Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin’s facial features rested in a natural scowl. He had, by all accounts, a penetrating gaze. “I felt,” said one woman who worked for him, “that he could see right through me.” His aura, she believed, was that of a living historical figure, someone who pulsated some grand, obscure fate. A polished dome complimented Yevgeny Viktorovich’s sharp visage, evoking a Bond villain. And like any good antihero, his origins, and his path to success and fame, were anything but ordinary.
In his youth, Prigozhin spent nine years in prison for robbery and fraud. After his release, he claimed he sold hot dogs until he had enough money and connections to enter the restaurant business. In 1997, he and a partner opened a restaurant in St. Petersburg that one client in particular, Vladimir Putin, came to enjoy. That special relationship launched the restaurateur into the lucrative world of government contracting. Prigozhin’s companies provided Russian schools and the army with meals, earning him the nickname “Putin’s Chef.”
In 2014, Prigozhin became a purveyor of both meals and men. On the heels of Moscow’s invasion of Crimea, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) was sponsoring small bands of mercenaries and volunteers to fight in eastern Ukraine on behalf of the Luhansk People’s Republic, which had declared itself independent. Prigozhin wanted in and linked up with Dmitry Utkin, a career soldier with the call sign “Wagner,” a name that would eventually become a catchall term for the companies and entities connected to both men. To insiders, Wagner Group was simply “the Company.”
“Like it or not, a twenty-first century ‘scramble for Africa’ is underway.”
Prigozhin’s men proved themselves an effective fighting force on the front, and brutal enforcers in the rear. The Company grew with Russia’s increasing assertiveness abroad. Starting in 2015, contractors worked closely with the Ministry of Defense in Syria. Wagner forces helped take Palmyra from the Islamic State, only for the generals in the MoD to claim credit for the victory and unceremoniously pull them out of the campaign. A year later, Wagner-affiliated mining companies and “security types” were arriving in Africa, a continent largely free from the bitter infighting and rivalry inherent to Russia’s competing security institutions.
It was only in 2018, however, that Prigozhin started making a name for himself. “Putin’s Chef” was known back home mostly for poisoning school children and soldiers with his food. His infamy went international when he took on the world’s sole superpower on multiple fronts. In February, Prigozhin ordered his mercenaries to attack the Conoco gas plant in Khasham, where U.S. special forces and their Syrian partners were embedded. A four-hour battle ensued between Russian and American citizens that, at its worst, could have “plunge[d] both countries into bloody conflict.” Only eight days later, a grand jury for the District of Columbia indicted Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency for its role in interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
After that, it seemed like Wagner was everywhere. Prigozhin’s political operatives were found funding candidates in Madagascar’s presidential election while Wagner soldiers were fighting a jihadist insurgency in northern Mozambique. U.S. and European governments took notice. A new Cold War was emerging, and it seemed Wagner was the tip of Russia’s spear. The U.S. Department of State called the mercenary group a state-backed organization that “exploits insecurity to expand its presence in Africa, threatening stability, good governance, and respect for human rights.” The former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, Major General Marcus Hicks declared, “Like it or not, a twenty-first century ‘scramble for Africa’ is underway.”
Back in Russia, however, who wielded the spear was never quite clear. In Putin’s system, Russian elites enjoy outsized freedom to lobby for and pursue lucrative policies they can frame within Russia’s “national interests.” Prigozhin had a unique talent for selling what Russia’s national interests were, and how Wagner fit in.
Yet he was only one of many to make riches in this second Cold War, a world where state and non-state actors position themselves to balance, and profit from, tensions among great powers. As colleagues would attest, Wagner’s boss was rarely the smartest guy in the room. What he was good at was recognizing opportunity in instability and bringing a team together to take advantage.
The siren song of war and reward echoes across Libya’s coast, luring states, jihadists, armed groups, and mercenaries of all stripes to its shores. It is hard to imagine Libya would not eventually pull in Prigozhin as well. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the civil wars that followed, Tripoli—the capital and center of the country’s public and private institutions and thus its oil wealth—has been the key prize for a shifting web of local warring parties and their foreign patrons interested in the country’s geostrategic location and its relevance to energy markets.
In General Khalifa Haftar, ruler of east Libya, Prigozhin found his opportunity. Haftar was part of the group of officers who brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969. Nearly twenty years later, Chadian forces captured Haftar during the Great Toyota War. Gaddafi disavowed him, and Haftar turned on Gaddafi, going into opposition in Chad and eventually receiving asylum in the United States. Living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., he reportedly worked closely with the CIA on the Libya file.
