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Another Tool for the Kremlin

Russia’s return to the global stage as a major power relies on an array of diplomatic, information, security, and economic tools that help the Kremlin punch above its weight. One of the newest instruments in that toolbox is the Wagner Group—a shadowy band of mercenaries loyal to the Kremlin and controlled by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a member of President Vladimir Putin’s coterie. Russian and Western media have been following the group’s expanding footprint from Ukraine and Syria to Sudan, the Central African Republic, and now possibly Libya and Venezuela. But despite the significant attention, Western understanding of Wagner’s role and capacity is still incomplete at best. This is partly due to Moscow’s relentless disinformation campaigns and efforts to deny responsibility for Wagner’s operations. Adding to the confusion is a false perception that Wagner is a private military company (PMC) no different than Western outfits like Academi (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp International.

A detailed analysis of the group—including its origins, ties to the Putin regime, political and economic drivers, and capabilities—is essential for Western policymakers to better gauge the threat Wagner poses and how to respond. The group may not offer the Kremlin entirely new ways to wage war or build influence, but its existence is emblematic of how a more assertive Russia often—and at times implausibly—tries to evade responsibility for actions beyond its borders. Wagner is also a window into the broader dynamics of the Putin regime, including how it harnesses the ambitions and self-interests of elites like Prigozhin to create deniable and flexible tools. The West should not overreact to the challenge from Wagner, but a multilateral, low-cost campaign to shed light on the group and constrain its options will reduce the risk.

An Improvised Imitation of a PMC

Wagner is a vehicle the Kremlin uses to recruit, train, and deploy mercenaries, either to fight wars or to provide security and training to friendly regimes. Western and Russian sources often call it a PMC, but it falls outside widely used definitions despite performing some similar functions.¹ It is not a true commercial entity operating in a global marketplace; no one who runs it will admit to doing so, and it is not a legally registered company in Russia.

Wagner’s place outside the market—and the secrecy around it—stems from its origins as a covert creation of the Russian military, built to serve the needs of the Putin regime. Still, it was not part of a Kremlin masterplan. Moscow’s penchant for ad hoc decisionmaking shaped the group’s formation, and it developed in fits and starts as the Kremlin looked for advantageous and politically palatable ways to fight the wars in Ukraine and Syria in 2014–2015.

Moscow first deployed Wagner in Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin needed to fight a covert war, hide casualties from the Russian public, and mitigate the international repercussions of a gross violation of a neighbor’s sovereignty. The use of mercenaries or proxies is a tactic with deep roots in Russian history, most notably during the Cold War. By using so-called volunteers and other groups of irregulars in Ukraine, Moscow nominally reduced the number of active duty personnel and concealed their presence, at least initially. The recruitment of these groups happened quickly in 2014, and the Kremlin turned to private and state actors to finance and organize the effort.

One of the first groups of irregulars that Moscow mobilized included the men who later formed Wagner. With the probable support of Russian military intelligence (GRU), they augmented the ranks of Russia’s so-called little green men, the unmarked troops who seized Crimea in 2014. This precursor unit of Wagner operated under the leadership of Dmitry Utkin, a retired veteran from the GRU’s special operations troops. Later that spring, Utkin and his band stayed under GRU control as they moved with the war to eastern Ukraine, where they were one of many disparate and often unruly groups of Russian-backed mercenaries. Utkin’s group, which at this point started calling itself Wagner, was based in Luhansk and fought in the major battles against Ukrainian forces.²

In 2015, Moscow started to demobilize some of the irregular groups in eastern Ukraine, as it put the war on simmer and consolidated its forces. But the looming intervention in Syria gave Wagner new life. The Kremlin was worried about casualties and wanted to avoid an official ground combat presence. The Russian General Staff of the Armed Forces saw this as an opportunity to push forward its long-standing plans to create a permanent mercenary force. By turning Wagner into its vision of a PMC, the General Staff could help Syrian forces on the ground and take casualties without public acknowledgement. 

Russian military officials had been debating Western PMCs and whether they could imitate them for years. Moscow’s reflex is to copy the tools and tactics it believes the West is using against it, but often does so based on misperceptions of how Western countries operate. The Kremlin viewed PMCs cynically as powerful tools to hide the role of states rather than true private entities. Putin, in a revealing comment on PMCs in 2012, said such firms were an “instrument for realizing national interests without the direct participation of the state.” A year later, Russia’s chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, alleged that PMCs were part of Western efforts to destabilize Libya during the Arab Spring.

Given this view of PMCs, it is not surprising that the Russian imitation was first mobilized as a secret arm of the state. The Russian military already had a loyal, GRU-controlled cadre in Wagner. In 2015, it started relocating them and other mercenaries from eastern Ukraine to a covert, well-equipped training base next to a GRU special operations facility in southern Russia. Utkin remained in military command, and Wagner expanded over time for the Syria mission, with the addition of several reconnaissance and assault groups. The expansion gave Wagner more men and allowed Moscow to avoid reintegrating some potentially troublesome mercenaries back into civilian life in Russia.

