The Fiery Fall of the Wagner Group: An Excerpt from “Putin’s Sledgehammer”

In Putin’s Sledgehammer, New America Senior Director Candace Rondeaux traces the rise of the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The below excerpt adapted from the new book previews how a criminal-turned-warlord helped Russia defy the international order to ramp up competition with the West—leading to his death, and leaving behind a legacy of chaos.

On June 30, 2017, a retired American Marine, blogging as “Josh,” posted a two-minute video on Funker530.com, a site popular with military veterans. The video, titled “Breaking: Terrifying Footage of Russians Torturing Prisoner with Sledgehammer,” began with a warning: “THIS VIDEO CONTAINS SCENES OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE THAT MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR SOME AUDIENCES. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.”

The footage, shot on a mobile phone in what appeared to be a desert, showed a bloodied man in a striped shirt and track pants writhing on the ground. A masked man in military fatigues repeatedly struck his arm with a sledgehammer. Nearby, another man’s severed head lay on the ground. The scene was brutal. Two men with assault rifles slung casually over their shoulders filmed the ordeal with their phones, capturing the screams of the victim as the hammer struck again and again.

Off-camera, several men laughed and joked in Russian. One who stepped briefly into the frame wore a patch featuring the evil clown face of Joker, the villain from Batman, with the words “I’m just going to hurt you very, very badly.” Then a short man in a green uniform with a closely shaved head who was wearing a black-and-white-checked Middle Eastern keffiyeh scarf stepped in closer while two others cursed and laughed maniacally. The screen went black.

The video had no obvious identifiers, making it unclear when and where it was shot or how Funker530.com had obtained it. Despite the mystery, the gory clip quickly went viral, sparking horror and a rush to identify the perpetrators. Most who tried failed. But a Russian blogger in Kyiv, Kirill Mikhailov, suspected that the assailants were members of the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-backed mercenary outfit formed with the tacit support of Vladimir Putin amid Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Known for their cruelty, Wagner’s commandos had vaulted from obscurity to global attention under the energetic leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ex-convict turned hotdog salesman and serial entrepreneur. Tied to the Kremlin on a long tether, Prigozhin was a central player in Russia’s unconventional warfare strategy. Reviled by many elites in the West, he was larger than life and beloved by the Russian man in the street. Many who followed his lead into battle had criminal backgrounds. They saw in Prigozhin and the Wagner Group a chance at redemption, a path to become heroes and make Russia great again.

“Many who followed Prigozhin’s lead into battle had criminal backgrounds. They saw in him and Wagner a path to become heroes and make Russia great again.”

By 2017, when the video cropped up, Prigozhin was also rapidly on his way to becoming one of the most sanctioned men in the world. He had earned that dubious distinction after reinventing himself as a caterer and restaurateur and serving for more than two decades as chief maître d’ to the Kremlin and to Russia’s rich and powerful. His connections to Putin and his inner circle, dating back to their days in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, gave Prigozhin ready access to the titans of Russian industry who rebuilt the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Prigozhin’s career encompassed grocery retail, casinos, hotels, luxury dining, catering services (earning him the sobriquet “Putin’s Chef”), real estate development, construction, and eventually defense contracting. He became the Kremlin’s top pitchman for deploying irregular paramilitary forces worldwide.

With covert support from Russian intelligence agencies, Prigozhin provided arms and mercenaries to dictators in exchange for profits from oil, gold, diamonds, timber, and other resources. Wagner’s military operations spanned three continents, stretching from Europe to the Middle East and Africa, making Prigozhin’s mercenary army a force to be reckoned with in conflicts around the world.

His propaganda exploits and experiments in media manipulation targeted dozens of countries, including the United States. Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency, operating on the fringes of Russia’s hybrid warfare, ignited a firestorm in Silicon Valley. His operatives masqueraded as journalists, curious tourists, and social media activists, worming their way into the psyche of millions of Americans and Europeans who were already suspicious of their own governments but would—click after click on Twitter and Facebook—become even more suspicious of one another. All the while, Putin denied knowing what Prigozhin was up to, saying that the Kremlin was not involved in the Wagner Group’s operations.

From its inception, the Wagner Group was designed to insulate the Kremlin from direct responsibility for its actions. Plausible deniability was the sine qua non of the Wagner’s operations, allowing Russia to project power covertly while officially maintaining a distance from the paramilitary’s nefarious activities. For the better part of a decade, Prigozhin would—with the Kremlin’s express consent—deploy the Wagner Group to great effect, smashing through limits imposed on Russia and its allies by international sanctions. Wagner operations would succeed in expanding the market for Russian arms exports and military know-how in more than a half dozen countries.

The Wagner Group’s covert operations, whether fragmentary tall tales or outright missions, were legendary. They did not just hit targets; they also scrambled the pieces on the chessboard of geopolitical competition between Russia and the West. From providing equipment and intelligence to boot camp–style training, they turned motley militias and hollowed-out armies into formidable forces that were loyal to the autocrats whom Putin sought to cultivate in the Middle East and Africa. They were essential to Putin’s strategy of conducting war on the cheap while countering the influence of the United States and its NATO allies.

