20 July 2023: What are the obstacles to Russia legalising PMCs?

20 July 2023: What are the obstacles to Russia legalising PMCs?

Proposals to legalise private military companies (PMCs) in Russia frequently appear in the news, and the issue has come up again this week. This raises the question of what is stopping the Kremlin from resolving PMC’s ambiguous legal status. The most plausible answer appears to be intra-elite competition and the difficulties of deciding who gets to control a valuable resource stream.

Wagner, owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, has built a prominent public profile in recent years, and it is undoubtedly the best known of the Russian PMCs. Some of the recent developments around the group have related to efforts to provide it with a more solid legal foundation. For example, a legal entity by the name of “PMC Wagner” was registered with the Russian Unified State Registry, and a PMC Wagner Centre opened in St Petersburg (see the 26 January edition of this newsletter). Nevertheless, PMCs, unlike private security companies remain illegal in Russia. Proposals emerge on a regular basis to resolve the paradox of organisations that simultaneously do and do not exist by regularising the legal status of PMCs in Russia. Just Russia leader Sergey Mironov, for example, has advocated legalisation and generally championed Wagner in the public domain (again, see the 26 January edition).

The Kremlin has frequently alluded to its willingness to consider legalising PMCs. Just this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed with business daily Kommersant his three-hour meeting with Wagner commanders, which was first reported on 10 July but actually took place on 29 June. When asked whether Wagner would be maintained as a single military entity, Putin responded that “Wagner does not exist. We do not have a law about private military organisations.” He went on to clarify that “there is [such a] group, but legally it does not exist,” and that legalisation was “not an easy question” but should be discussed by the State Duma (1). The following day, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitriy Peskov, said that “the question of the legal status of such companies is a sufficiently complicated one that should be studied.” He shied away from promising legislative changes, but said “at least this question will be considered” (2).

What, then, are the obstacles to legalisation? Official protestations of the legal complexity of the matter notwithstanding, the main ones appear to be political, rather than legal. Of these, intra-elite competition stands out as the most persuasive. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU), and the Foreign Ministry all notionally compete for control over PMCs (5) — though the Foreign Ministry has the weakest hand in this particular game. No group appears willing to cede control — and the considerable access to resources that it brings with it (see the 6 July edition of this newsletter) — to another. This intra-elite competition has previously had a direct impact on the battlefield. In a notorious incident in Deir al-Zor, Syria, US forces carried out a strike on Wagner troops that were attacking its Kurdish allies. The Russian military appeared to have had ample opportunity to intervene, but declined to do so — giving rise to suspicions that the military command wanted to punish a group linked at the time to a different section of the elite (6). A lack of legal foundation also creates levers for controlling the PMCs themselves (4), since criminal violations can readily be found to discipline those actors that step out of line.

Other oft-mentioned motives for employing PMCs are possible but less persuasive. PMCs offer a degree of plausible deniability, allowing Russia to reduce the visibility of its foreign commitments, minimise political and reputational costs when things go awry, and avoid hostile domestic reactions at home to Russian casualties (3). Even where the plausible part of plausible deniability is tenuous, Russia’s refusal to provide PMCs with a legal foundation in domestic law provides a useful cover for this argument (4). Nevertheless, this explanation has limits: The Russian state could maintain the same level of plausible deniability by citing their separate corporate identity even if they were legal.