Part one: Origins -- Bandit City -- The old customs house -- New Island -- Guns, gas, and oil -- Pipeline dreams -- The new look -- Part two: Hidden in plain sight -- Gerasimov's ghosts -- Slavonic corps -- Polite people -- Down, out, and up in Donbas -- The cleaners -- Part three: Expansion -- Song of the Sledgehammer -- Clash at Conoco -- Project Astrea -- Africa or bust -- Onward to Tripoli -- Mix up in Minsk -- Prelude to spring -- Part four: Out of the shadows -- Orchestral maneuvers -- Gulag no, Gulag yes -- A stab in the back -- Icarus down -- Succession

"In July 2023 the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take control of Moscow. The last person to attempt such a venture was Adolf Hitler. Wagner's power began from patronage, then grew from international theft and extortion, until it was so great it exposed the weakness of Russia's conventional military and became a threat to the Russian state, one that was not demonstrably eliminated until a private jet containing Wagner's core commanders was blown up in midair. That Yevgeny Prigozhin, a local criminal thug, was able to build a private army that was on the threshold of overwhelming the world's second largest country seems incredible. In fact, it was inevitable following the hollowing out of the Russian military, the creeping use of contract groups for murky foreign missions, power struggles inside the Kremlin, and the ability of the new militias to corner and exploit the black economy. Told with unique inside sourcing and expertise, Putin's Sledgehammer is a gripping and terrifying account of a superpower that contracted its soul to a pitiless militia"--