More than a decade ago, the Wagner Group began its rise as the world’s most feared mercenary army — quietly, in corners of the globe far from mainstream attention. Dissident Russian journalist Katya was one of the few people chasing it, determined to expose what she called “a new model of violence that is transforming the world for all of us.”
Hell’s Army, the new documentary from Oscar nominee and three-time Emmy winner Richard Rowley (Dirty Wars, Kingdom of Silence), goes inside that world. The film world premiered Monday at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX), where Rowley followed Katya and Denis — an exiled police detective — as they trace the origins of the mercenary group and its enigmatic leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, from his rise to his death in a fiery plane crash.
Written and directed by Rowley, Hell’s Army was produced by Richard Butler, Atanas Georgiev, Odessa Rae, Rebecca Teitel and Caitlin McNally. Executive producers are Scott Norville for Evergreen Productions and Kris Kucinskas and Maria Logan for The Dossier Center, an investigative organization funded by Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Midnight Films is handling international sales.
Rowley spoke with THR in Copenhagen about the global rise of mercenaries, how the spread of oligarchy and authoritarianism relates to it, and why he believes Hell’s Army is a warning to us all.
Why did you decide to make a film about Wagner?
I’ve been tracking mercenaries since I first saw them in the field in Iraq, way back in 2004. It was their reemergence on the battlefield that signaled a terrifying potential in war. When Wagner emerged and came out of the shadows, it was clear that mercenaries had entered a completely new paradigm. Wagner put 30,000 soldiers in the field. They were larger than most of the armies in Europe. And they became the first private company to conquer a European city in 500 years. So, I knew this was a story that I had to cover.
How did you find Katya and Denis?
You can’t make a film about Wagner without talking to Denis, who revealed their existence for the first time and has cultivated an unmatched network of sources on the inside of the organization. He knows it inside and out. Denis introduced me to the whole team that he works with and Katya and the Dossier Center. It’s a unique combination. We have, on the one hand, Denis with his sources, and Katya, who’s on the ground in the field, immersing us, taking us to the battlefield and showing us on the ground what this means. And the Dossier Center has access to this trove of internal documents. All this allowed us to be global and epic in scope, and also intimate and immersive on the front lines.
Hell’s Army includes scenes where, as an audience, we are told that we cannot be shown certain people, or they may be recognized and face danger. How involved were the security guidelines you followed for the film?
The Dossier team has significant security protocols. They are on a list as an undesirable organization in Russia. Katya is also on a list. When she was in Syria, it was discovered that she was on a target list and that she would be arrested if she were ever found at a checkpoint. So they spend a lot of time thinking about and planning for ways to keep people safe.
You yourself accompanied her in the field. How key was your presence on the ground and what kind of security measures did that involve?
Absolutely. I had to be everywhere because I also shoot, and it’s really important for me to immerse the audience in the specificity of each location. Part of that is visual and oral. Part of it is [capturing] the color of light in the morning or the sound of drones whining in the air. But more important is the feeling of the walls closing in on us in Syria, or the public mourning in the streets of Ukraine. And so I had to be there, and I had to be there to shoot all of it.
Every location is different and unique and has its own set of security requirements. But I’ve been a war reporter for many years and have learned that sometimes you have to work with private security to just stay safe. But in the end, that’s not what makes you safe. What makes you safe is having local people whom you trust, who you can work with. There are always risks involved with going to any conflict zone, of course, but it’s important also to recognize that the risks we take are nothing in comparison with the risks that our local colleagues take in bringing us there.
What other elements were key to bringing this scary world of mercenaries to life?
It’s just an incredible cast of characters. I was amazed by every one of them. We have an AWOL Wagner colonel who’s hiding out in Turkish Cyprus, a scruffy-haired lieutenant with a mechanical hand who’s running their operations in the Central African Republic, a prison recruit who’d been thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine and then ended up escaping. Mercenaries occupy this gray zone at the extremities of human morality and experience. They’re always fascinating, and their stories are always revealing.
