After Putin's Sledgehammer: Russia's Shadow War on the West

When Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group mercenary outfit mutinied and marched on Moscow in 2023, it laid bare the criminal bargain at the heart of Putin's Russia. But that was only the opening act that led to the transformation of Russia's strategy. Across Europe, warehouse arsons, severed undersea cables, jammed GPS signals, and drones closing airports have become the frontline of a new kind of conflict — one waged below the threshold of open war, through civilian infrastructure and ordinary people drawn into a contest they barely understand. Two questions drive Candace Rondeaux's investigation: how did Europe become a battlefield again — and why have the United States and Europe, facing the same campaign, drawn such opposite conclusions that the Atlantic alliance itself has begun to fracture? Drawing on her acclaimed Putin's Sledgehammer and her ongoing reporting across NATO, Rondeaux traces the line from Wagner's afterlife to Russia's shadow war — and asks whether the alliance built to keep Europe at peace can still read the war being waged on it.

Deadline registration date

Jan 07, 2027, 12:00 PM MST

Bio:

Candace Rondeaux is a geopolitical risk analyst, investigative journalist, and author of Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos (PublicAffairs, 2025). She is the Founding Principal of Frontline Atlas, an independent public-interest intelligence platform, and co-editor of Understanding the New Proxy Wars (Hurst/Oxford, 2022). She is currently leading an investigative project on the changing character of conflict across NATO — sabotage, infrastructure disruption, and covert influence — that will inform a new work of narrative nonfiction.

A Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and a Senior Fellow with New America's Future Security Initiative, she writes a regular column for World Politics Review and contributes frequently to the Financial Times. An award-winning journalist, she served as Afghanistan and Pakistan Bureau Chief for the Washington Post and was part of a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting team. She has testified before Congress and advised NATO and UN panels on conflict and the outsourcing of violence.

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