Death Is Our Business
Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare
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Death Is Our Business
Narrated by:
Christopher Ragland
Buy Now for £14.90
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Ragland
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By:
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John Lechner
"Extraordinary. . . Essential reading for understanding Russia and modern warfare."—CHRIS MILLER, New York Times bestselling author of Chip War and Putinomics
“John Lechner is an amazingly bold reporter who has been to the key places where the Wagner Group fought, interviewing members, veterans, and victims to deliver a shrewd, granular sense of how Russian mercenary forces operate.”—ADAM HOCHSCHILD, bestselling author of King Leopold’s Ghost
The shocking inside story of how the Wagner Group made private military companies inextricable from Russia’s anti-Western foreign strategy.
In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia’s first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they’d go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they’d earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule.
Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group’s origins and operations, John Lechner—the only journalist to report across its many warzones—brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise—but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over.
Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity.©2025 John Lechner (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Death Is Our Business is an important and captivating peek into the Wagner Group’s expansion and operations across the world ... It also provides valuable reflections on interventionism more generally, and on struggles to build peace ... A must-read.
An excellent new book on Russia’s private militaries . . . Lechner’s book is particularly good at focusing on the way Wagner became embroiled in foreign wars after the conflict in eastern Ukraine died down . . . Death Is Our Business provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments.
Deeply researched . . . admirable . . . One hopes that Lechner and others continue to tell the stories of people and countries that the Western media shamefully neglects, even when the Russian bogeyman doesn’t dominate the headlines.
A rare, vivid portrait of the mercenary group . . . itself a feat . . . a fine account of Russia’s new private mercenary forces, and deserves a place on the bookshelves not just of military buffs but of diplomats and aid workers in Africa.
Gripping and superbly researched, featuring interviews with dozens of Wagner members. It’s remarkable to consider that the couple of hundred years hiatus on mercenary armies is now over, that nation states won’t be the only entities fielding military firms in the decades to come. This is one of those non-fiction books that gives this spy novelist ideas. It’s full of great material.
Lechner, an independent journalist who is fluent in Russian and at ease in combat zones, has succeeded more than any other Western reporter in gaining access to Wagner’s killers and societal castoffs… [he] weaves a brisk account of the group’s rise and fall with stories of his travels in Wagner’s main theaters of operation: Central Africa and eastern Ukraine.
In this in-depth, beautifully written chronicle and analysis of atrocities, massacres, war crimes, and theft on a scale scarcely to be believed, Lechner illuminates Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC, drawing on his extensive interviews with members, and its trail of devastation across Ukraine, Syria, and Africa. He also delves deeply into the history of Russia, the rise of Vladimir Putin and Prigozhin, and the lesser and greater conflicts across much of the globe . . . An invaluable look at a very dark dimension in geopolitical affairs.
Excellent… Death Is Our Business widens the frame to the global phenomenon of mercenary warfare, portraying the Wagner Group as the product of ‘structural forces shaping our violent century’ and reminding us that thousands of men all over the world are ‘willing to go to war for a paycheck.’
An unusually sensitive piece of war correspondence… Lechner argues convincingly that Wagner represents a new kind of warfare, one that emerged with the rise of globalization and mass privatization… Lechner’s excellent Death Is Our Business chronicles Prigozhin’s spectacular rise and fall.
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Well written and well narrated.
Excellent
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