Abstract

In this episode, Ms Candace Rondeaux, an expert on international security apparatuses, breaks down the purpose, demographic and long-term implications of Russian private military companies in the international and domestic arena.

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Full Transcript:

Ameem Lutfi: Welcome to the 10th episode of the Middle East Institute’s podcast series Boots off the Ground: Security in Transition from the Middle East and Beyond.

In the series, we look at the future of warfare, which will see uniformed soldiers, or “boots on the ground”, being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapons systems, and cyber weapons.

My name is Ameem Lutfi, and I will be the co-host for the series, along with my colleague, Alessandro Arduino. We’re very glad to have with us today Candace Rondeaux, a Professor of Practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and a senior fellow with the Center on the Future of War.

Professor Rondeaux is an expert on private military companies who has written extensively on Russian private militias and the footprint of hybrid warfare. An expert on international security apparatus, she’s previously served as a senior programme officer at the US Institute of Peace and as a strategic adviser to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

Alessandro Arduino: Professor Rondeaux, thank you very much for joining us today. In our previous podcasts, we have been discussing the role of private security and private militias from a Western point of view, and also from a Chinese point of view, including interviewing a leading Chinese private security company.

But following today’s podcast, we want to start to look more into the Russian setting of private security and private military companies. Following this podcast, we will have an interview with a well-known Russian private security company that specialises in maritime security, but we would love to start this podcast by looking especially at your very well received publication on the Wagner Group.

My first question is: Can we consider the Wagner Group a private military company, or is it just a hybrid tool for Moscow’s foreign policy, in the vein of the Little Green Men?

Candace Rondeaux: So, first thank you for having me. It’s great to be here talking with you about this really interesting and unique time in the history of military evolution, especially for Russia.

You asked the question about where Russian private military security contracting fits into Russia’s overall military posture. On the surface, the relationship may seem complicated to those who are less familiar with the history of the evolution of the Russian military over the last 30 years.

I think one thing that’s important to note is that a lot of analysts have been absent from that conversation for a long time, because the focus of the Middle East has been so drawn to the question of terrorism, ISIS and other groups (like Al-Qaeda) operating in the region.

Having said all that, Russian military private contractors evolved out of two big moments in Russian military history, and also Russian history generally, in the recent past. The first, obviously, is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which precipitated a huge shift in the way the state controlled aspects of the military-industrial complex.

So what was once a kind of monolithic/semi-monolithic enterprise began to be reorganised, first in the 1990s – in a very chaotic manner – and then progressively, after Vladimir Putin became president and began to lead the country in a new direction, there was a more concerted effort to reorganise along the lines of a military force that would mirror the United States and other Western militaries in that it had a logistical arm that could provide support for critical infrastructure.

So, for instance, we know that early on, one of the first experiments with Russian private military contractors was in Iraq, where there was already an existing relationship between Russia and Iraq. And when the war began in 2003, there were Russians on the ground, supporting the building of the electrical grid and pipelines.

So on the one hand, this has been a phenomenon that’s been around for a long time. But what has changed?

This is sort of where the Little Green Men bit comes in, starting around 2012-2013, as another phase of military reform began. There was a debate in the Kremlin about developing Special Forces in a different way and also creating the capacity to deploy in a much more manoeuvrable way. So, existing organisations that had already begun working in primarily maritime military security began to prepare for different types of operations, and Ukraine was the first instance where we saw them deployed, in small, manoeuvrable troop formats – small reconnaissance battalions that would then break down.

It’s sort of, you know, hit-and-run deep behind the lines and primarily offensive scout operations. And that’s I think what everybody is surprised by when you talk about the Wagner Group or private military security contracting today.

Ameem Lutfi: Thank you for that very detailed answer.

To follow up, one of the questions that we’ve raised, even when we we’ve talked to Chinese private security companies, was the level of interaction between them and Beijing.

So, in case of the PMCs in Russia, what kind of control does the Kremlin have? Is it fair to say that their basic role is to give the Russian state plausible deniability?

Candace Rondeaux: Nothing is mutually exclusive in the world of Russian military affairs. You can both desire to have plausible deniability, and want other capabilities.

And I think what we can say about Russian PMCs is they certainly serve an important purpose in terms of logistical support for military technical agreements and contracts that exist with various countries that Russia deals with in Africa and the Middle East.