Hell’s Army even mentions at some point that it’s unclear why a person is talking to you. Do you always know people’s motivation to meet and speak to you? I would expect them to not trust you.
First of all, they’re all very suspicious of us. And their motives for speaking are complex and different. In some cases, they are genuinely looking for some kind of redemption. [One of the people in Hell’s Army,] Igor is weighing his options for his future. But I think that some of the people were talking to us just to see if they could figure out what we knew or what we’re working on, or where we might be going. That happens too.
Also, people want to talk. Everyone wants to talk. And I approach everyone with genuine curiosity. I really want to know how he ended up being who he is in this complex, gray world they operate in. And people sort of sense that. I’m not setting them up for gotcha questions and going to piece together something to misrepresent them. I want them to articulate as clearly as possible who they are and how they became who they are, and how they understand their role in the world. People feel that, and they open up when you approach them like that.
Hell’s Army mentions that the global rise of mercenaries is continuing. Can you talk about this trend a bit and what drives it?
Yeah, Wagner’s leader was killed, but the army metastasized. So in some countries, it remains unchanged. In Mali and in the Central African Republic, Wagner is still Wagner. In many other places, the fighters have moved into other mercenary formations. Some even defected and joined Western-backed mercenary companies that are also operating in Africa and in Europe.
Even their brand is being used to recruit people into Russia’s hybrid war. The Associated Press has identified something like 125 acts in Europe perpetrated by Russia as part of a hybrid war campaign. That’s attempted assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage. So they’re very much still a live part of all this.
Globally, the mercenaries are on the rise everywhere. The United Arab Emirates has a mercenary force that has been operating in Yemen, and they used it in Libya. Mercenaries hired out of Florida assassinated the president of Haiti. This is a terrifying new paradigm that we’re moving into. Democracies don’t need mercenary armies. Mercenary armies are what states turn to when they’ve been taken over by oligarchs and authoritarians who are running the state for their private ambitions and their private gain.
Can you expand on that a bit?
Hell’s Army is a warning. In the United States, we’re well on the road to an authoritarian future where our culture and politics are ruled by oligarchs or significantly influenced by oligarchs. And these are the horrors that lie at the end of that road when war is turned into a project for personal gain and personal ambition. It turns soldiers into murderers, and it debases us as a nation. So that is the dark future that’s ahead of us. I hope that Hell’s Army is a warning to us all to choose a different path, while we still can.
It’s about democracy. In a democratic system, you don’t have mercenaries, because one of the core functions of the state and of government is to have a monopoly on violence and to control the army so that wars are only fought when they serve some collective moral purpose. So that’s what’s at stake now. We’re witnessing the collapse of the liberal order that we’ve lived in since the post-war period. It’s almost gone, and it is something that we have to fight for. Because it’s so brazen and so out there in the open. People don’t even make an effort to conceal what’s happening at this point.
Was there any particularly crazy moment on your journey to making Hell’s Army?
The craziest moment in the course of making this film was the moment when Wagner went public. For years, Katya and Denis had been struggling to unmask and expose Wagner. And then just where they felt they’ve exposed them, Wagner’s out in the press. Ukraine is invaded, and Wagner goes public, and this villain who they’ve been trying to reveal, steps out and is on the evening news talking to the New York Times. That brought everything we had done up to that point into question. What is the purpose and the value of all the risks that you’ve taken? Colleagues have died exposing these crimes, and these crimes have now become a celebrated part of this brand. And the brand is brutality, the brand is war crimes. The answer that Katya and Denis came to was that they had to go even deeper to reveal the entire system and what makes this kind of violence not only possible, but maybe even inevitable.
Do you have any new projects in the works? If so, what can you share about it?
I have a new project in the same sort of universe as Hell’s Army. I’ve been making films about war in one way or another for 30 years, because it feels to me that wars reveal us at our extremities. The symptoms of our darkest cultural sicknesses become visible.
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