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‘Continuing War by Other Means’: The Case
of Wagner, Russia’s Premier Private Military
Company in the Middle East
By Sergey Sukhankin
Summary
The Wagner Group is a Russian private military company that has been active in Ukraine and
Syria. In early 2018, reports of the combat deaths of over 200 Wagner personnel in eastern
Syria shed an important light on the gray zone of Russian military operations in which such
paramilitary forces are deployed. Meanwhile, Wagner’s ongoing expansion across the globe is
providing key lessons for understanding the evolution and likely transformation of this type of
organization in the future. Given Moscow’s reliance on non-linear means of warfare and the
frequent desire to maintain “plausible deniability” in its operations abroad, exploring and
analyzing the Wagner Group offers a deeper insight into Russia’s role and modus operandi in
conflicts across the world, especially when using Private Military Companies (PMC).
Introduction
The decimation of the Wagner Group PMC near Deir el-Zour (a city in eastern Syria, some
450 kilometers from Damascus) in early February 2018,
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has highlighted the role Russian
mercenaries play in the Kremlin’s foreign policy. But the broader phenomenon of Russian
PMCs, including the Wagner Group, is highly complex, as exemplified by the nervous and
incoherent official reaction to the deadly Deir el-Zour clash;
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the re-initiation of a highly
contradictory debate on the legalization of PMCs in Russia by all key
ministries/institutions/fractions (including the siloviki, or security services personnel); as well
as the alleged assassination (officially identified as a suicide), in April 2018, of Maxim
Borodin, a Russian journalist who had been investigating Wagner. The sense of confusion
surrounding the activities and roles played by Wagner in Syria was further increased by the
ensuing comments of prominent Russian conservative military officers. For instance, Colonel
General (ret.) Leonid Ivashov, currently serving as the president of the Academy for
Geopolitical Problems (and well-known for his anti-Western posture), claimed that the official
version of the deaths of Wagner fighters at Deir el-Zour was a “purposeful distortion” by the
