Despite being written in 2019, this paper remains a vital source on the Russian-affiliated PMC "Wagner." Authored by Dr. Candace Rondeaux and published by the New America Foundation, it provides comprehensive insights into Wagner's global influence. My contribution to the paper was specifically focused on Wagner's role in Syria following Russia's direct military intervention in September 2015.
Abstract
Russian private military security contractors (PMSCs) are pivotal players in ongoing proxy wars in the Greater Middle East and its periphery. Their covert operations—real and imagined—are also critical in shaping Russia’s strategy for escalation management as well as relations with adversaries and allies. This report, the product of a joint New America and ASU Center on the Future of War initiative to study proxy warfare examines what social media and other digital traces combined with interviews and other research can tell us about Russian PMSCs and their role in Russian proxy warfare strategy.
Executive Summary & Key Findings
Russian private military security contractors (PMSCs) are pivotal players in ongoing proxy wars in the Greater Middle East and its periphery. They provide targeting intelligence, training, logistical support, infrastructure protection, and backstop proxy militias and paramilitary groups in key hotspots around the world, including Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. Their covert operations—real and imagined—are also critical in shaping Russia’s strategy for escalation management as well as relations with adversaries and allies.
Moscow denies any links to Russian PMSCs like the Wagner Group, a paramilitary group linked to Kremlin insiders close to Vladimir Putin. Yet, mounting PMSC casualties in Ukraine, Syria, and more recently Libya have undermined the plausible deniability of their Kremlin connections. Still, questions remain about the degree of control the Kremlin exerts over PMSCs. Are they simply patriotic volunteers as the Kremlin claims? Are they on official assignment for Russia’s GRU intelligence service? Are they mercenaries, corporate warriors, or frontline soldiers? Social media data on hundreds of Russian PMSCs and other evidence collected for this report as well as field research in Ukraine and Syria suggest they are at times all the above.
Above all, Russian PMSCs are frontline agents of a Russian grand strategy that prizes a multipolar world order. The Kremlin stretches legal definitions and obscures its control over PMSCs to benefit its strategic ends. The active reservists and veteran volunteers who make up the ranks of Russian PMSCs operate under a patchwork of national and international law. PMSC detachments are often registered in offshore corporate havens, technically lying outside the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, but their Kremlin-connected sponsors oversee strategic state-run enterprises that are vital for the survival of President Vladimir Putin’s vertical of power.
PMSCs bridge barriers to sustained expeditionary campaigns. Their relationships with local proxies are a force multiplier that allows the Kremlin to extend its influence beyond Russian territory. PMSCs like the Wagner Group will consequently remain a critical part of Russia’s proxy war campaigns, which are likely to far outlast Putin’s tenure. Many conflate Russian PMSC operations with a new form of hybrid warfare, but in fact they represent more continuity than novelty with Soviet-era efforts to cloak military assistance to insurgent paramilitaries operating far beyond enemy lines. The Wagner Group and other Russian PMSCs are also products of disjointed phases of privatization, industrial reconsolidation, and military modernization over the last 30 years that has spurred the growth of state-backed corporate armies.
Neither fully within the state nor outside of it, PMSCs are, in theory, an attractive way of lowering the costs of intervention while extending Russia’s reach. In practice, the Kremlin’s reliance on PMSC operations in fragile states has gained Putin and his closest political allies many benefits. Yet, PMSCs also pose substantial risks for a regime determined to keep a lid on domestic outcry over its military adventurism and to manage blowback. The advent of the digital age means PMSC activities are often hidden in plain sight, and disinformation is no longer a failsafe remedy when the secrecy of covert operations is compromised.
The lack of a clear legal architecture for Russian PMSCs can encourage risk-taking, a dynamic that has already led to direct confrontations with the U.S. forces in Syria and degraded Russia’s efforts to manage escalation. Consequently, Russia places a high premium on narrative control. The Wagner Group narrative of “ghost warriors” on far flung battlefields obscures operational objectives, tactics, and the diversity of agents at work. Separating myth from fact about Russian PMSCs is critical for understanding Russia’s proxy strategies.
Key Findings
Russian PMSCs are designed for strategic deception. Legal loopholes permit Russian PMSCs to perform an end run around national and international prohibitions against mercenary activity.
Individual citizens are barred under Russian law from mercenary activity, but laws passed under Putin-empowered state-run enterprises to form private armies with wide operational latitude.
Several Russian PMSCs operate as joint teams with the Russian military under special contractual arrangements between government ministries and strategic state-run enterprises.
International legal prohibitions against mercenaries and protocols on PMSC conduct fail to address legal gaps that permit Russia an overly wide interpretation of collective defense principles.
Russia’s PMSCs are products of post-Soviet privatization of Russia’s military-industrial complex and reconsolidation of the security state under Putin. Their structures reflect the culture and hierarchy of Russian security services but also have been shaped by the country’s disjointed phases of military modernization.
State-run enterprises primarily recruited their private armies from a surplus supply of experienced special operations veterans made redundant by post-Soviet military downsizing.
Many PMSC groups are reconstituted units formed from security services such as the FSB, GRU, and VDV. They have imported wholesale the organizational structures and operational culture of those institutions.
Strategic state-run enterprises constitute a substantial part of Russian PMSCs’ client base, making them integral to informal networks that shape Putin’s domestic politics and foreign policy.
Russia uses PMSCs to pursue strategic ends in the Greater Middle East and its periphery that demonstrate continuity with earlier Kremlin strategic actions.
The Primakov Doctrine’s tenets of multipolarity and power projection on Russia’s southern flank remain a key framework for Russian grand strategy. Proxy warfare is a means to those ends.
Many of the same state-run enterprises that served as the Kremlin’s primary means of influencing proxies, partners, and allies in the Soviet era still serve today as the basis for Russian PMSC operations.
PMSCs reinforce Russia’s national security interests in areas of the world where it can ill-afford political instability that adversely impacts energy, extractives, and arms exports.
The narrative of a grand chess master, whether Putin, a Kremlin insider, or mercenary group, singlehandedly orchestrating Russia’s proxy warfare strategy is a useful fiction for the Kremlin.
Russian PMSCs did not begin with the Wagner Group or Wagner’s titular head, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Wagner narrative conceals a larger more enduring system of intertwined state and private networks.
Russian strategic aims have been shaped by the economic interests of Russian PMSCs as the privatized inheritors and overseers of much of Russia’s core exports of energy and arms.
Russian proxy warfare strategy long predates Vladimir Putin, and though his skill should not be dismissed, he is shaped and enabled by the historical dynamics that gave rise to Russia’s PMSCs.
Russia deployed PMSCs as proxies to manage escalation risks in Ukraine and Syria, but the free flow of information about their activities imposes limits and risks to Russian proxy warfare strategy.
Though opaque, the complex networks of Kremlin insiders and PMSCs are often hidden in plain sight and discoverable by the public, as well as by Russia’s strategic competitors.
The diminished plausibility of Russian deniability with regards to PMSCs places a premium upon information warfare and deception in Russian strategy, as demonstrated in Syria and Ukraine.
Growing global capacity to de-anonymize digital data poses risks for covert proxy networks, a fact that should prompt a strategic rethink for the United States and its allies.
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