Russia’s Shadowy Private Armies
Introduction
Private military companies (PMCs) have become integral to Russian foreign policy over the past decade. This article explores the history, roles, controversies, and uncertain future surrounding Russia’s extensive use of PMCs to pursue strategic goals abroad while evading accountability.
History and Background
Origins
The concept of PMCs emerged after the post-Soviet turmoil of the 1990s as supplementary defense forces fortifying Russian interests internationally without official state sanction. They shielded Russian convoys, installations, and diplomats overseas while allowing oligarchs to utilize military services indirectly.
Legal Status
Russian PMCs operate in legal grey zones, as they are banned under Russian law yet serve Kremlin interests unofficially across conflict zones worldwide. Their nebulous status provides plausible deniability regarding controversial activities.
Recruitment and Organization
PMCs leverage Russian veterans, extremists, and prisoners, offering incentives like pay, pardons, or ideology. Well-armed and lavishly financed by the state or oligarchs, they comprise hundreds to thousands of expendable troops structured in fluid, versatile units suited for varied contexts from guard duty to warfare.
Major Russian PMCs
Wagner Group
Among the covert forces in Russia, the Wagner Group stands out as a formidable and notorious private military company. Led by the elusive and influential oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group has played a pivotal role in various international conflicts. Notably, the group spearheaded operations in Ukraine, Syria, Africa, and beyond, showcasing its global reach and influence.
The Wagner Group gained infamy for its ruthlessness on the battlefield and its alleged involvement in war crimes. Reports of extrajudicial killings, human rights abuses, and questionable tactics have surrounded the group’s operations. Its actions in Ukraine and Syria, in particular, have raised international concerns and condemnation.
Interestingly, the Wagner Group’s significance extends beyond its military engagements. It served as a template for the development and organization of Russia’s broader PMC apparatus. The experiences and lessons learned from Wagner’s operations contributed to the refinement and expansion of Russia’s private military capabilities.
However, the Wagner Group’s notoriety reached a critical point with its involvement in the abortive 2023 Moscow uprising. The failed uprising brought the activities of the PMC Legion, especially the Wagner Group, into sharp focus, both domestically and internationally. The events surrounding the uprising prompted increased scrutiny of Russia’s use of private military forces, raising questions about the relationship between these groups and the Russian government.
The Wagner Group, with its complex web of connections and shadowy operations, exemplifies the challenges in understanding and tracking the activities of Russian PMCs. It underscores the clandestine nature of these private military entities and the blurred lines between state-sanctioned and independent operations. As we delve deeper into the PMC Legion’s dynamics, it becomes evident that the Wagner Group is just one piece in a larger puzzle of Russia’s shadowy private armies.
Redut
Redut has emerged as a dominant player poised to potentially replace the Wagner Group as Russia’s preeminent private military contractor. In the aftermath of Wagner’s failed Moscow uprising in 2023, Redut aggressively stepped in to fill the resulting power vacuum by recruiting former Wagner veterans and commanders. This allowed Redut to rapidly expand from a relatively obscure supporting player to a mercenary force over 7,000 troops strong. Unlike the officially illegal status of contractors like Wagner, Redut also heavily recruits female candidates for combat roles along with prisoners offered pardons in exchange for service. As Wagner did before it, Redut supplies soldiers for sensitive Russian operations in conflict zones like Syria, Libya, and across Africa while avoiding direct state affiliation. By mimicking Wagner’s effective playbook of maintaining autonomy from official channels while answering shadowy Kremlin calls for deniable manpower to pursue national agendas, Redut charts a trajectory to become a ‘Wagner 2.0’ dominating the landscape of Russia’s private military industry. Its swelling ranks, insider connections, and appetite for expansion make Redut not simply the heir apparent to Wagner’s mantle, but potentially an even more influential paramilitary force entwined with Russian foreign policy aims for years to come.
