On Aug. 23, 2023, a private jet took off from a Moscow airport. It had been in the air for barely 15 minutes before people in the nearby village of Kuzhenkino heard an ear-shattering boom. They looked up to see a trail of smoke and hear the whine of failing engines. Pieces of the airplane fell into the fields north of the village, along with what remained of its 10 passengers, including the most sinister figure in Russian politics after Vladimir Putin: Yevgeny Prigozhin.
In less than a decade, Prigozhin had risen from convict to leader of a corps of mercenaries known as the Wagner Group—a meteoric rise that brought him to the verge of power. In “The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army,” Jack Margolin, an investigative journalist, tells the full story, offering portraiture and political context and taking us from Leningrad to Moscow, from the killing fields in Syria to the burned-out cities of Ukraine, from the louche underworld of post-Cold War Russia to the upper reaches of the Kremlin. Along the way, he describes the ever-growing role of private military and security companies—so-called PMSCs. It’s a tale of violence and political intrigue that reads like a Tom Clancy novel written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
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