Abstract

In this episode, Dr Molly Dunigan will discuss how Russia’s use of mercenaries exposes what may be critical vulnerabilities in the Russian will to fight and Russian state power.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Alessandro Arduino]: Welcome to the 25th episode of the National University of Singapore Middle East Institute podcast series Boots off the Ground: Security in Transition from the Middle East and Beyond. In this 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. I am Alessandro Arduino, your host for this podcast.

We are thrilled to have with us today Dr Molly Dunigan, acting associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND Corporation and  a senior political scientist there as well. She is also a senior lecturer in Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Politics and Strategy. Her research encompasses military privatisation, outsourcing, operational contract support, strategic competition, civil–military relations, civilian deployment, counterinsurgency and maritime security. She is a recipient of numerous awards and the author of Victory for Hire: Private Security Companies’ Impact on Military Effectiveness and The Markets for Force: Privatisation of Security Across World Regions. Both publications have been a beacon of light in my own research on the shady evolution of private military and security companies.

In a previous Boots Off the Ground episode, we discussed with Dr Tor Bukkvall the role of mercenaries as a global placeholder for Russia geopolitical ambition. I have to admit that it was quite emotional as we started recording just a few hours after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Almost two months have passed since the Russian tanks began to flood Ukraine and we have witnessed numerous reports on alleged Wagner mercenaries and 16,000 to 40,000 Syrian mercenaries getting ready to fight for Russia. Molly, what’s your take on this statement?

[Molly Dunigan]: Thank you so much, Alessandro for having me here today.

One thing I want to emphasise is that data on this topic is always notoriously difficult to come by and particularly so when you’re dealing with an active war zone where information and the information space is very contested.

So, I would read some of these numbers with certain amount of scepticism and hesitation. It’s going to be really difficult to get a clearer picture of how many mercenaries are on the ground – on the Russian side as well as foreign fighters on the Ukrainian side, probably until we have a retrospective view and 2020 hindsight to go with. That being said, it does appear that there have been several hundreds and thousands of Russian mercenaries on the ground who are often referred to under an umbrella term of “Wagner group mercenaries”. Although, I should say, it’s a little bit deceptive to use the term at this point.

Wagner may not be just one company anymore. It may have spun off into several others – I’ve seen one spin off name, Liga, which could very well be run by the same people it might not be. These are groups that are very closely tied to Putin’s inner circle – Russian oligarchy – and very different from other types of PMCs and PSCs that we see across the world because they are so closely tied to the state apparatus and such a paramilitary force. You mentioned Syrian mercenaries as well. We can talk about what that might look like and the extent to which they may be sort of acting in parallel to Wagner or acting as a replacement for Wagner mercenaries because of personnel and force multiplying impacts that they could have.  I think it’s definitely a scary – potentially scary – development. Not so much in terms of what they might do operationally on the ground but the terror that they may instill there, so we can talk about that.

[Alessandro Arduino]: As you mentioned, data is not easy to get and there is also no clear picture but I do believe these are the strengths when you use private military companies and mercenaries. In an article that I think you wrote almost a year ago – Russian Mercenary in Great Power Competition: Strategic Superman or a weak link? – you mentioned, and it was quite an impressive foresight, that Russian army strategically with strategic lift was anaemic compared to the Soviet time and therefore, Russian capability to wage war was limited. Something that nobody was expecting and it showcased in Ukraine. Can you describe your assessment to our audience?  How does Russia mercenary being ‘Superman’ or a weak link is changing in light of the ongoing war?

[Molly Dunigan]: I do think actually, the article was quite appreciated in some ways and I’ll give most of the credit for it to my colleague and co-author, Ben Connable, who wrote it with me. That assessment regarding Russian army strategic lift and the fact that it was likely anaemic compared to Soviet times was based on a 2020 RAND report that Ben led. The report – Russia’s limits of advance – is freely available as a PDF document on RAND’s website. In that work, Ben and his team assessed Russian military capabilities against specific potential future scenarios and they concluded that Russia lacks the capability to project power significantly beyond Eastern Europe due to a variety of factors based on their gaming and scenario analysis. Most of the factors, I would say, fell in the realm of both logistical and personnel shortcomings – strategic lift and transport – but also the fact that for instance, the Russian military is so heavily dependent upon conscripts.  When you look at that in light of the fact that Russia is also concurrently deploying thousands of mercenaries at this point under the guise of Wagner and other groups, it really does call into question if they are doing this sort of sleight of hand (it isn’t a house of cards) in some ways to cover up? What is the shortcomings in their own military? Yes, you did mention that facts and data about these forces are so difficult to come by and that is one of their strengths. Certainly, it’s what I call backdoor deployments of PSC and PMC. As you know, they can be deployed without the eyes of the public on them and this can be advantageous both in terms of international views as well as domestic views.  Democratic presidents will often deploy them to get around domestic political opposition to war but I do think that the fact that you have significant personnel shortcomings in particular, is one of the reasons they’ve been trying to deploy Wagner mercenaries in their place.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I think that when you mentioned backdoor deployment, it is really important to look at this angle but in a hybrid warfare context or an area where you don’t want to be seen at work.  I’m referring especially to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where it seems that Wagner not only is it still operational there but is increasing its presence and my personal opinion is that in some respects, it’s helping the Kremlin to keep a footprint in MENA while Ukraine is absorbing all the attention and resources. Going back to your paper, you mentioned that mercenaries are Russia’s weakness.  Do you agree with my previous statement that they are an important geopolitical placeholder, especially in the areas spanning MENA?