Patriot
The enigmatic Patriot commands an outsized presence relative to its secrecy, largely attributed to its exclusive composition of former Russian special operations troops and intelligence personnel. Rather than opportunistic recruits, Patriot boasts seasoned military veterans shaped into a specialized task force under the tight control of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu himself. The group leverages these unparalleled human assets to conduct clandestine missions requiring a refined, professional touch beyond the skills of most Russian private military outfits. Patriot exceeds the capacities of competitors for complex intelligence gathering, unconventional warfare, counter-insurgency support, and precision strikes necessitating maximum covertness. Its activities stretch from politically unstable states in Africa such as the Central African Republic and Libya to the battle-ravaged quagmires of Syria and Yemen, having operated for years before public knowledge in the latter conflict. Despite acute postwar scrutiny surrounding Russian private military contractors, Patriot continues to undertake secretive defense initiatives for Moscow with minimal exposure. While Wagner once held the international spotlight, Patriot may wield more direct influence over events through its surgical application of highly trained personnel to shape outcomes to the Kremlin’s advantage. Its far-reaching tentacles subtly advance Russian geostrategy in hotspots around the globe even as Patriot itself lingers in the shadows.
RSOT (Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance)
Few Russian private military companies incite global outrage on par with the disreputable RSOT, the Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance group. Founded by an avowed neo-Nazi, RSOT attracts those sharing its extremist ideological bent and glorification of violence for its own sake. Since emerging to destabilize Ukraine in 2014, RSOT etched its name into infamy through heads on pikes, summary executions, systemic rape, and torture across occupied zones — all augmented by its penchant to proudly document and distribute evidence of its own war crimes. Despite renewed international demands for accountability and condemnation of RSOT’s elephantine brutality, the group continues fighting in Ukraine with apparent impunity granted by staunch Kremlin support. Unlike the treasonous Wagner Group, Moscow grasps RSOT’s autonomous narrow focus on chaos-stoking paramilitary operations makes it a useful instrument serving national military aims if left unchecked by political constraints. Disinterested in pursuing power itself, RSOT attracts fanatics taking grisly initiative to sabotage and terrify targets in furtherance of broader strategic objectives through unrestrained ultraviolence alone. Its shocking atrocities focused exclusively on perceived opponents allow Moscow to benefit from the terror and instability RSOT independently works to foment abroad. So while Wagner’s fall illustrated limits on Russian PMC autonomy, RSOT’s nest goes undisturbed; its penchant for graphic violence and disinterest in internal politics make RSOT an attack dog happily creating foreign bedlam beneficial to Moscow if simply unleashed pointed at chosen adversaries.
Russian Imperial Movement (RIM)
The radical ethnonationalist Russian Imperial Movement, abbreviated as RIM, occupies a unique space even among Russia’s assortment of controversial paramilitaries by producing reinforcements for Moscow’s proxies abroad. RIM disseminates its vision of fascist pan-Russian supremacy by training aspiring right-wing militants for combat through its ‘Partisan’ academy, open to any sharing its racist ideological platform from Ukraine to Europe to as far abroad as the United States. The white nationalist instruction provided to hundreds of recruits fanatically aligned with Moscow’s causes each year at Partisan is often their gateway to joining RIM’s armed Imperial Legion wing for real battlefield experience. The Imperial Legion consists of RIM’s most devoted alumni and took an active early role sparking conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas alongside assorted volunteers attracted from across the Russian diaspora abroad. Though RIM has since claimed distance from ongoing events in Ukraine, its lifeblood remains the mass production of radicalized Russian volunteers through Partisan eager to take up arms to ‘reclaim’ territory in service of Moscow — an end goal overtly stated by RIM leadership. Despite terrorist designations abroad, within Russia the RIM benefits from operational impunity to stoke ethnic tensions near Russian borders. Through mass ideological radicalization tacitly endorsed by a Kremlin that reaps the spoils, the RIM’s unique international ecosystem cultivating extremist ‘partisans’ comprises a potent ingredient for achieving Russia’s revanchist ambitions.
