dog at the helm of a vast private army? In her 2025 book, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos, Candace Rondeaux unravels the complex webs of individuals and shell companies that comprised the Wagner Group, their activities across the globe, and their impact on the Russian state, national security, and foreign relations. A seasoned global security analyst and journalist, Rondeaux delves into the group's evolution from a covert tool of Kremlin power projection to a formidable force that nearly destabilized the Russian government.
Overview:
In this work, Rondeaux offers a comprehensive and chilling account of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious private military company, and its profound impact on the Russian state. She charts the Wagner Group’s development from a clandestine fighting force into a global paramilitary empire stretching from Ukraine and Syria to Mali and the Central African Republic, engaging in activities ranging from combat operations to political interference.
The story is largely told through the figure of Yevgeny Prigozhin—an ex-convict-turned-oligarch who leveraged his criminal connections and proximity to Putin to amass vast wealth and establish a private army. Rondeaux examines the symbiotic relationship between Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin, highlighting how Wagner's operations allowed the Russian state to exert influence abroad while maintaining plausible deniability. Throughout this time, she argues, “Prigozhin had transformed himself over two decades from a caterer and court jester to a defense contractor extraordinaire and the cleanup man for Putin” (174).
However, this arrangement unraveled in June 2023 when Wagner's forces, led by Prigozhin, initiated a march toward Moscow, challenging the authority of the Russian military leadership. The subsequent events, including the mysterious downing of a jet carrying Wagner's senior commanders, underscored the group's capacity to defy the Kremlin and the internal vulnerabilities within Russia's power structures.
Drawing on leaked documents, firsthand interviews, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and a deep well of extensive research, Putin’s Sledgehammer provides an in-depth analysis of the intersection between organized crime, state power, and military force. Rondeaux's work not only chronicles the rise and fall of a mercenary empire but also offers insights into the broader implications for global security and the future of globalized warfare.
Commendations:
There are several noteworthy aspects to Putin’s Sledgehammer. Rondeaux’s account presents us with a rich and provocative contribution to the understanding of contemporary militarism, state decay, and hybrid warfare. Her narrative is built on extensive research: leaked emails, interviews with insiders, and digital forensics. As such, this work is exemplary in its use of open-source intelligence and journalistic methods to pierce the veil of plausible deniability around Wagner’s activities. Rondeaux’s access to leaked documents and interviews strengthens the empirical backbone of the book, offering an insider’s look at power dynamics typically obscured in international affairs. It helps bridge the gap between academic and journalistic writing on security studies and international relations, which is useful for gaining a holistic picture of the Russian state in the post-Soviet era.
As such, the book powerfully illustrates how modern state sovereignty is undermined by the marketization of military force. Wagner, though nominally “private,” functions as an extralegal arm of Russian foreign policy, enabling Moscow to operate in the shadows while avoiding accountability. Rondeaux reveals how Putinism has morphed from centralized authoritarianism into an unstable system reliant on criminal networks and informal power, validating theories of "neopatrimonialism" and kleptocracy. The collapse into "mercenary chaos" supports arguments that authoritarian neoliberal regimes are unsustainable and internally contradictory. Neoliberalism tends to outsource core functions of the state, including war, to for-profit actors, and we can see this in the privatization of warfare, including in Russia. As Rondeaux writes, “The transition from a government-run, multibillion-dollar military-logistics industry to one driven by free market competition presented enormous opportunities for private-sector entrepreneurs like Yevgeny Prigozhin” (89).
This confirms a long-standing critique from the Left: neoliberal capitalism not only deforms Western democracies but also corrodes authoritarian states by hollowing out public institutions and replacing them with clientelistic, militarized power blocs. The Russian state, in Rondeaux’s telling, does not so much govern as it arbitrates between warlords—an outcome predictable to those familiar with the commodification of violence under late capitalism. Rondeaux shows that Russia’s geopolitical ambitions have become inseparable from the logic of extraction and irregular warfare. Rondeaux effectively demonstrates how Wagner operates as a tool of parastatal violence, operating in the grey zone between state authority and privatized force. Wagner’s operations, often financed through gold and diamond concessions or oil deals, mirror colonial practices of plunder disguised as “security partnerships.”
Accordingly, Rondeaux implicitly critiques how neoliberalism fragments state sovereignty, turning warfare into a commodity outsourced to mercenary groups. By tracing Wagner's reach across Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine, the book shows how Russia mirrors Western imperial behavior through extractive relationships and violent resource acquisition. While Rondeux’s critique is primarily aimed at Russia, it echoes patterns familiar from U.S., British, and French interventions across the Global South.
Critique:
On the other hand, Putin’s Sledgehammer is not without limitations. First of all, while Rondeaux is meticulous and thorough in her account, it can often be information-dense and overly dry at times. There are so many names to keep track of throughout the book, despite the handy list of key players in the book’s first pages. While this list is helpful, it is still rather difficult to keep track of every figure throughout the complex web of individuals and shell companies that comprise the Wagner Group. This limitation, however, is nicely supplemented by an online resource that provides interactive flowcharts and other forms of data visualizations.