[Molly Dunigan]:  I think this is a really interesting questionand I’m going to try to make a nuanced argument with regard to it – we’ll see how successful I am.  I do think that Russia, particularly since 2014, has been trying to strategically utilise Wagner and its related groups to have boots on the ground presence across the African continent particularly but also throughout MENA and Eastern Europe. I mean, they were in Crimea and Ukraine back in 2014 and we’ve also seen them over in Venezuela. So, they are definitely utilising them to have some sort of strategic reach and to probably increase their positioning with regard to strategic competition with both the US and China. However, having said that, I think that there are a lot of weaknesses that are obfuscated, when you look at just the numbers and types of deployments  based on a map.  Some of them we wrote about in that article – a lot of the research that we had done underpinning the article – was on Russian mercenaries will to fight and specifically, what we saw in terms of their will to fight in Syria. So, there are different dimensions.  RAND has done pretty systematic analysis of ‘will to fight’ and has also developed tools to assess it.

Quite specific dimensions on which we measured included things like what were the motivating factors for their men to sign up, were there any morale issues after they were deployed, was there any human trafficking involved etc.  It does appear that there have been cases of human trafficking where their passports were taken and once they get into theatre – sometimes they’re lied to about where they’re going –they think they’re going to be deployed in a relatively hospitable environment but they end up somewhere completely different. They’re sort of told to work off their contract and fight their way out or they can pay for their plane ticket home. So, all these impact their will to fight and the other factor related to this is their underlying skill. I mean, we have seen Wagner mercenaries who are very highly-skilled and are drawn directly from Russian special forces.

They were founded in 2014 by Dimitri Utkin – as you probably know, he was the former commander of the GRU Spetsnaz, the Russian Army Special Forces.  I think his guidance, oversight and direction is primarily where they get some of their brutal tactics from but they also have hired and have had to span out too many fewer – like more folks with fewer skills, if that makes sense. When we think about them in terms of their level of skills, some of them being very closely tied to the GRU in the FSB, the Russian intelligence services, sort of retired military intelligence operatives, then you have a middle level where they may have had some former military experience and  you have what folks in the  field and  practice of looking at these guys commonly call: the cannon fodder. They throw them in and utilise them as force multipliers but also put them in very inhospitable situations and discount their deaths.

As you know, the Russian public isn’t going to look at them very much. So, I do think that strategically, Russia is definitely trying to employ Wagner in a way to make up for some of its weaknesses and its own military might. There are also a lot of weaknesses in its mercenary forces that are being obfuscated in it doing so and I think the more we can shed light on those things and show where the pressure points may be and have some leverage against them, the better off we will be in trying to combat this force.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Thank you, Molly. I think what you just mentioned in the research done by RAND in terms of willingness to fight is very important. I unfortunately don’t have the RAND data set and database but I recall an old Italian chap – Machiavelli. He used to say that mercenaries, in time of peace, are willing to show their sword while in times of war they are trying to avoid any fight as much as possible. In some respect, we don’t have to forget that still, if some of Wagner group people are looking at Mother Russia and they are part of GRU and special forces, most of them are still there for the coin.

So, if during the conflict, both winning or losing is a bad outcome: losing is bad because they end up dead, of course and winning is also bad because it will be end of their business.  Hence, they are there just there to preserve or continue the insecurity and that’s one of the severe issues that you have with mercenaries all over the world.

Having said that, there’s another question that is quite difficult and I asked it to all our guests discussing Russia, including Bukkval, Sergey Shukhanin and Candace Rondeaux. There are a lot of intricacies in the research about Russia private military companies. I would especially like to ask you how, in your opinion, Russia perceives its own private military companies?

