Putin, Prigozhin, and the Perils of Privatizing Political Violence via Proxy
Image: Sonia Dauer on Unsplash
Published August 30, 2023
By Ibrahim Al-Marashi
Yevgeny Prigozhin, commander of Russia’s Evro Polis, commonly referred to as “Wagner,” died in a plane crash on August 23 on a flight leaving Moscow. His death represents the ultimate culmination of the events that began in June with the Wagner offensive against the Russian capital.
The invasion of Ukraine, beginning with the seizure of Crimea in 2014, led to a growing Russian dependency on private military companies (PMCs), often referred to as “mercenaries.” The events of 2023 demonstrate how deploying mercenaries in the 21st century can result in “blowback.”
To modify the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s oft quoted phrase, “war is politics by other means,” since the 2003 Iraq War, PMCs emerged as an army by other means for the US, and later Russia. For the American and Russian states, PMCs served as convenient means of proxy warfare by privatizing political violence.
During the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia most likely learned the value of “little green men,” soldiers with no insignia, who could achieve a military aim for the state while granting it plausible deniability.
Russia denied that Wagner was deployed in Syria the following year to bolster its leader Bashar Asad during its civil war and then to Libya, to fight for renegade General Khalifa Haftar as he tried to seize the capital Tripoli. It aided the Ukrainian invasion of 2022, making the war easier for the Kremlin to take the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut in 2023 after a10-month long campaign.
The advantage of PMCs is experience. Wagner was primarily made up of Russian soldiers from the two wars in Chechnya, later augmenting its ranks with released convicts who could serve as cannon fodder.
Yet the overreliance on PMCs ultimately backfired for Putin. Deploying Wagner might have provided Putin the ease of plausible deniability in the past, but what one cannot deny now is that the tactic proved to be one of the greatest challenges to his grip on power.
Wagner began its offensive in June with a critique of the Russian Ministry of Defense, arguing that their forces were used as cannon fodder and not given proper weapons. The June Wagner offensive not only signalled a weakening of Russian resolve during the Ukraine war, but the potential to undermine Putin’s regime survival itself.
There has always been talk of the specter of a palace coup for Putin, from his constituencies in the inner core of the regime and the military, yet it has also been argued that Putin coup-proofed his regime, by creating rival military units to balance each other, such as Wagner and the regular armed forces. Yet relying on Wagner ultimately made Putin look weak, not just to the international community, but a more critical constituency, the regime insiders.
In Peter Pomerantsev’s book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, he writes of Russia’s post-truth dissimulation of political facts. Prigozhin’s death will be reported as an accident in Russian state-controlled media. Nevertheless, the death of Prigozhin ultimately signals to the insiders the fate of anyone who crosses him, serving as a means of restoring Putin’s authority. The damage to Putin from the Wagner offensive has been undone, for now. Putin discovered the perils of privatizing violence via proxy and has sought to integrate Wagner into its regular forces, but not entirely.
Putin might have learned his lesson that no person can be entirely trusted, he has not done away with Wagner or other PMCs. There is still a network of other Russian PMCs tied to other oligarchs and state-owned oil companies, providing protective services. They will provide the benefits for Moscow that Wagner did, but have learned the dangers of challenging Putin’s rule.
While the Kremlin removed Wagner’s forces from Russian territory and the battlefield in Ukraine, it still is essential for its lucrative foreign operations. In Mali, Sudan, and Central African Republic, Wagner and its front companies are involved in oil and gas extraction and gold and diamonds mining, which ensure considerable financial flows to Moscow, and help it brunt the impact of sanctions. This extractive network is not the purview of the Russian military. Not only Russian PMCs emerged as an army by other means for Russia, but as an economic system as well.
______________________________
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an Associate Professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos and an advisory board member of the International Security and Conflict Resolution program at San Diego State University.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
