The new book “Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare” is the inside story of how the Wagner Group made private military companies inextricable from Russia’s anti-western foreign strategy by independent journalist John Lechner. Lechner made his first trip to the Central African Republic in 2019 where he began researching the effect of Russian intervention on the country’s armed politics.
A speaker of Russian, French, and among other languages he was among the first to reconcile the Russian and African respective on what we now call the Wagner phenomenon. He parts the complex relationship between its private interest and the Kremlin’s across multiple theaters. His dispatches from Africa, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Wagner’s global rise, drew a loyal following among journalists.
