The PMC That is Neither Private Nor a Company: How the Wagner Group Revolutionized Russia's Quasi-PMC Model

Abstract

While the Wagner Group was Russia’s first irregular military formation to attract widespread international attention, the history of private and semi-private force in Russia stretches back to the early 1990s. Unlike other strong states with well-developed conventional militaries, however, Russia has been reluctant to provide clear legal frameworks for private and semi-private purveyors of force. Despite the widespread tendency to refer to the Wagner Group as a private military company (PMC), it has never been fully private, nor has it ever been a discrete legal entity. In the decade following the Wagner Group’s emergence in 2014, Yevgeny Prigozhin and other Wagner Group curators created a new template for semi-private force that is poised to remain a central feature of Russia’s surrogate warfare strategy in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa.

In the aftermath of the Wagner Group mutiny in June 2023 and Prigozhin’s death two months later, there has been a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the future of the Kremlin’s premier semi-state armed formation. While the mutiny demonstrated the serious risks posed by semi-state military formations, early indications show that the Kremlin is either unwilling or unable to abandon the Wagner model entirely. Despite the obvious hazards of outsourcing military force to ostensibly private actors, the Wagner model remains an attractive option for Russia to bolster its military posture in Ukraine and pursue strategic competition in the Middle East and Africa.

The report seeks to answer four main sets of questions. First, what were the historical and political conditions that paved the way for Wagner’s emergence in 2014? Second, why and how did the scale of Wagner’s operations expand so rapidly in the span of less than a decade? Third, what went wrong with the Wagner experiment? And fourth, how has the Kremlin learned from its mistakes, and how are semi-state armed organizations likely to feature in Russia’s foreign policy after the Wagner mutiny?