While the book may serve as an important contribution to the understanding of Russian militarism, it possesses a few critical weaknesses in its conceptual framing, especially when viewed through a critical lens that centers on global power asymmetries, anti-imperialism, and structural critiques of capitalism. Given Rondeaux’s background in Western policy and intelligence circles, her framing occasionally echoes the biases of the liberal international order. While she condemns Russia’s use of private military force, there is little reflection on the broader imperial order that normalizes such actors. The critique remains focused on Russia’s internal decay rather than asking whether the international system itself enables and rewards the outsourcing of violence.
She also tends to frame Russia as an exceptional state actor and often overlooks contradicting evidence to some of her larger claims for example, when comparing the use of private military companies (PMCs) across time, she writes, “The common thread across the ages is that mercenary armies are products of states that are short on the financial and political capital needed to feed and field a full-scale military, but big on imperial ambitions” (112). Yet, this claim comes right after she describes Blackwater’s activities during the US occupation of Iraq, which doesn’t seem to square with her argument that mercenary groups are primarily used by those with strapped finances but large imperial ambition (as America has no shortage of either). In this framing, Russia is seen as a relative exception in employing PMCs to carry out covert operations on behalf of the state; yet, while Rondeaux briefly mentions parallels to organizations in the West, such as Blackwater, these are quickly brushed aside.
As such, while Wagner is rightly critiqued, Rondeaux misses a broader opportunity to contextualize Russia’s behavior within the global capitalist system. This flattens the analytical field, making Russia appear uniquely rogue rather than part of a wider system of imperialist violence. There is little direct critique of Western private military contractors (e.g., Academi/Blackwater) and how U.S./NATO power helped normalize such actors. Wagner is not an exception to global norms but a logical outgrowth of the current world order, in which state and capital increasingly merge in the business of war.
While Rondeaux rightly centers the figures of Prigozhin and Putin, she occasionally leans too heavily into a personality-driven narrative. This mirrors a liberal tendency to reduce global crises to the pathology of strongmen, rather than analyzing deeper political-economic structures. By reinforcing a "great villain" narrative, which is common in liberal and neoconservative analysis, Rondeaux implicitly obscures deeper material conditions and class dynamics within Russia and globally. The Wagner phenomenon cannot be fully understood outside the global architecture of militarized capitalism, in which both liberal and illiberal regimes compete for control over strategic resources through violent means.
Additionally, while Rondeaux acknowledges that Russia's mercenary economy arose out of the privatization of formally nationalized industries in the wake of Yeltsin’s reforms, there is not much deeper analysis of this phenomenon, which seems like a missed opportunity. In this regard, the book once again misses the opportunity to theorize Wagner not just as a Russian aberration, but as part of a global trend toward the privatization of coercive power. The U.S. use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as Blackwater (now Constellis), deserves more comparative treatment. Without this, the book risks reinforcing a Cold War binary that obscures structural similarities between rival empires.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the lack of agency offered to the Global South in this account. In recounting Wagner’s operations in Africa and the Middle East, the book tends to treat local actors as passive recipients of Russian manipulation. This framing flattens political complexity and removes agency from African and Arab states, many of which have used foreign mercenaries strategically to navigate their own internal crises and contest neocolonial hierarchies. A more balanced account would explore how regimes in Mali or the CAR engage Wagner to assert sovereignty in the face of Western neocolonial pressure. While by no means excuses the awful brutality of Wagner’s operations, it complicates the picture and invites a more nuanced understanding of security alignments in a multipolar world.
Conclusion:
Overall, Putin’s Sledgehammer is a piercing and timely account of the Wagner Group’s rise and the concurrent disintegration of state authority within the Russian Federation. In laying bare the networks connecting the Kremlin to organized crime, offshore finance, and battlefield brutality, the book makes a vital contribution to understanding Russia’s informalized mode of statecraft. While its lack of systemic critique and overreliance on Western frameworks limit its transformative potential, Rondeaux’s work serves best as a case study in authoritarian decay, as it exposes the failures and contradictions of post-Soviet authoritarian capitalism and illuminates the dangers of militarized neoliberal governance.
As a Leftist, I left the book wishing that Rondeaux had situated Wagner within the broader crisis of global capitalism. It is apparent that states—both East and West—outsource violence in pursuit of profit, power, and geopolitical dominance. A more critical approach would connect the dots between Wagner and its Western counterparts, explore the agency of Global South actors, and interrogate the international system that enables mercenary capitalism to flourish.
As such, Rondeaux’s work is a critical resource for understanding the complexities of modern conflict and the role of non-state actors in shaping geopolitical dynamics. For scholars, journalists, and policymakers, it is a thought-provoking text that chronicles how parastatal actors can evolve into existential threats to the very regimes they serve. In summation, Putin’s Sledgehammer is essential reading, but it should ideally be paired with anti-imperialist, Marxist, and decolonial analyses for a fuller understanding of the dark underworld it seeks to describe and the conditions that allow it to flourish.
**Thanks to PublicAffairs for sending a free review copy of this work for me to read and review**