The Russian General Staff also recruited Prigozhin to be the group’s patron and sell Putin on the idea, according to a press account. In return, Prigozhin received lucrative defense contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide cleaning, catering, construction, and other services for military facilities; some of this money reportedly helped finance Wagner’s expansion. By fall 2015, the Putin regime’s new mercenary force was ready for action, and Moscow secretly sent hundreds of Wagner fighters into Syria in the early days of its intervention.

Power, Profit, and Denial: Understanding Prigozhin’s Role

Understanding Wagner requires taking a closer look at Prigozhin, his position inside the Putin regime, and how the pursuit of power and profit drive his stewardship of Kremlin tools. He is the primary financier and manager of Wagner, although he denies any association with it. His biography does not make him an obvious candidate to run mercenaries for the Kremlin. He has no military or security service background, nor does he have decades-long personal ties to Putin that are common in the inner circle. After a prison stint for robbery and fraud in the late Soviet period, he became a successful restaurateur running high-end eateries in St. Petersburg. But by the mid-2000s, after hosting Putin at his restaurants, Prigozhin had wormed his way into the president’s circle, eventually catering Kremlin events and earning the moniker “Putin’s chef.”

Over the years, Prigozhin made himself useful to Putin in more novel ways. His leadership of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), or “troll factory,” beginning in 2013 gave the Kremlin an important mechanism for manipulating the political debate online and trashing the reputation of internal critics. The troll factory pioneered the use of fake internet personas to promote the Kremlin’s agenda inside Russia, and, over time, it expanded its operations to stir political tensions and divisions abroad, including in the United States. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Prigozhin and the IRA for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

As with Wagner, Prigozhin’s IRA provided the Kremlin with off-the-books capabilities and unlocked privileges and revenue streams in return, including hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts for catering and other services. His role is emblematic of the dual power structure in Russia. Putin sits at the top of two overlapping political structures: one that is acknowledged and another that is hidden. The first is a hierarchical, bureaucratic, and organized state that functions within clear lines of nominal authority. The second is opaque and lacks a clear structure. It resembles a feudal court, populated by elites around Putin who curry favor and help protect his political control in return for patronage.

Prigozhin’s motivations are largely tied to membership in Putin’s court. By using Wagner and the troll factory to support Putin’s domestic and geopolitical ambitions—and prove his personal worth—Prigozhin can strengthen his claim on valuable state resources and power. The more Prigozhin pleases Putin, the more he gets. At the same time, Putin always looms above Prigozhin, presiding over the broader system of control. Wagner cannot exist without Putin’s blessing, and Prigozhin probably needs the Kremlin’s approval for strategic-level decisions, like where and when Wagner is deployed.

Keeping Wagner in Prigozhin’s hands provides obvious advantages for the Kremlin. First, it gets a mercenary force without having to pay for it. Second, the Kremlin can deny responsibility for Wagner by keeping it outside state control. Putin himself argued in a 2018 interview that Russia has no responsibility for what Prigozhin does because he has no official position. This is not credible given Prigozhin’s well-documented informal position inside Putin’s regime. Yet, time and again, the Kremlin clings to a shred of deniability even when its words are no longer believable. Whether it be the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom or the downing of the MH17 flight over Ukraine in 2014, even empty denials offer Moscow room to maneuver and to create an impression that it operates within the normal bounds of statecraft.

Prigozhin uses Kremlin connections to profit from natural resources in areas where Wagner operates. This started in Syria in 2016–2017, when the Bashar al-Assad regime agreed to pay for the military services of a Wagner front company controlled by Prigozhin. The agreement also gives Prigozhin’s company one-quarter of the profits from oil and gas fields it seizes on behalf of the Assad regime. When Wagner subsequently deployed to Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR), the Russian government helped reach agreements for the rights to potential diamond and gold deposits for Prigozhin-linked companies. These deals are miniscule within the broader Russian economy. They are best understood as payoffs to Prigozhin, helping him to finance and profit from Wagner in return for aiding the Kremlin’s foreign policy ambitions.

Prigozhin’s deals for resources became important to finance Wagner, because his relationship with Russia’s defense leadership became strained in the early days of Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian war. Prigozhin feuded with Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, reportedly over whom Putin should give credit for military successes in Syria and possibly over contracts as well. Amid growing tensions between the two men, the military’s deliveries of weapons and supplies to Wagner dried up, as did the lucrative defense contracts that had been flowing to Prigozhin’s companies. This was not a complete divorce, however, as the Kremlin’s needs demanded some cooperation between the military and Wagner. Operational coordination continued to take place in Syria at a reduced level. Today, Wagner continues to use its covert base near a GRU facility, suggesting that it maintains a relationship with Russia’s military intelligence in particular.

Wagner’s operations were noticeably affected as military support declined and Prigozhin developed more commercial interests around the group. In Syria, for example, Wagner took on two roles. On the one hand, it focused on seizing and defending oil and gas assets, in which Prigozhin now had a financial stake. On the other hand, Wagner was still a Kremlin tool, and Moscow used it to support broader military goals, with mercenaries fighting alongside pro-Assad forces in major battles. Wagner’s personnel, which reportedly numbered as many as 2,000 in Syria, also suffered as the financial and material burden shifted to Prigozhin via payments from the Assad regime.³ Prigozhin, who is not known for lavish spending on his projects, reportedly armed the mercenaries with subpar weapons and little heavy or sophisticated equipment. Salaries for the fighters also supposedly declined over time.

