Wagner: Private military trend Russia borrowed from West's playbook

Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi, June 27

One can’t blame the adversary for borrowing from your playbook. This is what the Russian authorities did by aping the West and creating private military contractors (PMC) like Wagner, Cossack Tigers, Top Rent, Moran Security and many more.

Dispute settlement

Having seen American, French and British PMCs operate in Africa, the Russians also permitted PMCs for providing a host of services ranging from ship escort, guarding of mineral mines and embassies, close quarter protection and even settling a dispute or two with a heavy show of arms.

Private armed contractors have existed since times of feudalism but the trend truly appeared in the 60s with India-born mercenary Mad Mike Hoare, who launched several coups, and when a US private military company (PMC) trained 70,000 loyalists of Al-Saud to ensure the clan’s domination over the Arabian Peninsula. French contractors at the time fought with and trained disgruntled locals against a pro-Soviet government in Angola.

The Russians began watching with interest after the trend multiplied in the recent decades. The western average voter turned skeptical about the nation’s forces fighting for little-known interests thousands of miles away. Yet both the US and Europe needed to militarily defend their national interests in some far corners of the world. And thus were born modern day PMCs. The Gulf war and the Afghanistan invasion in the early 2000s in which US PMC Blackwater (now renamed Academi) played a stellar role actually made the Russians sit up and start replicating the Western model of sending PMCs in wars they didn’t want to officially get involved in.

Wagner, having been involved in Syria as well as eastern Ukraine since 2013, also branched out to the Dark Continent; even displacing the French forces in guarding Mali’s uranium processing centres.

The involvement of Russian PMCs remained obscure till an intrepid journalist found out that the Kremlin in 2016 bestowed a military honour to former paratrooper Dmitry Utkin, who was then said to be head of an unregistered PMC called ChVK Wagner. Its soldiers were used as elite infantry in fighting ISIS in Syria. Somewhere along the way, Prighozin took over the mantle as its chief. For those wondering about the future of Wagner after its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny, none can operate or thrive out of the state’s umbrella. Technically, mercenaries are punishable under Article 359 of the Russian criminal law.