In the summer of 2023, after engaging in a brutal battle of attrition against Ukrainian forces over the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, where thousands of drugged up Russian convicts employed by the private military company the Wagner Group had been thrown at Ukranian defenses, taking the city inch by tiny inch, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin announced via Telegram that he was starting a “March for Justice.”

Enraged by what he saw as the Russian Ministry of Defense’s corruption and incompetence over the course of the Ukraine War, especially over the Battle of Bakhmut, Prigozhin decided that he would use force to bring change to the Russian high command. This “march” became known as the Wagner Group Mutiny and would involve up to 7 Russian military aircraft being shot down and possibly as many as 30 Russian servicemen killed by Wagner forces.

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated a deal that put an end to the rebellion before Prigozhin’s forces reached Moscow, but this mutiny would be the last major action that Yevgeny Prigozhin would undertake, as just two months later, Prigozhin and the Wagner Group’s cofounder, Dmitry Utkin, would be killed in a somewhat mysterious aircraft explosion, that many believe was an assassination by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thereby putting an end to the saga of the infamous Wagner Group.

Death is Our Business by John Lechner gives a history of the Wagner Group from its origins in the pressure cooker environment of Russian ultranationalists after the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula following the 2014 Maidan Revolution to the dramatic and mysterious deaths of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin.

The book follows Wagner through five general phases: Events in the lives of Prigozhin and Utkin before they created Wagner, and the Wagner Group’s early actions in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015; the group’s first forays into foreign mercenary work in Syria; Wagner’s progressively expanding actions in Africa; “The Company’s” high profile actions in Ukraine following the 2022 full scale invasion; and finally the 2023 Wagner Mutiny.

Many mainstream media articles gloss over the Wagner Group’s origin only with reference to Prigozhin as “Putin’s Chef,” due to his history of catering contracts with the Russian state, and quickly skip over the years 2014-2021 before addressing high-profile Wagner actions in Ukraine. However, Lechner’s book provides a deep history of the origins of the Wagner Group in 2014 after various Russian ultranationalist groups engaged in a form of rule from below, forcing the Russian state’s hand into acting more aggressively in eastern Ukraine.

Lechner’s history of Wagner’s activity in Syria is in-depth and provides the reader with a solid understanding of how the group operated there. He also covers the well-known Battle of Khasham, where approximately 40 American servicemen–outnumbered more than 10 to 1–fought off Russian and Syrian fighters working for Wagner using airpower, killing up to 200 Wagner fighters.

Your author found the detailed discussion of Wagner’s activities in Africa to be the most interesting. Africa, with a long history of mercenary activity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, became a chessboard for Russia to compete with the West. Many mainstream media tellings of the Wagner Group story gloss over their extensive African activities to the detriment of their readers. Lechner makes no such error.

However, if readers are more interested in learning more on how the gruesome meat grinder penal units came about or in details of the adrenaline-packed uncertainty of the Wagner mutiny, Lechner does not disappoint, covering these subjects well.

The book provides good insight into how the personalities of Prigozhin and Utkin came together to create one of the most high-profile private military corporations in the 21st century. In particular, Lechner provides an astute analysis of how the group operated and its overall role inside–or outside–of Russian foreign policy. Early in the book, Lecher states, “What the West came to see as well-established doctrine for ‘hybrid warfare’ was more to borrow from Charles Tilly, a by-product of efforts to carry out more immediate tasks.” Here, I believe Lechner has hit the nail on the head in terms of how the Wagner Group was created, operated, and ultimately died. By taking advantage of opportunities as they came, developing by iterating, and being willing to play fast and loose, the Wagner Group exploded in size and reputation over its relatively short lifespan.

Lechner’s status as a Western journalist gives his book the perspective of an outsider looking in, but his ability to speak multiple relevant languages, including Russian and French, as well as Sango, the lingua franca of the Central African Republic, ensured that the book is well researched with numerous interviews from those with real world experience in, or at the hands of, the Wagner Group.

Engaging and easy to read, the book does not get bogged down in academic language and keeps the reader going throughout. It is a great book for both hardcore followers of international conflicts, as well as for the layman interested in military history and current events. If you have an interest in mercenaries, the War in Ukraine, or have previously enjoyed books such as 85 Days in Slavyansk, then this is definitely a book that you should pick up.

