Wagner’s Brand Was Built on Extreme Violence

In death, as in life. The news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the infamous mercenary who led the Wagner Group, was killed in a fiery plane crash in Russia marked an unceremonious ending to a vulgar life. And while there is still some mystery surrounding the circumstances of the plane crash, which also killed several other high-ranking Wagner officials, few doubt Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind it. After embarrassing Putin by staging a mutiny two months to the date of the crash, Prigozhin’s death was simply a matter of when, not if. What occurred on Wednesday was merely Putin cleaning house and reasserting his control.

The way Prigozhin was killed—executed mafia-style in such a spectacularly violent and grisly manner—not only sends a clear message to others who would dare defy Putin, but it also fits with the brand Prigozhin built for himself and the Wagner Group he controlled.

Extreme violence has been a central pillar of the Wagner brand, and one gleefully promoted by Prigozhin himself. In late 2019, a video went viral on Russian social network sites showing Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group using a sledgehammer to kill a Syrian man named Hamdi Bouta near the al-Shaer gas plant northwest of Palmyra, Syria. Then, last November, another video made the rounds showing an individual identified as a defector from the Wagner Group having his head smashed in with a sledgehammer. Responding to the latter video, Prigozhin said that it should be titled, “A dog receives a dog’s death.”

Prigozhin soon adopted the sledgehammer as a symbol of his organization’s wanton brutality. After the European Union Parliament ruled that Wagner be placed on its terrorist list, Prigozhin sent the legislators a sledgehammer daubed with fake blood. On Thursday, videos and photos posted to social media showed a sledgehammer resting atop a pile of flowers and other tributes at a makeshift memorial for Prigozhin and the other plane crash victims outside Wagner headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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The Wagner Group’s reputation for violence is no coincidence. Its very name is an exercise in branding, referencing the German composer Richard Wagner, a favorite of Adolf Hitler. The private military company’s (PMC) image has been carefully constructed—from its logo of a skull in crosshairs with “Wagner PMC” written in both English and Russian, to the action movies it produces glorifying the mercenaries’ global exploits. Wagner’s motto, “Blood, honor, homeland, courage,” speaks for itself.

Although the Wagner Group’s notoriety has boomed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the organization has been building its brand for years. Wagner’s supposed heroic operations have been memorialized in multiple self-produced, highly stylized movies that serve as international and domestic propaganda as well as recruiting tools. Tourist (2021), for example, is a Wagner-funded movie set in the Central African Republic that portrays Wagner fighters as elite soldiers who are highly trained and exceedingly lethal.

Through its marketing, Wagner has generated niche appeal, embracing the concept of hyper-violence, much in the way Islamic State fighters did. The Islamic State disseminated images of decapitations, immolations, and slave markets to at once recruit the most deranged individuals into its organization while simultaneously terrorizing civilians.

Wagner’s penchant for extreme violence attracts sociopaths seeking to join its ranks as well, but its reputation also helps garner interest from strongmen, military juntas, and coup leaders seeking to hire Wagner as muscle to ensure regime security. Wagner is notorious for its propaganda operations in battle zones and has leveraged this expertise to craft its own image. Wagner uses social media extensively—including Telegram and the Russian platform VK—to foster a cult image of morbid bravery and violence. It releases horrific, savage, and heroic footage to propagate self-aggrandizing but sometimes false narratives, exalting its actions in combat.

While Wagner’s reputation for extreme brutality has been well-earned, much of the rest of its aura has been the result of smoke and mirrors. In fact, there is nothing private about this “private” military company, as Putin revealed in late June when he admitted that Wagner’s financing was provided by the Russian state, more than $1 billion over the past year alone. Even though PMCs are illegal in Russia, Wagner has been allowed to openly advertise and recruit, including on billboards in major cities displaying heroic images of its fighters.

Because of these efforts, along with Russian-state media productions such as RT’s PMC Wagner: Contract with the Motherland, Wagner is well-regarded in Russia. This was evident during the group’s mutiny in late June, when Russian citizens in Rostov-on-Don greeted Wagner fighters in the street, bringing them food and even chanting the group’s name. Even after the insurrection was aborted, Prigozhin remained a popular figure, revered by his men and respected by a significant portion of the Russian public.

Prigozhin’s personal legend grew as he unleashed a torrent of rhetoric denigrating Russian generals during the course of the war in Ukraine, publishing invective-filled videos from the frontlines in Bakhmut. Who was this madman directly challenging Putin’s top brass? Leveraging his flair for the dramatic, in May, Prigozhin posted a video from an open field filled with dozens of corpses, many of them badly mutilated, who he claimed were Wagner fighters killed in Ukraine. The aesthetic was deliberate, intended to appeal to ultra-nationalists who shared Prigozhin’s anger about the coffins arriving back home in Russia. The imagery evoked a cult of martyrdom, with the Wagner boss honoring those who had sacrificed their lives for the motherland. Prigozhin is now among them.

Yet the way Wagner’s fighters have been used in the war has also sullied its reputation. The group that once boasted of defeating Islamic State jihadists in Syria before seizing control of oil and gas fields has now devolved into a rag-tag horde composed of hastily recruited prisoners, convicts, and thugs-for-hire unceremoniously served up as cannon fodder in Ukraine. In branding terms, Wagner is no longer seen as a luxury brand, but is almost solely identified by anomie—violence for its own sake. With its fighters in Ukraine dispatched to the meat grinder with little training and substandard weaponry, Wagner’s brand was being sold below market rate, with the Kremlin desperate for quantity over quality on the battlefield. Meanwhile, its African and Middle Eastern deployments were viewed as exotic and portrayed as the profitable part of the brand.

The Wagner rebellion against the Kremlin, which stemmed in part from this discontentment with how the group was being used in Ukraine—raised the group’s and Prigozhin’s notoriety to a whole new level. Prigozhin’s short-lived “march on Moscow” exposed deep rifts within the Russian state and was ultimately what led to his undoing.

Interestingly, rather than marginalize Prigozhin, as many expected, Putin’s first move was to reach out to leaders in CAR and Mali to assuage any concerns they had about Wagner ceasing its operations. Putin lulled Prigozhin into a false sense of security, allowing him to believe that he could continue on with business as usual. Prigozhin was pictured meeting with African leaders at the recent Russia-Africa Summit hosted in St. Petersburg. Two days before he died, Prigozhin released a video that appeared to show him somewhere in Africa.

Now, with Prigozhin and other senior Wagner commanders such as Dmitry Utkin dead, the brand itself could be well-placed to experience something of a renaissance. The Wagner name still has some cache, and Putin is in position to reassert control over its operations. In a post-Prigozhin era, Wagner’s branding will need to more closely align with the new objectives yet to be publicly shared by Putin. As Moscow asserts tighter control over Wagner through closer integration with the Kremlin, the group will have to eschew defining itself in opposition to military elites.

Yet the situation remains uncertain. Prigozhin’s presumed assassination could still lead to some blowback for Putin. Following his death, a post on Wagner’s Telegram channel, Grey Zone, declared that “the head of the Wagner Group, Hero of Russia, a true patriot to his Motherland, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, died as a result of the actions of traitors to Russia.” The only guarantee is that whatever the next iteration of the Wagner Group looks like, extreme violence and the broadcasting thereof will remain integral to its brand.