In 2011, the general returned to lead forces against Gaddafi, but his clear ambition earned only distrust from other revolutionary forces. Haftar turned to building up his own military force, the Libyan National Army (LNA), in the east, establishing a base in Benghazi and framing his consolidation of power in anti-Islamist and anti-jihadist terms.
He could point to real threats. In 2014, Syrian returnees and foreign jihadists declared the eastern city of Derna a province of the Islamic State. Haftar rallied the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to his side, both of which sent funds and advisors. France deployed special forces. The United States, however, was less convinced the Islamic State represented a threat in Libya.
The Egyptians took the Islamic State on their border most seriously. And it was likely Egypt, political scientist Jalel Harchaoui notes, who first connected Haftar to Moscow. In the twilight of the Arab Spring, Egyptian military forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. The United States briefly suspended delivery of weapons in response, but it was a wide enough window for Russia to step in. In 2014, the UAE and Saudi Arabia funded a $3.5 billion weapons deal between Russia and Egypt.
A year later, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia were ramping up their lobbying efforts on behalf of Haftar. During Putin’s visit to Cairo in February 2015, President Sisi invited a Libyan officer close to Haftar to meet the Russians, and the provision of weapons and military equipment was discussed. The UAE then delivered Russian-made attack helicopters. The following year, Haftar’s force ordered another eleven.
Haftar needed more and more mercenaries. For his 2016 attack on the oil crescent, he hired thousands of men from the main Darfur rebel groups in Sudan, including factions of the Sudan Liberation Army, as well as Musa Hilal’s forces.
Later that same year, a private military company, or PMC, RSB Group, landed a demining contract for a cement factory in Benghazi, underbidding a British firm by the equivalent of $25,000,000. RSB Group, founded by Oleg Krinitsyn, a former officer in Russia’s border guards, is known to be “the first Russian PMC.” Krinitsyn’s company offered a wide variety of services: maritime security in the Gulf of Aden and Gulf of Guinea; consulting; demining; and convoy, site, and personal protection. In 2007, RSB worked with American security companies guarding convoys in Iraq. “Everyone has the same task—to make money,” Krinitsyn later told Russian state-affiliated media. “Where the U.S. Army appears, private military companies follow. If you imagine a war on foreign territory as a hunt by predators for herbivores, then the American army is a lion, and PMCs are jackals that eat up the carrion of the king of beasts.”
By 2017, it was clear to many in both Russia’s private and public sectors that there was money to be made in Libya, particularly in the region under Haftar’s control. After the factory deal was signed, the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence agency, which often competed with the FSB-friendly Krinitsyn—made RSB’s boss an offer he couldn’t refuse. “[The GRU] basically said to Oleg [Krinitsyn], ‘Look, let us buy your company, and we will work more in Libya,’” a person close to the matter told me.
Krinitsyn sold RSB, reportedly for a fair price, paid in cash, then registered a new company, “RSB Security Services.” The GRU then put their own man in Benghazi.
RSB’s new owner would be Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national and GRU asset. Marsalek was the chief operating officer of the German payment processing company Wirecard, whose collapse would become the largest fraud case in German history. The Austrian, an investigation by the Insider found, wanted his own mercenary company after the GRU arranged for him to LARP as a Russian soldier in Syria alongside Wagner’s head of intelligence, Anatoly Karazii. Marsalek envisioned his RSB not only demining the cement factory but training an army of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Libyan mercenaries to guard “the country’s southern border and [restrict] migration flows at gunpoint . . . mercenaries could be outfitted with state-of-the-art body cams to record ‘awesome video material’ of them shooting people.”
Though it seems he wasn’t directly involved in the GRU’s deal, Prigozhin was well embedded within its network, which had now effectively monopolized the Libya portfolio. And in the end, Prigozhin’s capacity to move men and material, far larger than anything Krinitsyn or Jan Marsalek could muster, paved the way for Wagner to service Haftar’s need for mercenaries. It helped, too, that Prigozhin was already working with the UAE in Sudan, where Emirati officials allegedly connected Wagner’s boss with the head of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Muhammad Dagalo “Hemedti.”
There are two pillars supporting the United Arab Emirates’ foreign policy. The first is security. Abu Dhabi seeks to counter Islamism and jihadism before it reaches its shores. The second, advanced by Dubai, is commerce: the desire to see the UAE as a twenty-first-century Venetian empire. Despite the population boom in places like Dubai, there are few UAE citizens. With only one million nationals and incredible oil wealth, the country can outsource its foreign policy priorities. In Prigozhin, UAE officials found the perfect partner. As one Russian intelligence official put it: “When you have military equipment, military technologies and skills, trained and motivated personnel, and someone has money, then a form of cooperation is always found and easy . . . why not shake the hand with the money in it?” Abu Dhabi would provide the financing in Libya, and Prigozhin would supply the men.