You can order Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare here: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Our-Business-Russian-Mercenaries/dp/1639733361

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

In the bombed-out hulk of what appears to be a rail depot, “White” ground force commander Polygon sets his watch to a countdown of two hours, and presses start. Simultaneously, an ominous two-hour countdown clock appears in the upper right of the viewer’s screen. Polygon’s men let out tense sighs as they set off on their mission, and their leader looks back with foreboding at a Pelican-style case being held by one of the fighters staying by his side. The battle soon begins when the Whites use automatic grenade launchers to open fire on a building occupied by the opposing “Yellows.” Here, the viewer is quickly dumped into the action of a brutal room-to-room urban fight without much of any backstory and lots of confusion as to why there is a countdown on the screen.

So, begins Best in Hell, the new Wagner Group film directed by Andrey Batov and starring Aleksey Kravchenko, Georgiy Bolonev, and Sergey Garusov. The movie was produced by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and now deceased commander of one of Wagner’s Assault Groups, Aleksey Nagin. Nagin is also credited as one of the film’s writers, along with Anton Zimin. The storyline, said to be based on an actual action that occurred during the War in Ukraine’s Battle of Mariupol, (though the film appears to have been shot in Luhansk) revolves around a group of Wagner Group stand-ins. Best in Hell isn’t Batov’s first time directing Wagner puff pieces, as he also directed 2021’s Tourist, a film about the Wagner Group’s fight against “bandits” in the Central African Republic.

Militant Wire offers regularly published research and analysis accessible to paid subscribers. Recent exclusive articles include:
• Operations and Weapons Profile of Russia's Controversial Rusich Reconnaissance, Sabotage, and Assault Group
• Detention of Former Serb Police Officer Brings Kosovo Back to the Brink
• Key Cartel Leader's Arrest Spurs Chaos and Violence in Culiacán, Mexico
• Islamic State Khurasan's International Target Strategy: Suicide Bombing Aimed at Taliban Foreign Ministry and Chinese Diplomats
• Islamic State Khurasan Criticizes Taliban-China Relations, Alleges IEA Complicit in Suffering of Uyghur Muslims
• Weapons Analysis: Russia's Wagner Organization and Its Combined Arms Operations in Ukraine
• In-Depth Analysis of Islamic State Iraq's Degradation, Operational Capabilities, and Weapons Arsenal
• Islamic State West Africa's Vast Weapons Arsenal
• Russia's BOAK Partisans Act to Undermine Moscow's War on Ukraine
• Analysis: Islamic State Khurasan Releases New Detailed History of Uyghur Plight in China

Subscribe now

We begin in medias res with the White fighters already deployed in front of the first of four buildings that they must take in order to reach their ultimate objective. This objective is the fourth building, which is touted as being the tallest building in the area at nine stories. Like the actual War in Ukraine, the combatants are more often than not wearing the same multicam pattern uniforms and are often only distinguishable by the color of their armbands. White for the Wagner stand-ins and Yellow for the Ukrainian stand-ins. However, the Yellows also have units wearing M81 woodland pattern camouflage uniforms as well as Ukrainian MM-14 digital pattern uniforms. Notably, there are some Yellow fighters wearing skull masks, which may or may not be a gesture towards the real-life Ukrainian Azov Regiment or other right-wing fighters who have been known to don such masks. As the fight across the four buildings progresses, things really begin to unravel for the Yellows after the Whites take a radio off of a deceased enemy fighter and proceed to listen in on the tactical communications between Yellow units. As the battle progresses room to room and staircase to staircase the men from both sides alternately throw hand grenades at, shoot at, stab, and wrestle with one another. Conspicuously, no prisoners are ever taken by either side and the men often resort to shooting otherwise wounded or subdued opponents as they lay on the ground unarmed. All of this action leads up to the frenetic final showdown, which includes both airstrikes and a tank duel. Other than the awkward beginning, the most incongruous part of the film is the overuse of the heroic sacrifice trope, with a White fighter selflessly blowing himself up to achieve victory on nearly every sub-objective on the way to the nine-story building.

The film’s cinematography blends traditional camera shots with various forms of modern camera work. The traditional shots are mixed in with drone footage, steady cam closeups of fighters’ faces, shaky cams during artillery barrages, go-pro style action shots from vehicles, and first-person shooter-type perspective shots. The latter were done so as to add to the tension the audience feels as you stalk from room to room with the fighters, rather than giving a gimmicky Doom-type feel. 

In terms of gimmicks, the movie does intersperse the action of the battle with briefing-type scenes from the overall White commander, Whisper, played by Aleksey Kravchenko, who western audiences may know from 1985’s Come and See. While a little odd and didactic, these types of scenes ultimately help the viewer better understand the action as Whisper walks the audience over maps of the battlefield with labeled objectives. It is through these briefings that we ultimately learn of the purpose of the ominous countdown on the screen. In a similar vein, the movie also intersperses weapon recognition slides that inform the audience of the stats of the type of heavy weaponry that the two sides are about to employ in the following scene. Somehow, the weapon recognition slides seem to be more smoothly integrated than the briefings, the latter of which could have been better if integrated as flash-forward scenes directed at a higher-level commander rather than the audience.

