The “special military operation” or SMO launched on 24 February 2022 was to be a mission of the Russian military. But somewhere along the way, attention shifted to two individuals — Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic who fights for Russia with his army Kadyrovtsy, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russian private military company Wagner Group. The rise of these two Vladimir Putin loyalists with direct access to the Russian President isn’t favoured by the mainstream military elite, who wish to be seen as the sole legitimate Russian force.
This has led to a peculiar situation now.
Ideally, loyalty to the cause should be the binding glue for different combatants. But the three main combatant groups in Russia’s war on Ukraine are competing for superiority by highlighting the others’ weaknesses. In that process, Russia’s military, logistical, and operational shortcomings have been highlighted time and again, first by Kadyrov, and lately, by Prigozhin.
To add to this complex maze, more private armies are getting launched in Russia. In February 2023, Ukrainian intelligence reported on the proliferation of mercenary companies modelled after Wagner Group. The latest to join the bandwagon is Potok, a private army established by the energy giant Gazprom.
Does it indicate that the oligarchs sense an ensuing disorder in Russian society and are preparing in time to protect their investments? Likely.
But first, why isn’t the SMO a solely Russian military undertaking anymore?
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The rise of the two leaders
In the first phase of the Russia-Ukraine war, enthusiasm about taking on Kyiv ran high among Moscow’s military establishment that planned a three-to-five-day attack on Ukraine, confident that it would win. That was also a time when news of the SMO was institutionalised by Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu and his department. Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov seemed to be in charge of the official narrative.
However, as plans to take on Kyiv backfired and the Russian offensive stalled after August 2022, Kadyrov started expressing discontent with the state of affairs on social media. Months after projecting Russia’s war in Ukraine as ‘jihad’ for Chechen fighters, he started to openly criticise the Russian army for setbacks in Ukraine. His disapproval of then-commander of the Central Military District Alexander Lapin led to the latter’s replacement in February 2023.
Kadyrov’s views were followed and supported by Prigozhin, an ex-convict and a business tycoon who, until recently, controlled the Wagner Group from behind the scenes. For the record, the paramilitary organisation aided the Russian military for the first time during the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Prigozhin’s global and domestic profile got significantly enhanced following his army’s successes in Syria and other African countries, but he kept denying any formal links with it. It was only in September 2022 that he stepped out from the shadows as the PMC Wagner leader and openly pledged to help Putin’s cause in taking down Ukrainian forces.
In a dramatic self-launch, he first filmed himself recruiting Russian prison convicts for PMC Wagner and started claiming that the gains made by Russians in Bakhmut were to be attributed to the mercenary group and not the army. He also issued a blunt statement bragging about openly interfering in November 2022 US midterm elections.
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Grey zone of shadow operations
Prigozhin’s rise takes us back to addressing a fundamental question: What is the role of private armies in Russia? PMCs are illegal entities under constitutional law in the country. In fact, Chapter 3, Article 71 of the Russian constitution reserves all matters related to defence, security, and foreign policy solely under the purview of the Russian State. Over the years, there have been repeated proposals in the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Federal Assembly, to legalise PMCs, but they have not been met with any tangible success.
Closer scrutiny reveals that the utility of the PMCs remains high as long as they are extra-legal. It is their grey zone status and operating power in the shadows that enable them to carry out missions no legally constituted armed force in the world would do, least of all that of Russia’s, the second most powerful military in the world.
As an undefined shadow instrument of State policy, these private armies operate as the flexible and convenient deputies of mainstream statecraft, adapting to complex international security situations. For instance, these armies come in handy where formal Russian interference or involvement could perpetuate a diplomatic row or a regional security crisis. They act as arms traders, political consultants, and force multipliers.
Since these private armies are mostly carrying out orders in lieu of economic benefits, it explains the staggering rise through lush business opportunities in Russia as well as through diplomatic channels outside the country. Even after such economic benefits, the self-funding private armies remain a low-cost option for the Kremlin to assert its influence in key foreign engagements.
Russia’s diplomatic support to Putin’s “chef” Prigozhin was evident when PMC Wagner was able to expand its economic footprint in the Central African Republic after 2017. In turn, the mercenary group helped deepen Russian influence in the region. The Wagner phenomenon over North and Central Africa has been duly recognised by the European Union (EU). The European Peace Facility (EPF) has decided to train the armies of affected countries to fight the Wagner menace.
Therefore, low-maintenance PMCs have been successfully operating as a potent toolkit of Russian policy, particularly in North and Central Africa. What makes these PMCs most attractive for the Kremlin is the space to manoeuvre deniability. Any responsibility that the Kremlin wishes to evade could be ascribed to the PMCs, eventually evaporating in the cloud of their extra-legal status.
However, these armed groupings also perform an important domestic function known as “parallelism” — when authoritarian regimes coup-proof the State to neutralise coup attempts by regular military lest it turns against the autocrat. Literature on parallelism describes how, for instance, Adolf Hitler maintained an alternate array of loyal armed institutions as a double check to protect himself in crisis situations. In principle, the domestic function of PMC Wagner is quite similar.
Cracks within Russian military
Since there has been a shift of power away from the official security and defence institutions in Russia to leaders of extra-legal PMCs, it could mean that both Kadyrov and Prigozhin are eyeing more central positions.
Kadyrov emerged as the original critic of the Shoigu-Gerasimov bloc after he posted an 11-minute-long video criticising the military’s underperformance in Izyum. Prigozhin, too, has grabbed attention by taking repeated jibes on Russian military capabilities on his telegram channel.
Amid all the noise, both men have tried to build a reputation of Russia’s true patriots and Putin’s true loyalists with direct access to him. That Putin has still not silenced them at this sensitive time is indication enough that their voices are directly heard at the top.
This undeniably reflects their larger political aspirations too.
Kadyrov has gone on record expressing frustration at being relegated to the margins for years as the leader of the Chechen Republic. In a public display of his loyalty, he vowed to send his three sons to fight for Russia in Ukraine. That said, Kadyrov’s ethnic roots limit his pan-Russia appeal. Prigozhin, meanwhile, has been posturing himself as the next fearless conservative leader. He proudly talks about interfering in the US electoral process despite being sanctioned by both the US and the EU for war crimes in Syria and other regions of Africa.
Only time can confirm the veracity of these conjectures. But what may be safely argued is that the increasing visibility and prominence of Prigozhin and Kadyrov indicates the weakness of the formal State apparatus within Russia.
There is an uncanny similarity between Prigozhin and Kadyrov, hardliners such as army veteran Igor Girkin and ultranationalists such as Alexandr Dugin. All of them have been attacking the Russian elite and accusing it of appropriating State resources for personal gains. In their common opinion, wars such as Russia’s in Ukraine have exposed disloyalty and the decay within. These personalities project themselves as the ‘fixers’ of the situation but compete for legitimacy.
What does it mean for the future of the Ukraine war, which is currently pegged on a tense hook after an alleged assassination attempt at Putin triggered Russian fury? To call this ‘special military operation’ a ‘war’ is a criminal offence in Russia, and information about it remains tightly guarded in the country. It is ironic that Putin loyalists have been openly releasing videos on the lack of ammunition, problems with Russia’s logistics, and poor preparation for Ukraine’s upcoming counter-offensive. To a distant observer, the line between Russia’s internal friends and foes looks blurred.
Finally, it is all an indication that things will get a lot worse before they get a little better.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)