In October 2018, those men were spotted at Al-Watiya Air Base, a slice of land the Haftar’s LNA controlled in western Libya. Months later, in early 2019, Haftar’s forces launched an offensive on Libya’s southern region, officially an effort to oust “Chadian gangs.” He took the main cities of Sabha and Ubari and captured the Sharara oil fields, bringing the majority of Libya’s oil production under his control. Haftar, though, wanted more than just the south: he wanted Libya’s capital.
On April 4, 2019, Haftar launched a surprise attack on Tripoli. The head of the Tripoli government (GNA), Fayez al-Sarraj, promised to resist and launched a counteroffensive, dubbed the “Volcano of Anger.” Seizing Tripoli, home to 1.2 million residents and a host of militias armed to the teeth, would prove no easy task. But Haftar had sold outside powers, particularly the UAE—but also the Trump administration—on the notion he could unite Libya. The UAE poured weapons, cash, and drones into the conflict. In mid-April, Haftar left Saudi Arabia with more funding. And while the French denied any connection, the LNA general had met French diplomats just two weeks prior to the attack. Soon French weapons also appeared on the battlefield.
Abu Dhabi would provide the financing in Libya, and Prigozhin would supply the men.
Everyone wanted a slice of the offensive. Security entrepreneurs flocked to Haftar. Christiaan Durrant—a former Australian fighter pilot, founder of security firm Lancaster 6, and a good friend of Blackwater founder Erik Prince—also had men in Benghazi. According to a confidential UN report, a few days after he started his attack, Haftar met Prince in Cairo. Prince proposed an $80 million contract to the Libyan National Army, which would cover the provision of “assault aircraft, cyber capabilities and the ability to intercept ships at sea.” He outlined a program to kidnap and kill high-value targets in west Libya as well. The plan, according to the UN, swiftly fell apart. The Jordanians cancelled a deal to sell Cobra helicopters, forcing Prince’s team to look for backups. They procured some utility helicopters from South Africa, then supplied crop dusters previously outfitted with weapons through Bulgarian and Serbian companies.
Durrant contends the UN investigation mixed up all sorts of timelines and geographies. “There’s nothing ‘united’ about the United Nations,” he later told me. “I’ve been in countries where the UN is feeding the rebels, criminals really, on the other side.” It was Durrant, not Erik Prince, who rolled into Libya quickly, after a separate deal in Jordan fell through. “In our line of work, the first mover picks up most of the business,” he continued. “So, we were on the ground early talking not just with Haftar, but with the National Oil Corporation of Libya and U.S. government logistics.” As a former associate of Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, Durrant had worked on crop dusters before and was well positioned to purchase planes and other assets for his own company.
After landing in Benghazi to assemble civilian helicopters, Durrant’s team were pulled in front of Haftar. “They were told to put a machine gun on the helicopter and fly it over Tripoli.” When the team refused—the mission was both “suicide and illegal”—Haftar’s men were furious and started waving guns around. The twenty unarmed men decided they needed to get out of dodge. In the dead of night, Durrant’s men escaped through Benghazi to reach two small inflatable boats, then crossed nearly two hundred miles of the Mediterranean to arrive safely in Malta.
With Trump in the White House, Durrant believes, there were those in the UN interested in using Erik Prince as a means to link the U.S. president to a “scandal.” “Everyone else, Britain, France, is sending in javelins, meanwhile we get reams of reports written up about a potentially armed crop duster.” (An Austrian court later found that the crop dusters did not constitute war material.) With regards to the assassination program, Durrant notes there’s nothing illegal in proposing business. “I will do any work, as long as it’s legal,” he added, “and on the side of the right guys. If we are helping the U.S. stamp out terrorism, and we are able to make money doing it, then that’s great.”
“By August 2019, we knew Russian mercenaries were in the country,” Heithem, a militia commander, told me when I met him outside his former base a few years later. Rocket blasts had ripped the building half-open. Concrete, furniture, cooking utensils—the scaffolding of daily life—pooled onto the street below. It was early 2020, and the front line had settled where we now stood, in Ein Zara, a suburb south of Tripoli. In his late twenties, stocky, and shy, Heithem, at the time part of an anti-Haftar militia from Benghazi, stared down the enemy’s old position in a whitewashed house a few hundred yards away.
