Key Issues
• The Russian Wagner group provides the
Kremlin with an opaque and ruthless
instrument to expand strategic political
inuence across failing or failed autocratic
regimes and an occult way to secure
troves of cash, oil, gold, or diamonds.
• The Kremlin’s dark hand avoids any form
of accountability for the involvement of
its “ofcial” army as well as “plausible
deniability”, since it operates extra-
judicially without regard for human rights
or the laws of war.
• The brazen use of the Wagner group
as a tailored murder weapon poses
intractable challenges for the international
community, its criminal prosecutors, and
its democratically controlled militaries.
• When not kept in check, private military
comp ani es – Wes ter n, Rus sian, or Chin ese
– constitute a very signicant security
threat, and an underexposed one, given
that they are barely studied at war colleges
and civilian universities, supercially
surveyed by the intelligence community,
scarcely addressed in operational
planning, and poorly regulated.
It is often said that allegiance to
the king’s ag or to his treasury
has made the difference between
patriots and mercenaries
for centuries. It is also the
critical distinction the Geneva
Conventions tried to codify with
the aim of granting “combatant
immunity” to prisoners of war,
while mercenaries – dened
as foreign ghters not part of a
regular army, hired to undertake
military operations – would
be excluded from any legal
protection.
The services Wagner Group
provides to Putin range from
close protection, intelligence
gathering, and resource
management (for commodities
such as gas, petrol, gold, and
diamonds, usually obtained as
collateral from corrupt regimes
lacking hard currency) to the
simple provision of lethal force
for so-called “stabilisation and
peacekeeping operations”. It has
also diversied into spreading
disinformation through troll
farms and the more subtle
art of inuencing elections or
referenda.
Reliance on private military actors
is certainly not new: even the
Swiss-guard-close-protection-
detail of the pope, which took
root in 1506, can be considered
as an early private security
service. Since the Middle Ages,
paramilitaries led by warlords and
mercenaries were employed by
warring parties and sometimes
by legitimate governments.
During the World Wars, private
companies were used for logistics
and transportation purposes
only. Vietnam saw the rst
application of civilian technical
specialists as maintainers of
sophisticated weapon systems.
The rst massive application of
private corporations was seen
during the Gulf War, as they
were routinely embedded in
POLICY BRIEF • 1/2020
By Patrick Wouters | 8 Nov 2022
Putin’s Private Army: How Wagner Group
Supports Russian Strategy
CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 19/2022
BRUSSELS SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE
BRUSSELS SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE
CENTRE FOR SECURITY,
DIPLOMACY AND STRATEGY