The primary relationship is really not at arm’s length at all. It’s quite close: State-run enterprises that work on these contracts essentially control the movements the mission, the operational objectives of the military contractors who are deployed to places like Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

At the same time, the true evolution of the deniability part began in Ukraine, but really was accelerated in Syria, for two reasons. First, Russia was very clear, Putin was very clear, and (Foreign Minister Sergey) Lavrov was very clear, from the outset of the Syrian engagement, that they would continue to fulfil their contracts and obligations with the Assad regime, despite the fact that the UN was looking at sanctions and the US was already beginning to call very heavily for sanctions.

In essence, Russia told the world, “we don’t give a damn about your sanctions, we’re going to deliver not only because we care about Assad, but because we care about the money we might lose”. And that’s really when we began hearing the story about how the Wagner Group began to emerge in a much more forceful way.

It was the need to do an end run around sanctions against Syria, but then progressively, once it seemed like it was something that would work out well, which it did, at least in the first couple of years in Syria, this model was transferred to Libya, to Sudan.

The difference is that the reason Russia wanted plausible deniability in Ukraine, was because these small-scale scout groups were essentially assassinating troublesome separatists and trying to get them back under control during the Minsk process.

In Syria, the mission progressively became plausible deniability for offensive operations to seize territory where Russia had oil and gas interests. It was the case for Libya as well.

So while the reasons for plausible deniability evolved, generally speaking, it wasn’t just because they didn’t want to escalate kinetically, it was also because they were concerned about the repercussions of potential further sanctions for dealing with other sanctioned actors.

Alessandro Arduino: In this respect, if we are looking now from a legal standpoint, one of the things that sets apart Chinese private security from its Western rivals is that they operate under Chinese law, which forbids citizens from carry weapons.

Russia has a similar set of laws that bar mercenary activity and there was a case, if I recall correctly, a while ago where some Russian contractors returning from Syria were detained by the FSB upon returning to Russia.

But now, if we just look at the news, most are still operating, from Libya to Central Africa. What kind of legal loophole, in your opinion, makes this possible?

Candice Rondeaux: The conversation about the legalisation of private military security contractors has been going on in the State Duma probably for about a decade now, maybe even longer.

I think in talking to some of the Russian contractors out there, they’ll probably tell you that anti-piracy measures and programmes during the late 1990s triggered that conversation. As Russia’s navigational lines were imperiled in Sudan, Somalia, and off the Red Sea coast, this question of legalising private military contractors began.

So first it’s important to understand that, yes, there’s a prohibition under Russian law. But there’s also a debate about the legality, and I think increasingly – as more news comes out, as more casualties pile up, or as more embarrassments pile up – the debate becomes progressively more heated, though obviously it’s difficult to have a shift in policy take place quickly under the current regime.

At the same time, Russia is maybe where South Africa was way back in the day in the 1970s/late 1960s, with its thinking on the legalities and employing a sort of “lawfare” by denying the contractual relationship between state-run enterprises and the men who primarily get deployed out to Syria or Libya or elsewhere.

In reality, the problem isn’t necessarily just Russia’s. It’s also that international law has not kept up with the times. Under the Geneva Convention’s Articles One and Two, there are different definitions, but essentially, they define mercenary behaviour and activity as doing things for profit, for financial gain. But all of that is attributed to an individual who makes the decision to pick up arms.

That’s not today’s world. Today, you’ve got a pretty professionalised military force out there in many different countries. In China, as in Russia, the state runs the show and organisations that want to do this kind of work are working for it.

And it’s the state and state-run enterprises where the attribution really should lie, and I think that’s what has to change now with international law. But it’ll be a while before the law really catches up with reality.

Ameem Lutfi: If we could move the discussion from the legal side to perhaps the social side, I want to ask about the make-up of the Russian private military companies, because when we were talking about the US and the UK, they are based on private security and military companies, especially the ones in deployed in the Middle East. People mentioned about how they employed a wide array of international contractors and people from third countries in Latin America, Nepal, etc.

But when we’re talking about the Chinese, I said they mainly hire Chinese nationals. What is the case with Russian private military and security companies? And I do not refer only to the Wagner Group, but you know, more broadly, are there non-Russians that get hired?

And even within the Russian contingent, where do the majority of the people come from? Are they retired military or police officers? What kind of connections do they have?

Candace Rondeaux: That is such a great question.