Walking softly across the rubble-strewn courtyard, Heithem waved me over. “Wagner played a logistical role in August, not an offensive one. Then in October, the guys in that white house started to look very different, like special forces. They had special vests, cameras on their helmets, different equipment.” The mercenaries started to make a difference. “The LNA usually takes four or five shells to hit a target,” Heithem added. “The Russians were hitting us immediately.”
Wagner’s intervention put Tripoli’s forces in a dangerous position. Growing desperate, the head of Tripoli’s GNA government, al-Sarraj, signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkey in November. The memorandum established maritime boundaries that effectively cut a direct line between Libya and Turkey and prompted immediate protests from Turkey’s rivals in the east Mediterranean—Greece, Egypt, and Cyprus—where Turks and Cypriots were competing for oil blocs. Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in return, ramped up his support to the beleaguered Tripoli government, shipping in air defense systems, the Turkish military’s infamous Bayraktar drones, and mercenaries.
Turkish intelligence selected al-Hamzat, one of eight armed groups in Turkish-controlled Syria, to recruit mercenaries for Libya. Al-Hazmat emerged in 2013 as a division within the Free Syrian Army. The group received training and equipment directly from the United States and United Kingdom, first to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime, then to fight ISIS. In 2016, under the leadership of Seif Abu Bakr, al-Hamzat joined Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield against the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkish military officers put no restrictions on the number of recruits for the Libyan front. An influx of Syrians would provide more time to train Libyan fighters and free up GNA personnel for offensive operations. Syrian commanders quickly took advantage. The more men commanders sent to Libya, the more money they could skim off the top.
One recruit, “Ahmed,” had previously fought with al-Hamzat. In Syria, Ahmed recalled, fighters were rarely forced into battle. If conditions in a skirmish became unfavorable, many would simply fall back and fight later. In Libya, however, Ahmed discovered this was not the case. Seeing the front line in south Tripoli, the barrage of artillery and the drones hovering overhead, he asked to go home. His commanding officer told him: “Coming to Libya was your choice, going back is not.” Together with fellow recruits, Ahmed reluctantly moved into an empty villa close to the front line. The first disbursement of his salary would be in three months, upon his return to Syria. Food became an issue, and it didn’t take long for Ahmed to understand how things worked. “A shopkeeper introduced us to the black market,” he said, “where we could sell our bullets and weapons to pay for groceries.”
Turkey’s Syrian mercenaries found themselves under-equipped for the fight ahead. “We were given old machine guns from home,” one fighter recalled, “not due to lack of higher quality weapons, but because those weapons had been sold off on the black market.” On the enemy’s side, Haftar’s LNA employed sophisticated surveillance drones—likely provided by the UAE, but also Wagner—to map targets. Back in Syria, “neither the regime nor rebels had the ability to target precisely.”
Turkish officers told the Syrian recruits they were fighting not just Haftar, but Assad’s regime—there were Syrians on the other side loyal to the regime. They weren’t wrong.
In proxy warfare, outside powers are typically willing to invest enough resources to ensure their preferred proxies won’t lose, but not enough for them to win.
In September 2019, “Basil,” a twentysomething Syrian from Syria’s Latakia region, was in Deir ez-Zor with Wagner’s ISIS Hunters unit when an order came to head to their base in Homs. “The Russians told us about [another] mission, but no one knew where exactly. We thought we were maybe going to Raqqa.” The ISIS Hunters took a bus to Hmeimim Airport, then boarded a military plane packed with men and coffins. Three hours later, they landed. The Syrians were loaded in pickups and brought to Al-Karama base where they were finally told where they were: Libya. The starting salary was $500 per month. Twenty of the ISIS Hunters immediately refused to fight. “They said it was because of the low salary, but really they were afraid of the whole situation.” More ISIS Hunters joined them in a strike, forcing a Russian commander to raise salaries to $1,000 a month: low by international standards but good money in the overwhelming poverty of Assad’s Syria.
The same twenty fighters still refused to participate. They eventually flew back to Syria. The commander of the brigade collected the mobile phones of the others. Basil’s family had no idea where he was, but that was pretty normal given “all the secret work” he did. Still, he was terrified. The men were given weapons and piled into another plane, this one heading for al-Jufra. Everyone was given a fake name. From there, they hopped onto small buses and drove twelve hours to the front line in Tripoli. The trip shouldn’t have been that long, but various “clans” put up roadblocks on the way.