[Molly Dunigan]: That’s a great question as well and I think there are different opinions there.  I think the Russian government probably views them differently than the Russian public do and it’s hard to tell. It is very difficult and there are a lot of intricacies in researching this. I think that’s really critical because it is something I hate to speculate on too much but what we have seen is that they are very able to cover up the deaths of Wagner mercenaries without much public outcry. that, to some extent, indicates there is just less concern amongst the public. There have been reports that the families of those who died serving  Wagner and/or related firms are  threatened that if they talk to the media or anybody else about how their son(s) died, they will not receive the death payments, which can be quite significant especially in the context of the Russian economy.

So, I think that there’s a good deal of obfuscation again – that’s sort of the word of the day here – there’s a good deal of covering up the extent to which they’re utilised. The other thing is that they’re not all Russians and I think that that is really important to note – they do draw upon other nationalities as the definition of a mercenary force would make you think. I think that’s part of the reason they have to call on Syrian proxies so much right now because the nationalities that the Wagner was drawing from for its prior conflicts included Ukrainians, Moldovans and Serbians, in addition to Russians.  I would think they’re having some personnel problems now,  in terms of being able to get enough folks on the ground with them so they are looking to other labour sources. However, in terms of how they’re seen in Russia otherwise – in terms of government circles and this sort of alludes to your last question – I do think they’re seen as a tool of the Russian government.

It’s interesting that Russia is one of the few countries that has not legalised the use of private military and security firms and they’ve actually demurred on votes that were put forth in their parliament to do so. Hence, they have actively chosen not to legalise them and it does seem that that has been a strategic decision. They want them as a tool in their back pocket to try to have some strategic reach across the globe but also to be able to plausibly deny that they are linked to the Russian government and we saw that after some of their activities in Syria, where large deployments of Wagner mercenaries were arrested at the airport when they came back to Russia and the government completely  distanced itself from their activities there and simultaneously, in other battles in the Syrian conflict. They were awarding military medals to Wagner mercenaries too so I think they really think that they can utilise them instrumentally and they are trying to do so.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I totally agree. The fact that the Duma didn’t pass the amendment to the law to make a private military company legal, it doesn’t mean that Russia doesn’t want to use it. It’s just to give it strategic leverage, in case some of the mercenary outfit or spin off don’t fall in place as the Kremlin wants to, they can use it. As it happened – and you mentioned correctly – there was a group of mercenaries coming back from Syria and there was FSB waiting for them at the airport in Moscow and in this respect, we have also spoken a lot with Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat.  It was quite interesting to see how he followed Wagner on the social media scene.

In the beginning, the Russian government was always denying everything related to private military companies and then at the end, you have the Mali government officially asking for Wagner and you have the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentioning that it’s a private company. So then again, all these layers of obfuscation that stemmed out of Wagner group as a label or as an umbrella, as you mentioned before. Now, I want to ask you another question and it’s probably too early to ask it.  We saw from the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, that things were not playing well for the Russian army or at least, what they were expecting. This war is going to sign the end of the Wagner group or it could even be a booster for the group to increase its footprint in Africa – you also mentioned Venezuela, so even increasing the footprint in South America.

[Molly Dunigan]: I really don’t want to speculate on how the war itself will end at this point. I think it’s a difficult thing to speculate on. I certainly don’t see this being an end to Wagner but I also think the impact of the conflict on Wagner very much depends on the impact of the conflict on the Russian state and on Putin’s senator circle.  I say this because as I mentioned earlier, Wagner is unlike many other modern PMCs that we see deployed by western states. It’s very much a paramilitary and state-linked entity and so I think if the Russian state disintegrates or if the Russian economy disintegrates, if Putin and his inner circle, somehow go by the wayside, then Wagner could have a much more difficult time moving forward, I think.  I think we haven’t talked too much about what Wagner’s impact will be on the ground in Ukraine and I alluded to this a little bit early on in the podcast but I do think that they will face some challenges in really changing the operational course of the conflict. You know, some of my prior research has looked in detail at the impact of private military forces on military effectiveness and one of the things that really comes out of that work is that they, especially when they’re deployed alongside allied military forces, can have major command and control issues if it’s not dealt with in a very systematic manner so there can be structural communications problems. There can be friendly fire incidents, there can just be sort of a lack of knowing about who’s doing what on their side unless they’re really incorporated very systematically alongside the military.  Also, given the will to fight issues that they could have and some of the human trafficking indications on how these people are recruited, where they think they’re going and what they think they’re doing especially at those lower non-Special Forces levels.

