Wagner is the monstrous legacy of a Russian mercenary tradition

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Eighth, in the concluding part Anna KareninaCount Alexei Vronsky, the lover of the tragic heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, joins thousands of Russian volunteers fighting in the Balkans for the liberation of fellow Slavs from Ottoman rule. “He’s taking a squadron at his own expense!” a character shouts.

Tolstoy, a pacifist, depicts Vronsky’s behavior as the impulsive act of a flawed man who, even before Anna’s suicide, struggled to find a purpose in life. However, for modern readers, the closing scenes of this novel published nearly 150 years ago have resonance for our times. They highlight a long tradition of unofficial, semi-official or covertly state-backed warriors fighting for Russia – a tradition that stretches from the 19th-century volunteers of the tsarist empire to the Wagner Group under Vladimir Putin’s presidency happened.

Following the failed uprising of Wagner’s founder and leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in southern Russia, the mercenary group faced reorganization or even disbandment at the hands of a once-supportive but now resentful Putin. The days of Prigozhin and his agents traveling across Russia to recruit convicts in prison to fight in Ukraine are over. Putin’s crackdown on alleged supporters of the rebellion signals pressure to remove Wagner and put the war effort under the control of Russia’s regular armed forces and security apparatus.

It is less clear how matters will play out in Africa, Wagner’s other main area of ​​operations. In countries such as the Central African Republic and Mali, Wagner has relied heavily on military support from the Russian Armed Forces. However, Wagner’s control of diamond and gold mines allows him to function as an organized crime organization as well as a mercenary company furthering Putin’s foreign policy goals.

Wagner emerged under the auspices of a decade earlier Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, an association that sets it apart from the private security companies that flourished in Western countries after the Cold War. To Putin, one of Wagner’s most attractive features was that, legally, it didn’t exist — in fact, it didn’t until last September. Prigozhin accepted He founded the group in 2014.

Before then, the Kremlin took delight in denying that it knew anything about Wagner or his activities in Ukraine, Syria or Africa. The secret alienates Wagner from another erratic force working for Putin – the openly brutal battalions of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov.

For Western countries, private military organizations came to be valued because they were more adaptable than regular armed forces and cost less public money. governments used them fighting drug traffickers in Latin America, stopping pirates in Somalia, and conducting covert operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taking advantage of the post-Cold War “peace dividend”, Western governments cut defense budgets and hired private contractors to make up the shortfall.

All this was done deliberately, not because the governments were weak. It is an entirely different story when the state loses its exclusive control over the armed forces. When this happens, as Europe’s violent 20th century showed, desperate political leaders can cut deals with the paramilitary, mercenary or volunteer units that grow up as a result. An example with dangerous historical consequences is Germany after World War I.

The military defeat in November 1918 was accompanied by a revolution that overthrew the Kaiser and established a republic led by the Social Democrats. The leaders of the new democracy did not even have time to take a breath before the Communist uprising broke out in Berlin in January 1919. Lacking enough regular troops to suppress the rebellion, the government turned to so-called Freikorps units.

These militias were no friends of democracy, but consisted of former frontline soldiers, raw cadets and ultra-nationalist students, all of whom were fond of unbridled brutality. A spiritual ancestor of the Nazis, he looted Berlin and murdered Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Later in 1919, Freikorps units rioted Like Wagner in Ukraine, through other German cities and the Baltic states.

Closer to our time, the 1990s saw an explosion in the Yugoslav wars paramilitary violence Relating to the willingness of nationalist leaders to use irregular forces. In 1992, Serbian and Bosnian Serb paramilitaries terrorized Bosnian Muslim communities in a blood-soaked genocide of ethnic cleansing. This was made possible by the collapse of the Yugoslav state and the transfer of weapons into private hands. But the killing spree also depended on the Serb-dominated Yugoslav military supporting Bosnian Serbs, just as Moscow’s armed forces supported Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The ultimate political responsibility for these atrocities rests with the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also said a similar thing about Putin he said this week Prizoghin’s rebellion was “a monster acting against its creator”.

Tolstoy leaves Vronsky to his fate Anna Karenina Unclear, but the implication is that he will die in the Balkan War. Prigozhin’s future is similarly uncertain, but for the time being he is in Belarus – perhaps the least safe country in Europe for a Russian mercenary commander who has fallen from favour.

tony.barber@ft.com