Like their fellow Syrians across the front line, Basil and the ISIS Hunters were put up in civilians’ houses. The next day, they visited one of the field hospitals that had an operations center. The first floor was for injured Russians and Syrians and food supplies, provided by the UAE. The floors above were for communications. There were Sudanese mercenaries, who, annoyingly for Basil, were earning $1,500 dollars, as well as Chadians. After a few days, it was time to fight. “The Russians were advancing during the day and withdrawing at night. I don’t know why,” Basil remembered. “The real war was in the air, and the Turks controlled it.”
In May 2020, the Turkish intervention had made a serious difference. Pro-Tripoli forces pushed Haftar’s LNA out of Tripoli’s southern suburbs. Milita commander Heithem thanked the Turkish drones more than the mercenaries. “They cut off the logistical supplies for the Russians and the LNA. They ran out of ammunition, even food.” At the end of the month, Wagner’s 1,500 mercenaries, a number that did not include Syrians under their employment, made a sudden and hasty retreat from Tripoli. From what Basil had heard, there had been a truce. “The Russians learned the GNA and Turks wanted to attack Sirte. Both had oil and were more important to Wagner than Tripoli, so they made a truce, and we were given seventy-two hours to withdraw.” For now, it seems unlikely that Wagner had a direct stake in those oil fields. The bulk of Wagner’s funding in Libya likely came from the Russian military, not Haftar. It is still unclear, too, whether Wagner brokered a deal with the Turks or simply made a hasty retreat. Soon, though, fires were lit at Russian headquarters. Smoke from laptops and documents filled the air. Haftar’s campaign against the capital collapsed a few days later.
Ahmed—who had fought for the Turks and the GNA—went back to Syria with a shattered pelvis. He was paid $2,500, a quarter of the $10,000 he was owed. “When I complained, they said this is what we have for you. If you don’t like it, file a complaint.” When the fighting in Libya was at its peak, a recruiter for one of the Turkish-backed militias reported he was told to “send as many fighters as we could recruit . . . so, we started sending kids with zero military experience.” But once the battle was won, “commanders confiscated salaries,” he confirmed.
After visiting the white house where Wagner forces had allegedly stayed, Heithem and I drove a few minutes to meet Abdul Rahman. Abdul lost two brothers to the mines Wagner left behind. He showed us the car, speckled with small holes where shrapnel sliced through. He pointed to the trip wires in his garden and the booby traps behind his doors.
“Was it possible this was the LNA?” I asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” he responded. But the sophistication hinted at the Russians. “Libyans themselves wouldn’t leave these mines behind; society is not structured that way.”
In the backyard we saw an unexploded shell. Abdul covered it with a rusty bucket and put a rock on top to keep it in place. His neighbor lost two children the year before when they picked up a mine. Frequent petitions to demine Ein Zara had gone unanswered by the government in Tripoli.
We then drove past several buildings destroyed by Emirati drones and fighter jets. On the street, groups of African migrants congregated, some on break from rebuilding Ein Zara, earning money to pay for boats to Europe. They bore the brunt of injuries from unexploded ordinances.
In October 2020, representatives from Libya’s two rival camps signed a United Nations-sponsored action plan committing to the withdrawal of foreign mercenaries. A Wagner force stuck around, however, keeping some of its Syrian fighters. Basil’s unit was transferred to Sirte, to wait for an attack from the Turks and GNA that never came. They were bored almost immediately, even more so after commanders cut everyone off from hashish. Most Syrians opted to go back, but a few signed new contracts to fight in Africa. They went south to the Central African Republic.
The offensive on Tripoli was a failure for Haftar, but not for Wagner. Prigozhin’s men were paid for their services—likely through the UAE and the Russian state. While the Kremlin and Prigozhin would be happy for Haftar to take Tripoli, there was no interest in throwing all the necessary resources behind him. Russian military planners knew Haftar’s chances of taking the city were limited. In the spring of 2019, Prigozhin received a report stating the LNA lacked the capacity and motivation to seize the capital. It was more important to maintain Haftar’s dependence on the Kremlin and, therefore, Russian influence in an important country on NATO’s southern flank. In proxy warfare, outside powers are typically willing to invest enough resources to ensure their preferred proxies won’t lose, but not enough for them to win. In this sense, Russia and Turkey have made the conflict in Libya more intractable. Ironically, it is also Russia and Turkey’s intervention that produced a military stalemate and prevented the eruption of another war after 2020.
Neither at war nor at peace, the real winners in Libya are those comfortably straddling the two, feeding belligerents’ demand for men and material.
Copyright © John Lechner, 2025. Adapted from Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.