Last summer a bald middle-aged man in a beige anorak stood in a Russian prison courtyard addressing dozens of inmates in blue overalls. “I represent the private military company Wagner — perhaps you’ve heard of it?” he said. His presence there was a sign of just how badly things were going for Vladimir Putin’s army in Ukraine: Yevgeny Prigozhin, himself a former convict turned billionaire businessman and friend of Putin, was trying to help the war effort by recruiting convicts into his private army.
Until then, this paramilitary force had served as an unofficial foreign policy tool of the Kremlin, providing Russian muscle to various dictators around the world, notably in Africa. At the start of the war in Ukraine some Wagner combatants had been sent to Kyiv in a failed attempt to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky. Prigozhin did not beat around the bush: if the prisoners agreed to sign up and survived for six months on the front, they would be free to go home with an official pardon. If they ran away, they would be put in front of a firing squad. “You have five minutes to make up your mind,” he told them.
