Antonio Giustozzi and David Lewis have released a new report reflecting on the legacy and trajectory of Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner since it's notorious "march of justice" in June 2023 and the death of its owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, in August of the same year.
The report provides a good overview of key developments and reflects on the group's current trajectory. While I disagree on its characterisation of the origins of Wagner, its overall conclusion seems sound: Russia — and in particular the Ministry of Defence (MoD) — “has struggled to replace Wagner while retaining the flexibility and effectiveness of its operations on the ground.”
This, however, shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It is a product of fundamental contradictions between the advantages offered by PMCs and the current goals of the Russian state.
On the one hand, regardless of how strong the links between the Russian security apparatus and Wagner — and they were very strong — Wagner operated outside the traditional military chain of command. The war in Ukraine has highlighted a defining characteristic of the Russian military (indeed, arguably the Russian state as a whole): It is very slow at responding to new challenges and threats and struggles to adapt quickly to changing circumstances but, when it does eventually respond, it is able to bring substantial resources to bear. I think of the Russian military as akin to a stereotypical no-neck thuggish bouncer. It is not agile, particularly smart, or even necessarily the most effective in combat. But it is strong, powerful, and more than capable of inflicting pain. In other words, it may not be particularly admirable, but it shouldn’t be underestimated. By operating outside a top-down, tightly controlled command structure, PMCs have been able to compensate from some of the shortcomings of the traditional military and display the agility that would otherwise be lacking, while still benefitting from the resources of the state.
On the other hand, the current Russian political system is largely intolerant of forces and actors outside of its control. Indeed, Prigozhin’s “march of justice” demonstrates that it can have good reason to be wary of such things. The Russian state’s push to bring Wagner and the PMC universe more widely under tighter state control has therefore been predictable. As the report documents, after the “march of justice,” the Russian Ministry of Defence in particular sought to subordinate and absorb Wagner’s operations; Prigozhin’s death only accelerated these processes.
The problem is that this subordination works to negate the aforementioned advantage offered by PMCs in the first place. The tighter the control, the more limited the agility — and the more PMCs come to resemble traditional military actors. The report sees post-Prigozhin developments as in part an effort to avoid “the constraints of standard MoD regulations, bureaucracy and culture,” yet it is the MoD itself that has essentially been tasked with achieving this goal. Institutional culture shifts are hard enough to achieve when they are widely supported, never mind when they are ambiguously pursued.
That is not to say that the entire advantage offered by PMCs is lost. Even if, as a quoted source says, “there is no direct continuity between Wagner Group and the African Corps, other than…the preservation of certain traditions, symbols and the recognition of past awards,” African Corps is also not operating as a standard military deployment either. As such, the advantage is diminished but not lost. Yet the fundamental contradiction means we shouldn’t really be surprised that, post-Prigozhin, Russia has struggled to replace Wagner. It is seeking to replicate the advantages of agility without allowing the freedom of operation that produces the agility in the first place.
You can read Giustozzi and Lewis’ full report here. It’s well worth a gander.