We’ve looked very closely, just at the social media accounts of individuals who say that they either work for Wagner, or are interested in military security contracting, and say that they have at some point or another worked in the industry. Social media can be tough as an indicator, but we found some trends we thought were interesting. So what we noticed, looking at just 20,000 individuals, is the vast majority of them came from Russia. In terms of cities, many were from St Petersburg, or the St Petersburg region, as well as the Moscow region.

Overall, many seem to have some sort of allegiance and prior military service in the Southern and Western Military Districts of Russia. Not exclusively, but that was one of the predominant markers that we saw when we were looking at the social media footprint of individuals who made a claim to be soldiers of fortune.

That makes sense for lots of reasons. One, we know that those are the operational headquarters for deploying to the Middle East, or what’s called the “near abroad”: The Black Sea region, and the Middle East and North Africa.

So logistically, it makes sense that you would try and draw these people. We also know that, historically, those are the areas where there’s been a big draw for counter-terrorism operations in places like Chechnya, Tajikistan, and even Afghanistan, way, way, way back in the day.

So, from a line of control, or a sort of “lines and legacies” perspective, all that makes sense. But there are a lot of individuals drawn from outside Russia, from the places you would expect: Russian-speaking parts of the world. So we saw a lot from Ukraine, quite a few from Kazakhstan, a small smattering from Kyrgyzstan, a significant amount from Serbia and, interestingly, also Germany.

But, you know, who knows what that’s about. Moldova is another place. So, while Russians are the majority, I’d say the second largest provider, as far as we can tell, is Ukraine, and then, progressively, Kazakhstan and some of the other smaller Russian-speaking post-Soviet republics.

Alessandro Arduino: I would like to move away from the convention, our biases, really, that in the strategic domain, Russians play chess, the Chinese play weiqi, and the Americans, well, play American football.

In my personal opinion, and especially in the Middle East, the Russian modus operandi closely follows a previous strategic approach that is part of the Primakov Doctrine. What’s your opinion on the matter?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think there’s been absolutely an overblown case made for the Gerasimov Doctrine.

There’s been a lot of debate about that amongst Russian specialists, and ultimately, I think was (academic) Mark Galleotti who was the first coined the phrase “the Gerasimov doctrine”, and he sort of rejected that whole idea when he realised he’d created this “Frankenstein” that outside folks who maybe are not as specialised in Russian affairs kind of mistook and ran away with.

There is much greater common continuity, as you say, with the Primakov Doctrine. What is that exactly?

We’re talking about the role of the first big, towering foreign minister from Soviet times. A very influential figure, Yevgeny Primakov, who is an Arabist by training, had been a journalist. He lived and worked in the Middle East, knew Syria like the back of his hand, knew Libya like the back of his hand, understood Egypt.

He really was an eyewitness to all of the major events that took place the 1960s, in particular during the post-colonial period.

And that very formative experience is something that he brought with him to foreign affairs, but he also happened to be the head of KGB at various junctures, and was the deputy president and was going to be considered to be the president at some point to replace Boris Yeltsin. Ultimately it was Putin who took Yeltsin’s place, and that was often thought of as Primakov’s last gift to Putin, to push him forward as his acolyte. There’s a lot of debate about that too.

But nonetheless, what’s the principle that doctrine? It is that Russia must always have influence and the ability to navigate the waters of its near abroad, so that’s the Black Sea region and the eastern Mediterranean, and it must always have a path through those navigational waters to the Far East.

That lesson is taken from the great Russo–Japanese War of 1905, in which Russia was defeated primarily because it didn’t have that passageway. It couldn’t deploy quickly and couldn’t find ways to manoeuvre along the seas.

Increasingly, in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, these navigational channels, as for all great powers, are critical to trade and to the stability of the Russian economy. Primakov’s view was that cultivating leaders in the Middle East was objective number one in ensuring Russia’s military stability and its economic survival.

Ameem Lutfi: To continue this discussion about perception, when we were earlier talking to speakers from ISOA (International Stability Operations Association), IPOCA, or any in the Chinese industry, there is an indication that the industry suffers from a Hollywood-biased caricature of the mercenary as a kind of “merchants of debt”.

Is there a similar portrayal of private military companies in Russian media? And in your opinion, is there a mismatch between how they’re perceived and what they actually do on the ground?

Candace Rondeaux: That’s a very interesting question, you know.

In terms of mainstream media, what we have seen since the emergence of the mythology around the Wagner Group is one increasing acknowledgment of the phenomenon which had initially been denied.

