READING MATERIAL: Wagner, illustrated

Regarding the "Wagner" topic, there is now a substantial amount of literature on the Russian PMCs. This one stands out: a new Graphic Novel attempts to delve into the secret history of Putin's mercenaries on the African continent.

The cover resembles Russian dolls. Yevgeny Prigozhin stands in the foreground, his chest bearing the skull logo of the paramilitary Wagner Group that he founded, his menacing silhouette against a glowing background with Vladimir Putin's face towering above. "Wagner, l'histoire secrète des mercenaires de Poutine" ("Wagner: The Secret History of Putin's Mercenaries") by Jeune Afrique journalists Mathieu Olivier and Benjamin Roger was published on February 8 by the French publisher Les Arènes.

The flourishing field of Graphic Novels has proven to be an ideal medium for journalistic reports and investigations over the past decade, allowing journalists to recreate scenes that cannot be photographed and offering a new way to look at current events.

As the two authors emphasize in their credits, the book was "largely influenced by investigations published in Jeune Afrique between 2021 and 2023." This portrait of the Wagner Group is a mosaic of stories from Ukraine, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates, heavily drawing on journalistic missions to Mali, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon. This 176-page work is also the result of hours of interviews.

The Graphic Novel describes the rise of the Russian mercenaries in four sentences: "The Central African Laboratory", "The Malian Breakthrough", "The Crazy War", and "The New Era". Through a mix of real and fictionalized characters and playing with chronology, the comic explores the status of soldiers without orders and often without ideology, inappropriately recruited and with varying levels of training, acting as both brethren and opponents to the Russian soldiers they sometimes encounter.

The text is rich in numbers, data, and information. As it is published as close as possible to real events, it does not focus on Wagner's future after the death of Prigozhin and the alleged co-founder of Wagner, Dmitri Utkin. An intriguing approach, we are curious to see if the Graphic Novel will also be available in German.

"Wagner, l’histoire secrète des mercenaires de Poutine", by Mathieu Olivier, Benjamin Roger, and Thierry Chavant, Les Arènes, 176 pages, 22 € (24 $).