Book Review | Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

Pamela Ligouri Bunker

Small Wars Journal

23 June 2025

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. By Candace Rondeaux. New York: PublicAffairs, 2025. 480 Pages. ISBN-13: ‎978-1541703063.

Published in 2025, Putin’s Sledgehammer, by Candace Rondeaux, is one of the most recent and most comprehensive works to address the phenomenon that was Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and the impact it ultimately had on the Russian way of war. The author, who had a notable career as an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, is eminently qualified in this arena, having firsthand experience since the mid-1990s with Russia’s use of narrative and deflection to obscure its political positioning along with the political maneuvering among its shifting cast of characters. Per the author, the book grew out of a joint project between Arizona State University and the New America Foundation on the future of proxy war in the 21st Century. Rondeaux currently directs New America’s Future Frontlines program (with a global view to the digital transformation of our times) and its Planetary Politics Initiative (connecting academic research to real world action in ecology, ethics, and law) along with being a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Future Security Initiative.

To read the entire book review goto: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/23/putins-sledgehammer-candace-rondeaux-review/