So in the news, you see stories of men who had fought for the Wagner Group and then came home from Syria wounded and trying to recover, maybe in the magazines, and on TV. There is a glorification of that stereotype, you know, the tough guys who are out there, living their wildest dreams, living their most beautiful, bachelor boy army lives, essentially.

And there’s a lot of nostalgia for the time when the Spetsnaz were at their strongest, during World War Two, which is when they first emerged. There’s a lot of nostalgia for Chechnya, which you see a lot of in social media.

Unfortunately, you know, there’s a lot of deep, what I think are signs of deep post-traumatic stress disorder in this cohort of military actors, a kind of obsession with very graphic violence.

That not to say that it doesn’t exist elsewhere, but there are a number of signs, where you see a kind of glorification of very graphic violence, trophy violence or performed violence, that I think is definitely disturbing.

Alessandro Arduino: One stereotype is that Russian contractors are always depicted as a blunt instrument that always relies on an excessive amount of force.

But we are witnessing from all over the world, a trend among private security and private military companies that are moving toward cyberspace, so called cyber-mercenaries.

The United Nations is looking just now at the role of cyber-mercenaries in a conflict area and in non-conflict areas among non-state actors, but for state purposes and agendas.

In this respect, cyber mercenaries showcase a sophisticated kind of service, and Russian hacker groups are well known for operating independently for profit, nationalistic aims, or even as covert operators for the GRU or other government agencies.

So looking at this trend, do you see in the near future Russian private military companies offering this kind of cyber security service?

Candace Rondeaux: So that’s the “hybrid part”. People are very confused about what is the “hybrid part”. The “hybrid part” is not that some forces are plausibly deniable, that’s not the hybrid part.

The “hybrid part” is that you do have situations where there’s a pairing of what we call political technologists, who are political scientists, with sociologists, anthropologists and social scientists with some training and understanding  of the culture and milieu of politics on the ground in given regions.

So we saw that definitely in the case of Libya, of course, the most famous case being Maxim Shugaley, the St Petersburg sociologist who was forward deployed before a major offensive involving some Russian mercenaries just outside of Tripoli in 2019.

Ostensibly, he was just there to do some survey work. In reality, it seems like he was also there to do some forward operating for social media-influenced campaigns, you know, psychological operations to sort of soften the population, and understand what kind of messages were going to work in the lead up to and probably in the middle of this offensive that was going to be paired with Wagner and Khalifa Haftar. He was detained and is still in prison.

That’s just one of many examples. I don’t think that the Wagner Group is alone in this kind of packaging and pairing of kinetic services, or just critical protection services, along with some forward social media strategic communications and messaging in influence operations. I think that’s very common, actually.

What is I think increasingly worrying is this trend toward pairing those types of political technology services with your standard military protection and/or forward operations services with attacks on critical infrastructure in advance of or in the middle of an operation.

That’s some dangerous stuff, again because there isn’t a lot of transparency, a lot of ownership. In fact, a strategy that is meant to actually manage escalation risks only increases it because you cannot attribute, particularly when the target is a Western target, let’s say in Europe or the United States. There’s a temptation, I think, on the other side to have it as well.

I think there’s a real danger that this three-fold package ultimately is a strategy. It’s a recipe for escalation, instead of managing escalation.

Ameem Lutfi: About escalating conflict, if I could get you to speak on a specific incident that made the headlines in a lot of places: The Battle of Khasham, where a group of Russian soldiers, specially classified as volunteers, came directly into the American military’s line of fire. The incident raises an important problem of international coordination between private militaries.

Do you think such problems will necessarily plague private militaries in the future? How do you tell another international contingent about what you’re going to be doing? Is there a better way of coordination?

Candace Rodeaux: That’s an interesting scenario that happened in 2018 in Syria. We had a clash of Russian mercenary forces on the ground near   ConocoPhillips’ gas plant.

This was a major prize that everybody was trying to get after, basically. It actually had been contested throughout the Syrian civil war, right up to the point where this clash occurred, in February 2018.

Interestingly, and a lot of people don’t know this, but there was actually a coordinated effort between the United States and Russia that had been going on for a good nine months to try and ensure that this kind of incident didn’t happen. So there was a what was called a US-Russian deconstruction cell that operated primarily out of Kuwait with some coordination forward in Khmeimim, the Syrian headquarters for the Russian forces.