I think that could make it challenging for them to have a large-scale impact over time. Obviously, it’s hard to get the appropriate numbers that you would need of the Special Forces levels – there are only so many of those guys to go around. That being said, I do think from the impacts they’re going to have on the operational course in the conflict, is to instill terror in the population – I said this recently on another interview before we saw what had happened to him occur.  Before we had some indication that Wagner was involved there, some of the tactics that they have utilised and that have really been fed down the ranks systematically from their founder, Dmitry Utkin has been very brutal.  We’ve seen this across the different conflicts that they have been involved in. Torture, beheadings, strapping, grenades to teddy bears – they did it in Libya so children would find them and these are things that Wagner got involved.

So directly in Ukraine, I don’t think we were seeing as much of that – certainly not from conscript forces.  One of the downstream impacts on Wagner over time from this war may be that there is more international condemnation of   their activity as it raises to a new level of exposure to the international community. There have been calls for years for United Nations regulation or some sort of international regulation or amendment to the Geneva Conventions to try to better regulate wars. This may stimulate some of that in some directions but I certainly don’t think that it will happen soon because there are a lot of challenges.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I totally agree with you. There are a lot of challenges in this course. Not long ago we had   Dr Sorcha McLeod on one of our podcast episodes and she is in the United Nations Working Group on mercenary activity and at that time, they were looking very closely at the footprint of Wagner group in Libya.  You mentioned effectiveness, willingness to fight and something that we didn’t talk much before but I do believe it’s very important and I thank you for mentioning it is the morale impact of mercenary, mercenary willingness for brutality and how it impacts the morale not only of the military force but also the civilians. Unfortunately, history is full of these examples. The Varangian Vikings as bodyguards in the Ottoman Empire come to my mind and just when the population we’re looking at –the Raven’s banner of the Varangian – there was a severe moral disruption due to their well know brutality but we can go on to talk about it for hours but unfortunately, our show is going to end and Molly, I have to thank you very much for your time.  I have one last question. I would like to move the discussion from Russian quasi-PMC and look more at the evolution of the sector, from a bird’s eye view. We are witnessing an increased presence of Chinese private security companies abroad and now, we have  some new  kids on the block – security company from Turkey, Sadat or Academy Sanckar and we are still looking at an evolution of the footprint of the Western private military companies or even just the United States private military companies since the end of the conflict in Afghanistan –  the West is also changing the modus operandi of its PMCs to a new area: an operational one.  This is a quite long story but in your opinion, in a nutshell, what is the future of PMCs?

[Molly Dunigan]: Thanks, Alex. This is a great question too and also one that’s somewhat difficult to speculate upon but I would draw upon history to answer it.  I think it’s really important to know that the past, since between 1789 and 2003 (guess 200 years or so) there were huge dearth of those private security and private military companies and really, the prominence of state run militaries and that had been instituted following the Peace of Westphalia 1648 but hadn’t really actually begun in practice until the end of the French Revolution. Prior to that, though, the norm across any type of war throughout history – civil wars, international wars – however you want to look at it, was the use of hired forces and worse, tourism, and we see that the first documented example of mercenaries dates back to 294 BC. They were utilised throughout the Roman and Peloponnesian Wars and were utilised throughout the Italian city states and their conflicts  in the 1200s, 1300s and 1400s. With the ‘condottieri’, and so this really, what we’re seeing a return to is actually a new form of normal but it really was the norm for a very long time. The use of state militaries is not the norm but it was something that we had imposed upon the system so I mentioned 2003 as being the point when this ended. This was the beginning of the Iraq war and there was an explosion of privatisation on the western side, with the US and coalition partners utilising firms that were sometimes popping up overnight. Sometimes, these mom-and-pop shops  I think have now evolved  into what you’re mentioning  that we’re seeing with  Russian,  Chinese  and Turkish PMCs  working abroad.  It’s what our colleague Sean McFate refers to as one of the new rules of war that mercenaries will return and this will be the new norm.

I don’t think the trend is going to go away at all but I do see the industry is always very fluid and particularly, when you have firms that are more market- oriented than what we’ve been talking about today. State- driven is not very market-oriented because it really is a paramilitary organisation tied to the Russian government but when you have PMCs and PSCs that are much more market-driven, they quickly will evolve based on the needs of the market and new companies will pop up. The others will evolve the services that they offer so sometimes, they change shape pretty much overnight or within a matter of weeks.  I think we’ll continue to see that on a larger scale and as conflicts become more internationalised and global, we’ll continue to see the spread of this throughout the world.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Thank you very much.  With your last sentence, you helped me to rope in our next podcast which will look at cyber mercenariesy and how mercenaries are shifting gradually to the Ciborium and cybersecurity. Molly, I have to thank you very much for being with us today and also thanks to our audience for listening. Have a great day.

[Molly Dunigan]: Thank you so much, Alessandro.