In early 2022, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, the Wagner Group would emerge as the safety net which ensured that the Kremlin could pursue its aims, no matter the odds. These maneuvers were key to Russia’s strategy for managing escalation, keeping adversaries guessing, and keeping allies on edge. Prigozhin’s mercenaries were critical players in a game of brinkmanship, where Wagner’s actions—or the fear of them—played a crucial role in shaping Russia’s global standing.

“The Wagner Group would emerge as the safety net which ensured that the Kremlin could pursue its aims, no matter the odds.”

Over the eight years leading up to Russia’s massive incursion into Ukraine, Prigozhin had built the paramilitary into an advertisement for a more muscular Russia, one determined to rewrite the rules of the international order to its advantage. The men who worked for him embraced with gusto the Wagner Group’s informal marketing motto: “Death is our business and business is good.”

A few months before Wagner’s first sledgehammer video made its splash in 2017, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Prigozhin for his role in constructing military bases near Russia’s western border with Ukraine. Prigozhin had by then already rocketed to the top of the FBI’s list of suspects behind a wide-ranging online influence campaign aimed at disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, damaging the candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and propelling Donald Trump to the White House.

That was about the time when Kirill Mikhailov, the Russian blogger, first picked up the Wagner Group’s digital trail. In a message posted on Facebook a few hours after plunging headlong into an investigation into the origins of the video, Mikhailov had worked out roughly where the footage was shot. The revelation came after he had analyzed another video that had surfaced on the Telegram social media app two weeks earlier showing a Wagner Group fighter carrying a 1970s-era AK-74 rifle as he inspected the bodies of several dead Syrians in a rocky landscape.

“Hi everyone, from Wagner 😃,” the cheeky caption on the Telegram video read.

Mikhailov noticed that one of the Russian-speaking men in the sledgehammer video was also carrying an old AK-74 rifle. Another had an RPK-74 machine gun: a Soviet-era weapon that suggested that it came from the kind of old surplus stock typically provided to Wagner forces in Syria.

Analysis of satellite imagery and press accounts of ISIS battles to control Syria’s energy resources later revealed the execution spot as a natural-gas facility located a short distance from Palmyra, where Wagner Group forces had dug in. These were the first clues that a hidden profit motive was likely at work, one that extended far beyond Prigozhin’s sprawling network of enterprises.

The sledgehammer video marked a watershed moment for the Wagner Group, transforming it from a battlefield rumor to an internationally recognized brand and symbol of Russian power. The clip’s viral spread on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, led to the creation of memes, T-shirts, and other merchandise featuring an image of a hammer-wielding soldier taking a swing at a horned black demon laying prone on the ground. The sledgehammer, once an icon of Soviet industry, was reborn as a badge of Russia’s resurgence.

The Kremlin’s strategy of deploying irregular paramilitary forces under the guise of private-military companies (PMCs) exploited a vulnerability in international law. The international community has struggled to address the legal implications of the blurred line between state and private actors in conflict.

The law is even less clear about the arm’s-length arrangements between state-run companies and ostensibly private entities that profit from the plunder and pillage of proxy wars. Prigozhin’s paramilitary force thrived in this legal gray zone, enabling Russia’s smooth transition from a member in good standing in the international community to a rogue-state champion of autocracy.

Even as he helped Russia try to win back its Great Power status, Prigozhin left a trail of destruction in his wake that invited ever-greater scrutiny. The higher he flew toward the sun, the more visible were the contrails of his ruinous band of mercenaries. Eventually, the scale of the atrocities attributed to the Wagner Group drew not only sanctions from the United States and Europe but also strong admonitions from the United Nations.

Yet Prigozhin and Putin were not deterred from their quixotic crusade to reshape the global balance of power. Prigozhin skillfully marketed Wagner, turning it into a brand as recognizable as Stolichnaya is to vodka drinkers. Just as Stolichnaya conjures images of Russia and its hard-drinking culture, Wagner’s emblem—a skull in crosshairs—became infamous, with the sledgehammer as its unmistakable symbol.

Prigozhin envisioned the Wagner forces as modern-day Valkyries, guiding Russia’s fate through their militaristic ambitions. This vision crystallized with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a campaign they believed would secure their place in history.

The massive Russian incursion brought the Wagner Group spectacularly out of the shadows, thrusting Prigozhin and his mercenary commandos into the klieg-light glare of a world stunned by the audacity of Putin’s war of aggression. The Wagner Group became notorious the world over for being the shock troops of Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine, for recruiting hardened convicts from penal colonies to plunder cities and villages already scarred by years of conflict, and for the devastating human toll that the paramilitary left in its wake. And it was over Ukraine that the marriage of convenience between the former KGB officer and the ex-convict would eventually end in betrayal on both sides with an abortive mutiny and fiery plane crash near Moscow.

In the end, the glittering notoriety he had achieved was also the force behind Prigozhin’s downfall. Just as the sledgehammer struck without mercy, so too did fate—delivering a violent and uncompromising end that mirrored the disorderly legacy he had built.

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