Stephen T. Satkiewicz
The attention of the world was gripped by a rather puzzling and dramatic event occurring within an already tumultuous on-going conflict in Ukraine when the prominent Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner Group and its leader enigmatic leader Yevgeny Prigozhin embarked on a major mutiny on June 23, 2023 that sparked international fears of a possible civil war in Russia. It is best to situate it within a larger context that sometimes gets neglected by scholars and analysts.
One element of the current situation of the war in Ukraine that is often overlooked is the activities of other lesser-known paramilitary and irregular forces by the Russians. Furthermore, there is a more long-term historical legacy of the so-called “wild 90s” that Russia experienced in the immediate post-Soviet period. In this period, a paramilitary culture of varying kinds thrived and helped lay the foundations for these irregular forces of the Russian war effort. This occurred as a result of two closely related processes: the disintegration of the official militarism of the Soviet state along with the rise of radical ultranationalism as an ideological alternative to Communist ideology. What is certain from a historical vantage point is that such groups do not arise out of nowhere, but rather do so when there is a vacuum of necessary military force.
Before the dust had settled on the Wagner Group mutiny, scholars and analysts were seeking to find suitable historical parallels to the recent events in Russia. The actions of the Wagner Group have also raised the issue of the reliability of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) and other irregular paramilitary forces around the world. The dangers of PMCs going rogue on their host states have long been a matter of debate among analysts and scholars. Even Niccolò Machiavelli in his Art of War (1520) warned against the use of mercenaries due to the uncertainty of their loyalty, declaring “War makes thieves, and peace hangs them.”
Paramilitarism Defined
The theoretical questions over the exact nature of paramilitarism should be outlined to assist in better understanding the nature of the phenomenon under investigation in this study. Max Weber (1864-1920) famously argued in “Politics as a Vocation“ that the state is the power that “lays claim to the monopoly use of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory … ” This includes both the professional military as well as police and other security forces employed by the state. Thus, paramilitary forces are often defined as those that operated outside this monopoly, most often against the interests of the state.
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