So for months, while Russian and US forces were deployed on the ground chasing ISIS primarily out of Mosul or out of North Eastern Syria, there had been this daily conversation going on.

My understanding is that, in fact, there were a number of attacks, or probing operations, along what was a dividing line along the Euphrates River, that the Russians and the Americans had agreed on, and the Russians kept coming out of the box, as it was described to me.

They kept probing the edge because they were keen on pushing the Americans completely out of Syria.

And instead of having the regular Russian military do this, which, of course, would have been an extremely escalatory move, they had contractors doing it. Just months before the February 18^th 2018 incident, in September 2017, there was an incident that resulted in casualties, in this case, Syrians on the American side.

But that was a rare instance. In Libya, there is no deconfliction cell. Right now there are no American troops on the ground, but you can see that this lack of communication, coordination, or at least acknowledgement of private military security contractor operations on the ground can be quite dangerous and can escalate things, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen, I think in the Libyan case, where there is no failsafe, no means to mediate, basically.

So to answer your question, yes, that would be great. But I don’t know how you would incentivise that for militaries that are working with private contractors.

Alessandro Arduino: I mean, it’s quite a worrisome, as you mentioned, this recipe for escalation.

But without focusing too much on the Wagner Group, there is still a plethora of Russian private security and private militaries that operate abroad, but it is quite peculiar. You mentioned that there are also fake Russian private security companies, and they are a part of Russia’s disinformation campaign. “Dezinformatsiya” is a typical Russian word, so this is not unexpected, but could you comment?

Candace Rondeaux: Right. So part of the diversion here is who’s doing what, right?

And we’ve seen all kinds of different stories popping up, sometimes on social media, sometimes on popular, often Ukrainian, channels online, bloggers on different channels that are of interest, primarily to military watchers. They’ll cite somebody like the Patriot Group. There are a lot of different groups out there. But it’s not right to categorise them as 20 different “Blackwaters”.

It’s not 20 different “Blackwaters”, it’s 20 different contingents for one state- run enterprise in one particular region.

Yes, there’s a lot of diversionary disinformation about, you know, who is doing what, and nobody understands exactly how all this works. In fact, the Wagner Group itself is a “disinformational fiction”.

It primarily refers to legacy operations for particular companies. I think I won’t get too much into that, except to say the better ones that are well known, like Rosneft, Techbourn export, Rosoboronexport, STG, you know, big companies that operate in heavy industries that need to have critical protection for their service delivery.

Some operate in a more offensive orientation, but that’s very area-dependent. The RSB Group which, you know, I think you may end up talking to, is very well known. They mostly do maritime work, but the reality is they are also in Libya. Everybody knows that.

They’re in Libya, they had been working on de-mining. Some people say they’re mining while they’re de-mining. So yes, there is a lot of fiction at play, and it’s quite purposeful. Again, it’s about shrouding – not necessarily just the operational piece, although that’s important, but it’s really about the evasion of sanctions.

It’s really about the fact that the business model today for Russia, the Russian military and the contracting process is to work with dictators and authoritarians who have come under some sort of sanction, are no longer popular, or there’s some concern about their human rights record.

Ameem Lutfi: You’ve mentioned Libya and Sudan, if we could go just a bit more south.

There’s news coming out that Russian private military companies or security companies are involved in Sub-Saharan Africa as well, to certain extent.

How would you compare their roles in these areas to what we see in, let’s say, Libya or Syria? Are they similar in terms of their practice? Their demographics? Their relationship to the whole state, or even to the home government?

Or do you think that the different contexts where it’s not an active security risk environment, it’s a different kind of risk at least. Does that fundamentally change how they look, or how they work?

Candace Rondeaux: It’s hard to kind of piece together the Africa story, except one thing that’s really important to note is that there’s kind of a connection between Libya, Sudan and the Central African Republic. So geographically, they are obviously proximate to each other. There’s also Chad, which is slightly in the mix.

What do all of those countries have in common? Well, big mining resources and, importantly, gold is a key resource that is of critical concern for Russia. Why is that we wonder?

Well, Russia has been under sanctions from the United States, the EU and Ukraine for the better part of almost a decade now, and even before that there were a number of individuals and companies that were also scrutinised for their activities and are under sanction.

Those sanctions have been very costly, and Russia has adopted a new strategy to try and do what it can to balance out the fact that it cannot draw in hard currencies like the dollar, and it’s losing its reserve currency.