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its portrayal of contemporary war in terms of tactics and procedures. Both the Whites and Yellows are ultimately led by commanders in tactical operations centers (TOC). In the TOCs Whisper and the opposing Yellow commander are each giving their respective teams various orders in reaction to intelligence and the changing ebb and flow of the battle. Drones feature prominently in terms of both intelligence gathering and executing strikes over the course of the battle, with both Whisper and his counterpart often standing over the shoulder of their main drone operator. Not only are drones from large to small featured, but the use of anti-drone electronic countermeasures also plays a role over the course of the action.

Maybe the most impressive part of the film is the portrayal of combined arms warfare tactics. Both the Whites and the Yellows are constantly on the radio talking to the TOC, infantry, armor, drones, artillery of different calibers, and manned aircraft. In fact, signals intelligence gathered via captured radios serve as important plot devices more than once over the course of the movie. While the portrayal of tactics is impressive, it is not the most interesting part of the movie.

If Best in Hell is a propaganda film, then its primary audience may very well be the Ukrainian people. Repeatedly throughout the film both the Whites and Yellows refer to the actions of their opponents by saying “It’s like we’re fighting ourselves.” While this statement is overtly about the tactics of their opponent, the subtext is that these two groups of men think and act the same. This point is driven home twice.

First, during a dramatic scene where a Yellow fighter picks up an Orthodox Christian icon and restores it to a shelf after it is knocked off by tremors from artillery fire. The Yellow fighter crosses himself in the Orthodox “pushing” motion after he places the icon back in its corner. The icon, of who appears to be Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, again falls to the ground as a White assault team breaches the wall to the room. After the White fighters pour into the room, one of them notices the icon on the floor, picks it up, replaces it on its corner shelf, and crosses himself in the Orthodox fashion. Here, at this moment, the Yellow fighter who had first replaced the icon emerges from under the bookshelf that had protected him from the explosion of the breach and engages in brutal hand-to-hand combat with the White fighter, his fellow Orthodox Christian.

Second, during the film’s denouement, the two forces are juxtaposed and found to be similarly damaged, motivated, and frustrated. After the battle’s conclusion, fresh young soldiers are brought to both the White and Yellow commanders who give similar speeches to the young replacements. Finally, Whisper narrates to the audience that little progress was made as a result of the conclusion of the battle. While one of the two sides achieved a tactical victory, this victory was far from decisive. Whisper tells the viewer the war goes on and it looks like little will change.

The ultimate message seems to be one often voiced by Russian President Vladimir Putin prior to the February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine. The message is that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and that a war between the two peoples is a war between brothers. While they seem to be the primary target audience, whether any Ukrainians will be swayed by this message seems to be rather unlikely.

Overall, based on this author’s expectations going into the film, it was surprisingly well made, treated the antagonists rather fairly, and gave a relatively accurate overview of how contemporary wars are fought. Finally, as I am not a Russian speaker and watched the movie with subtitles, I may have missed more subtle cultural or linguistic references, and apologize in advance for anything that I misinterpreted to this weakness. For those interested in getting a look at some of the high-quality propaganda coming out of the Ukraine war, I would recommend this film: 7/10.

Subscribe now

Follow Militant Wire on Twitter

Subscribe now

Two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th, a previously obscure Instagram account belonging to an Arsenal Kyiv football fan and member of Ukraine’s only anti-fascist hooligan firm[1] began posting interesting photographs of young hooligans in military gear holding light weapons. One of the first photos was remarkable: about a dozen young men stand grouped together holding mostly Kalashnikov-pattern rifles, the man in the middle with a WW2-era Soviet DP-27 light machine gun. The group is flanked on either side by two men holding RPG launchers—one is the owner of the Instagram account, Anton, and the other wears a shirt that reads “Hoods Hoods Klan: No Fear, No Weakness”. The group was tagged in the post with this same phrase, “hoodshoodsklan”. Over time, those observing the many ideologically motivated groups defending Ukraine became familiar with Hoods Hoods Klan as a part of the broader anti-authoritarian milieu enlisted in the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine (TDF). Hoods Hoods Klan is an anti-fascist, anti-racist hooligan football fan club, and are participants in both the coordinating body for anarchists and antiauthoritarians within the TDF, the Resistance Committee, as well as the civilian anarchist aid initiative, Operation Solidarity.

