Mercenary warfare: How the Wagner Group changed modern warfare and geopolitical relations
C. O’Carroll
Mercenaries are not an invention of the 21st century, however our understanding of mercenaries is historically based on examples such as the Greek army of the ‘Mighty Ten Thousand’, the Italian ‘Condottieri’ or the German ‘Soldatenhandel’. Despite the clear anachronistic differences, the common ground between these mercenary groups was a clear intention to execute their mandate as killers in war. Today, they are corporate entities hiding their services behind the clinically legal façade of “security and logistics” providers. Their corporate structures have created a humanitarian Frankenstein, leading to an increasing commercialisation of war with the ability for their state sponsors to maintain plausible deniability. This has had a subsequent devastating effect on geopolitics.
It is impossible to discuss the recent history of mercenaries without discussing the Wagner Group. The co-founders Dmitry Utkin and Yevgeny Prigozhin in a cartoonishly evil fashion named the group in honour of Utkin’s military call sign, Wagner, not by chance also Hitler’s favourite composer as Utkin was infamous for his obsession with a Slavonic branch of Nazism. Since 2014 Wagner has operated in active warfare across 3 continents but gained its infamy by providing private security for power hungry authoritarian regimes who in exchange secured dubious contracts for the Kremlin.
In the years that followed Wagner’s establishment, Russia used it to conduct operations in Syria, its soviet era ally. Russia lent its support in a proxy fashion by supplying the Wagner Group with arms and informally deploying them to aid the Al-Assad regime. This was an indirect way to counter the bludgeoning interventionist American approach in the Syrian civil war. By 2018 Wagner actively engaged with US forces on Syrian soil. Russia’s staunch support of the Al-Assad regime in Syria was further motivated by the possibility for Prigozhin to secure control of lucrative oil and gas fields in the region for the Kremlin.
Wagner’s presence in Africa stretched across Libya, Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali. They offered military support to the Rapid Support Forces who have been found guilty of committing genocidal acts in Sudan, simultaneously using their power to fill in state military functions in Mali to aid a brutal anti insurgence campaign. Wagner’s presence in Africa is of a particularly insidious nature, as the network of shell companies it operates under secure profitable gold and diamond mining contracts, while making it virtually impossible to formally track the flow of money back to Russia. Their African operations are a perfect representation of the utterly brutal and unscrupulous nature of the Wagner Group, their clients range from rebel forces to authoritarian leaders, corporations and paramilitary groups, giving concrete meaning to the popular understanding of mercenary groups as ‘guns for hire’. Their conduct has been nothing short of inhumane, yet their poorly feigned ‘otherness’ from the Russian government has placed their conduct in an international law grey space. These deeply engrained political ties stemming from these defence contracts play out on the world stage, as particularly the CAR has been an outspoken Russian ally, consistently in voting in a pro-Russian manner in UN resolutions while also being closely aligned in diplomatic affairs.
The Wagner Group first became notorious as the unnamed ‘little green men’ who occupied Crimea in 2014. Since 2022, they have played an active role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Membership soared with over 85,000 men by 2023; to evaluate the significance of such a statistic, they outnumbered the British Army at the time. Meanwhile the world watched leaked footage of Prigozhin recruiting soldiers from Russian prison camps, which gave a sombre reality check on the composition of the group and the extraordinary power Wagner’s leader wielded within the state. Prigozhin having spent almost a decade in a Russian penal colony in his youth, knew exactly how to exploit the prison system; he dangled the prospect of 6-month deployment with Wagner with the promise of complete expungement of their crimes, no matter how heinous. This dystopian recruitment tactic was finalised to obtain expendable lives, as Wagner opted to use its frontline troops as ‘cannonfodder’ for Putin’s territorial gain campaign.
Prigozhin, known in Russia as ‘Putin’s Chef’, nefariously rose from St Peterburg’s first hot dog vendor, to star studded caterer and finally the premier military contractor responsible for exerting Russia’s neo-colonialist influence. By mid 2023 this relationship between Wagner and the Kremlin had soured, the Wagner Group was ordered to submit to conventional forces, a move designed to wield power and dismantle the formally autonomous structure. Prigozhin outwardly defied the orders, instead choosing to lead a mutiny against state incorporation and to protest treatment of Wagner troops on the Ukrainian front who had been facing consistent starvation alongside insufficient arms supply. Despite the relocation to Belarus, Prigozhin died in august 2023 in an apparent aviation incident.
The gap between expanding Russian operations and the role of mercenary groups was already closing swiftly before Prigozhin’s death, however his drastic end allowed Putin to incorporate fully the progress Wagner made under his own ubiquitous control. Practically unaltered remained the African operations which continued under the state-run Africa Corps, a Russian paramilitary organisation created to replace Wagner with a duly subservient successor. However, alongside the escalation of Russian presence in Ukraine, this marked a shift in Russia’s outward assertion of power. There can be no doubt that the role of mercenary groups has changed, they are no longer limited to the execution of their cagey defence contracts, but they are a tool to establish present day spheres of influence.
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