Gazprom’s PMCs
The Russian corporate behemoth Gazprom has recently opted to supplement Redut and other private contractors through cultivating its own in-house militarized security wings. Leveraging Gazprom’s sheer size as an employer of over 450,000 people, its departments Gaz Fleita (Torch) and Gaz Pota (Stream) take advantage of a massive workforce from which to draw recruits. While contractors like Wagner and Redut must fundraise and advertise to attract often underqualified volunteers, Gazprom can select from dedicated company men as candidates for global asset protection roles — generally the most experienced veterans among its ranks who routinely rotate between civilian positions and contracted paramilitary work abroad. Veterans return to careers at one of Russia’s largest and most politically connected companies between deployments, amounting to a favorable arrangement drawing lifelong loyalty to Gazprom. The increasing institutionalization of Gazprom’s private battalions, which saw combat action amid grueling urban fighting in Ukraine and appear structured to endure as permanent military organs, reflects the prioritization of resilient security forces under company direction rather than dependency on third party contractors. As defense of infrastructure abroad owned by Russian entities like Gazprom grows increasingly paramount yet hazardous amid a global backlash, the innovation of recruiting detachments from loyal employees for guard duty and combat marks a notable evolution in corporate military integration that may inspire other Russian firms.
Roles and Responsibilities
Russian private military companies overwhelmingly share the core objective of advancing national agendas in situations where the Kremlin prefers secrecy and plausible deniability over overt ties or direct attribution. To fulfill this overarching aim, PMCs perform a remarkably extensive array of sensitive duties abroad spanning roles typically handled by regular military and intelligence organs. These services range from straightforward physical security of key sites and strategic infrastructure to covert intelligence gathering, military training of separatists and proxies, occupying civilian locations for later advantage, conducting psychological and information operations to erode opposition morale, actively participating in armed conflicts alongside irregular local forces, and carrying out autonomous combat actions including raids, ambushes, and high-value target assassinations. Eclipsing standard military responsibilities, the flexible and often specialized skill sets maintained by Russian PMCs allow meticulous application towards achieving Moscow’s desired ends in a given unstable state while masking overt Russian complicity. Whereas deploying regular troops carries political implications, PMCs grant the Kremlin freedom of action — deniability permits PMCs to utilize egregiously brutal means such as systemic human rights violations fundamentally at odds with Russia’s official rhetoric. From covertly influencing foreign public opinion to overt combat gambits against adversaries both on the battlefield and in the shadows, PMCs constitute indispensable and multi-purpose tools for an expansionist Russia intent on regaining its Soviet-era global stature and geopolitical footholds.
Controversies and Issues
War Crimes
PMCs have regularly committed grievous war crimes and human rights violations with impunity across conflict zones, including summary executions, rape, torture etc. Their unaccountable violence and extremism fuels global outrage and allegations of Russian sponsorship.
Rivalries and Power Struggles
Inter-PMC rivalries have emerged surrounding lucrative defense contracts, spheres of influence, and reputational status. There are concerns that unchecked growth may precipitate violent conflicts over business that destabilize foreign partners or ignite open clashes domestically.
Conclusion
Are PMCs Worth It For Russia?
While PMCs grant Russia significant flexibility pursuing foreign policy goals, Wagner’s attempted Moscow coup highlighted unreliability while the expanding contractor ecosystem risks dangerous factionalism. Tighter regulation appears necessary, yet PMCs seem sufficiently value-adding for the Kremlin’s global ambitions to continue relying extensively upon contracted proxies to conceal its hand. Their future role likely hinges on preventing another Wagner-style mutiny.
FAQs
Q: How many PMCs does Russia use?
A: The exact number is unclear, but there are dozens operating in around 40 countries currently, and new groups continually emerge. However, groups like Wagner, Redut, and Patriot are the most prominent.
Q: Why are Russian PMCs controversial?
A: PMC atrocities, disinformation tactics, exacerbation of conflicts worldwide, and evasion of accountability for Russian strategic interests are seen as highly unethical and objectionable by global observers.
Q: How are PMCs related to the Russian military?
A: While technically private entities, most PMCs are financed by Russia and coordinate with state intelligence and security agencies. Some are even owned by officials like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. There is much overlap in goals, leadership and manpower.
Q: Could PMCs turn on Russia someday?
A: Theoretically, yes. Wagner showed that heavily armed PMCs with autonomous funding streams and ideological motivations cannot necessarily be controlled indefinitely by Moscow. Managing their growth is crucial.
Q: Will Russia expand its use of PMCs?
A: Most experts assess Russia’s dependence on contracted security forces will keep rising, especially if utilizing deniability around foreign interventions remains strategically useful. However, regulation may increase to avoid uncontrolled escalation.