One of the first among journalists and researchers to discover Anton’s Instagram account was former Vice News journalist and founder of independent media outlet Popular Front, Jake Hanrahan, who has done extensive work in Ukraine, including a documentary on another fighting formation participating in the Resistance Committee, anarchist militia RevDia. In the early days of the ongoing war in Ukraine, Hanrahan began a conversation with Anton and other members of Hoods Hoods Klan, shortly after traveling to Ukraine, where he covered both the Resistance Committee and Operation Solidarity. Recently, Hanrahan spent time with the anti-fascist football hooligans fighting for the TDF. We take a quick look at the Popular Front documentary he made in our following review:

Frontline Hooligan
Frontline Hooligan is Popular Front’s latest video production and comes on the heels of their documentary covering the recent unrest on the French-administered island of Corsica. Between Frontline Hooligan and the Corsica coverage, Jake Hanrahan managed to travel to Ukraine just prior to the invasion, where he covered civilian defense training in anticipation of war as US intelligence assessments began forecasting with high confidence that the Russian military would cross the Ukrainian border. Frontline Hooligan takes Popular Front’s audience back to a country now already accustomed to the daily realities of war.

Hanrahan races around the outskirts of war-torn Kyiv in the bed of a civilian pickup truck interviewing members of a regional squad of the TDF, all of them Hoods Hoods Klan hooligans. They zoom back and forth between training sessions at the firing range and defensive fighting positions around the Ukrainian capital, talking about life before the war, how Hoods Hoods Klan organized into a cohesive fighting unit of the TDF, the war from both a hooligan and an anti-fascist perspective, and what the firm ultimately stands for.

Frontline Hooligan is a striking portrayal of Europe’s prolific hooligan culture prior to the Russian invasion, from the streets of Ukrainian cities and the flare-lit ramparts of her soccer stadia, and later of Europe’s 21st century war, from trench networks and bunkers manned by armed Ultras.[2] Riding around with the lads, Hanrahan is at his best, drawing on both his familiarity with the working-class world of football hooliganism and his deep knowledge of anarchism and anti-authoritarian movements in Europe. Speeding down a highway to a range for small arms training, Hanrahan asks one Hoods Hoods Klan fighter, “Do you miss football?” The response is uncertain, now four months into a hot war: “A little.” Throwing punches into the palm of his off-hand, Hanrahan asks, “Do you miss fighting?”—as in, fighting other hooligans. A resounding “yes,” followed by: “We were one against all Ukraine’s football firms.” Again, with great attention to the antebellum hooligan world of Ukraine, Jake asks: “Who is your biggest rival?” The fighter answers: “Dynamo Kiev.” “Now Putin?” Hanrahan shoots back with a laugh that is characteristic of his reporting from modern conflict zones. “Now Putin, yes…”

Another fighter, interviewed earlier in Frontline Hooligan, confirms what many conflict analysts thought when they saw Hoods Hoods Klan emerge as a fighting unit in this war, recalling various football hooligans that joined the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s: “We were strong in football [hooliganism]… Now we’ll be a strong war unit.”

Beyond his interviews with members of Hoods Hoods Klan, Hanrahan travels to civilian areas severely affected by the Russian invasion, such as Borodyanka, near Bucha, north of the capital, talking to an average resident outside the ruins of her apartment block, hit by Russian airstrikes and missiles. The devastation is almost total. Answering questions so many have asked as to how self-proclaimed anti-fascists can fight on the same side as openly fascist units within the Ukrainian military, such as the Azov Regiment, Hanrahan insightfully offers this explanation from the field: “The destruction and massacres carried out by Russian forces are why people with many different and sometimes conflicting ideologies are all fighting for Ukraine. It’s not about politics for them; it’s about survival.”

Popular Front’s latest documentary is a unique look at how pre-war organizations, in this case, drawn from the marshal substrate of Europe’s fighting football hooligans, mobilized themselves for the defense of their country against Russian invasion. Frontline Hooligan gives us more insight into the complex constellation of groups fighting for the defense of Ukraine, and does so with the style that is characteristic of Popular Front.  Jake Hanrahan’s excellent coverage of Hoods Hoods Klan can be seen on YouTube, here:

Subscribe now

Follow militant Wire on Twitter

[1] “Firm” is a term originally from the British football scene that means an organized hooligan football fan club.

[2] An “Ultra” is a member of a hooligan football firm with a distinct ideological affiliation, almost always considered to be on the far-right or in this case the far- and post-left.