Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

"For really drilling down into a topic, my favourite, unputdownable nonfiction book of the last few months was Putin’s Sledgehammer by Candace Rondeaux. This is about the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a hotdog seller from St. Petersburg who rose high but was ultimately killed after challenging Vladimir Putin and marching on Moscow in 2023. The book takes us through every step of that evolution, and is a jaw-dropping account of Russian mercenary activities in Syria, several African countries and Ukraine, featuring troll farms, PR campaigns and information warfare as well as gruesome murders and even cannibalism. Inevitably, you don’t get to know Prigozhin himself (or Putin, the man at the top of the pyramid), but it’s a very full picture of a world he built and operated, and that I knew absolutely nothing about."