It’s time for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries to come in from the cold

The Kremlin would be best served by acknowledging the reality of what is happening on the ground – rather than peddling the denial, writes Borzou Daragahi

Alexander Lukashenko (right) has recently complained about Wagner mercenaries (AP)

Officially, they don’t exist. The Kremlin doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of private military contractors, which are illegal under Russian law.

Researchers and spies refer to the complex of private military contractors linked to the man described as Vladimir Putin’s “chef”, Yevgeny Prigozhin, as the “Wagner Group.”

But experts say Wagner is really an umbrella term that describes numerous small and mid-sized companies – some registered abroad – that serve as Russia’s legionnaires.

One such firm is Evro Polis, which has been linked to operations in Syria. The fighters are soldiers of fortune, recruited from the post-Soviet space, who allegedly do the Kremlin’s bidding.

Last week, the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, loudly accused Wagner operatives of interfering in his country’s affairs ahead of crucial and closely watched elections on 9 August. Minsk authorities, who are unlikely to have been surprised by their alleged presence, arrested 33 suspected Wagner operatives on accusations of scheming to manipulate the vote.

Dmitry Mezentsev, Russia’s ambassador to Belarus, claimed that the men, some of whom were identified as operatives from the 2014 Ukraine war, were civilians who “had signed work contracts” with a local firm. “In Russia, de jure, there is no such thing as a private military company,” said the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.

Whether or not the suspected operatives were up to anything nefarious, the fact that even Lukashenko, a former longtime pal of Putin, is publicly calling out Wagner is significant. Rather than issue blanket denials, the Kremlin would be better off acknowledging reality and bringing about a measure of transparency and honesty about this mysterious network. It’s time for Wagner to come in from the cold.

Russia certainly didn’t invent private military contractors. Soldiers of fortune have been a feature of wars for millennia. Since the latter half of the 20th century, they have been essential to some armed conflicts, used especially by the Americans to supplement uniformed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also hired out by other governments for specialised purposes. Since the 1970s, mercenaries, military contractors, guns for hire – whatever you call them – even have their own trade publication, the infamous Soldier of Fortune.

Russia employed what one diplomat described as “ambiguous forces” in the 2008 Georgia conflict, but they were less privately employed fighters than old-fashioned local ethnic militiamen.

They gave Putin a cloak for his intervention – the kind of cover necessary to avoid United Nations sanctions and to give Putin’s enablers in the west enough political cover to propagate Kremlin talking points.

Putin may also believe the air of mystery surrounding the mercenaries gives them an invincible air. Their track record is spotty at best, however; they have repeatedly failed, and have been accused of human-rights violations.

Plausible deniability has always been a benefit of such operatives, although the sense among analysts is that the Kremlin’s influence has vacillated over the years, from being arm’s length to appearing more solid.

Wagner fighters first emerged during the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, playing a role in the widely condemned annexation of Crimea and the downing of a Ukrainian military transport plane, according to officials in Kiev.

Russian mercenaries next emerged on the battlefields of Syria, where they were doing the bidding of the Kremlin by defending the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. Scores were killed and wounded during a 2018 confrontation with the US in a scramble for control of oil fields near Deir ez-Zor. “It was the US counter-strike in Deir ez-Zor that really showed how useless Wagner was in a real battle,” said one former Western diplomat. “There was zero response by the Russians.”

A UN report released in May accused Russia of deploying hundreds of mercenaries to Libya in support of commander Khalifa Haftar in his failing quest to conquer the country. Like in Syria, the Kremlin can claim it is not able to control what its ex-soldiers do in the north African country. This year, however, the US published satellite images showing Russia deploying advanced fighter jets in support of the fighters. So much for plausible deniability.

Russian mercenaries have also emerged in war-torn stretches of Africa, including Central African Republic, where three Russian journalists researching the alleged presence of Wagner were murdered under mysterious circumstances. The Russian ministry of foreign affairs asserted that the men died in an armed robbery.

Russian mercenaries were used to prop up the defeated tyrannical regime of Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir, with Ukrainian security services accusing them of helping to violently suppress ultimately successful anti-government protests. They reportedly showed up in Madagascar, where Russia tried to manipulate elections in 2018, and in Mozambique to fight against Islamist militants.

Hundreds were reportedly deployed to Venezuela in 2019 to help defend the government of Nicolas Maduro.

In many of the deployments, the mercenaries are allegedly under contracts to protect or exploit mineral, oil, or energy resources on terms that are favourable to the Kremlin.

But Russian private military contractors operate under no regulatory framework and without even a minimum of transparency, unlike similar US enterprises, which are subject to local, state and federal registration and licensing requirements as well as export controls.

In order for Russia to adopt similar regulations, it would have to admit that such firms exist.

Doing so would allow Russian diplomats and Kremlin officials to stop humiliating themselves by constantly peddling the same line about the mercenaries.

When Russian officials say Wagner doesn’t exist, no one outside a coterie of morally and intellectually bankrupt pro-Kremlin enablers in western academia and journalism believes them. Few in Russia really believe them either; some of the best reporting on the mercenaries is by Russian media.

In any case, plausible deniability is overrated at a time when everyone has a smartphone that can be used to film and broadcast fighters – that officially don’t exist – barrelling down the highway.

Some countries have given up on the clandestine approach, without too much of a cost. Turkey, for example, intervened forcefully and with relative transparency in both Syria and Libya. It paid little if any diplomatic price for its overt interventions.

In fact, Ankara has drawn the praise of Washington for taking on Russian mercenaries about which the Kremlin says, “There is no such thing.”