And so gold is the new reserve. A big motivation for a lot of what we’re seeing is, well, those are places where gold can be mined, as well as other precious metals that are useful and not as fungible as the dollar is today in the Russian Federation.

So typically, the pattern is, yes, in sub-Saharan Africa, the attachment contractually is usually to some sort of mining enterprise or some sort of oil and gas enterprise. Not exclusively, but generally.

So unlike the Chinese, where there’s a lot of road-building and dam-building going on, the primary industry attachment is around natural resource extraction.

There may be some exceptions here. One obviously very big one is, of course, arms delivery. So again, where there’s a military technical agreement state to state, Russia to Central African Republic, where Russia actually gained an exception to sell a bunch of AK-47s and small arms essentially to CAR, despite the fact there’s a UN provision for sanctions, it did get a waiver, and since then, has tried to expand its footprint there and has been successful. In Mozambique and Madagascar, it’s the same deal – oil and gas.

So that’s the primary relationship, and that’s who is drawn to that work: Essentially people who have experience and training, you know, local contractors, to guard places of importance.

Alessandro Arduino: Let’s move to Singapore.

Singapore is a very attractive port and one of the leading logistics hubs in South-east Asia, and most of our previous guests foresee an increasing role for it, especially in the insurance sector related to kidnapping for ransom and anti-piracy. There is also a possibility for Singapore to act as a regulatory hub for the Asian private security market. How do you see this in terms of Russian companies, is there competition?

Candace Rondeaux: Very good question. Actually, you know, I think people have not examined the question of insurance and re-insurance services, and how they fit into the growth of the Russian military security industry.

My understanding is actually that there are a number of semi-reputable companies, Russian, that have registration in Singapore because they know that they need to be there in order to supply their services to insurers who are in the business of providing for or underwriting essentially big missions and complicated situations in complicated places. So actually, there’s probably more synergy between Singapore and Russia than there is competition. But again, I think that bears exploring.

Ameem Lutfi: Okay, thank you for that illuminating talk. I want to end by asking you a question that we’ve been asking all of our guests and that is: What does the future of warfare and security management in a complex environment look like in, let’s say, the coming 30 years? Or see if you can answer it specifically while talking about Russian, private security sector and the military industrial complex, more broadly.

Candace Rondeaux: 30 years is a long time. So maybe I’ll try and break it down into bits and pieces. Russia’s private security industry faces a couple of challenges over the next five, maybe 10 years.

The more we come to know and understand about the business model, who is doing what, how the organisations operate, what’s the command structure, etc., the more difficult it becomes for Russia to deny it has an interest in the operations of Russian private military security contractors abroad, or that there’s even a connection between the state and these operators on the ground.

I think that’s already beginning to happen, and that’s a real challenge. Why is that a challenge? Because we just saw the EU, for instance, began to impose sanctions on one of the alleged financiers of Russian private military security contractors for the first time. After years of the United States haranguing the EU, finally, it has become clear that something has to be done. So there’s a policy concern for Russia.

And whether or not it can continue to operate with this level of transparency and not incur damage over the long term, I think the answer is, there will be damage, and it will be difficult.

There will also be questions about human rights abuses, and that is not going to go away. And, in fact, I think what we’re going to find, as we see with the MH17 case, the shutdown over Ukraine of the Malaysian jetliner back in

2014, you already have civil litigation. This is a concern for Russia because what we know is that it wasn’t just a group of random separatists on the ground in Ukraine.

There were probably forward operators who are on contract for Russian state enterprises in the region at that time. I think we’re going to see more and more civil litigation from individuals who are impacted by Russian military operations where there’s a contracted element.

From a global affairs perspective, there is a risk also that other countries look at Russia’s model and say “why don’t we do that?”

Even in the United States, you might find people in the Pentagon saying “well, why can’t we do that?” and there are reasons you can’t because of the laws of war, at least as the US administers them, so we don’t allow that.

Also, it really causes political challenges in a democracy. But increasingly, I think what you’re going to see is it could change the tempo of what would be small-bore civil wars or insurgencies and escalate them very quickly beyond borders, particularly in Africa. I think there’s a deep concern about Russia’s impact on Africa, and it can be quite deleterious if it’s not brought under control.

Alessandro Arduino: Thank you very much, Professor Rondeaux for joining us today.

It has been very insightful and the best way to kick start our podcast, looking at the Russian private military influence from the Middle East and beyond.

I would like to conclude this podcast by thanking all our listeners.