Prigozhin’s business interests in Wagner’s operations have also created more serious risks. In early 2018, for example, several hundred Wagner fighters attacked an outpost manned by U.S. special forces personnel and their allies at a Conoco gas plant in Deir Ezzor Province in Syria. As the Wagner fighters and their Syrian allies advanced, U.S. military officials warned their Russian counterparts to pull them back. The Russian military denied any knowledge of the advancing force. At the direction of the Pentagon’s leadership, the U.S. military and its allies killed as many as 200 Wagner fighters.

Much remains unknown about why and how this attack took place, but the best explanation is that Prigozhin wanted to capture more energy assets. The lure of profit caused him to overlook or underestimate the risk of plunging Moscow into a conflagration with the United States and the potential for high casualties. This type of periodic mistake—albeit on a deadly and calamitous scale in this case—is not an aberration; it is inherent to the feudal court system that Putin controls. Autonomy from the state’s bureaucratic decisionmaking process and wide latitude to pursue one’s self-interest can lead elites like Prigozhin to overreach. In this case, Prigozhin risked sparking the ire of Putin, who can take away his contracts and privileges. In the aftermath of Deir Ezzor, Prigozhin reportedly had to convince angry Kremlin aides that the mistake would not happen again.

The debacle at Deir Ezzor also deepened tensions between Wagner and the Russian military, which distanced itself from the attack. Wagner members interviewed by journalists disputed the military’s claim of ignorance and voiced suspicions that Russian officers let U.S. forces decimate Wagner fighters to embarrass Prigozhin. One former member even claimed that a Russian military officer pledged air cover for the operation, but nothing materialized.

Why Wagner Is in Africa

Wagner’s deployments to Sudan and CAR in late 2017 mark an important evolution of the group, which adapted to satisfy Russian geopolitical aims and Prigozhin’s ambitions. In these countries, Wagner is not operating in a combat role as it was in Ukraine and Syria. Instead, it is acting as a security provider, helping regimes with training, site defense, and the protection of high-level officials. This shift to operating outside Russian war zones made Wagner a more useful and flexible tool for Prigozhin and the Kremlin. Prigozhin has a pattern of expanding the writ and capabilities of his tools as Kremlin priorities evolve. The IRA’s focus on the United States, for example, began in 2014, after Russia’s war in Ukraine increased tensions with Washington. Prigozhin even sent two employees to the United States in June of that year to gather intelligence for the campaign.

Wagner’s arrival in Africa coincided with Russia’s push to expand its presence on the continent, largely on the cheap. A slew of military and economic agreements with African states reflects the Kremlin’s attempt to fill vacuums where the West is absent, with an eye toward developing security relationships and gaining access to resources. Like much of Russia’s foreign policy, Moscow’s outreach to Africa involves multiple political, economic, and security actors and is opportunistic. It gains the most traction in weak or isolated states open to the Kremlin’s advances.

Prigozhin sees personal opportunities within Russia’s geopolitical ones. Much of his recent activity has focused on Africa, where he also peddles political consulting services (including meddling in elections) on behalf of the Kremlin. People working under him have shown up in a number of countries, including Zimbabwe, Madagascar, and South Africa, to conduct polling and support political campaigns, despite lacking detailed expertise on the countries in which they operate.

Details on Wagner’s deployments in Sudan and CAR are scarce, but based on what is available, they follow a similar pattern. Leaders in both countries welcomed ties to Moscow, having few options to obtain security assistance from other sources. This opened the door for Wagner personnel (reportedly a few hundred in CAR and around 100 in Sudan) to train local forces, protect mining sites, and guard government officials. At the same time, Sudan and CAR have granted companies linked to Prigozhin the rights to survey and/or mine mineral resources. Moscow admits that Russian contractors are in both countries but does not acknowledge them as Wagner employees. Prigozhin, for his part, denies any links to Wagner or financial interests in these countries.

Both Prigozhin and Moscow likely see Wagner’s presence as a toehold, from which they can expand into other spheres. For example, in 2018, Prigozhin pressed for increased military cooperation between Russia and Sudan. News reports also show that people working under Prigozhin advised Sudanese officials on a wide array of topics, from countering protests to economic development and reform of the financial sector. Given the coup against former president Omar al-Bashir in April, it is unclear whether this work continues, but the current military government maintains friendly ties to Moscow.

CAR is a more stark case study in how Moscow and Prigozhin are using Wagner’s presence to generate political influence. Less than two years after Wagner’s deployment began, Moscow is challenging France’s role as CAR’s primary partner. The relationship runs through Prigozhin, who usurped roles normally reserved for diplomats and security personnel. For example, President Faustin-Archange Touadera’s national security adviser is a Russian national who reportedly works for Prigozhin. Prigozhin has attended CAR peace talks in Sudan. Compa