Wagner Penal Battalion — The First Step to Firesale Privatization of Russia's Military Power?
First Russia's oil to oligarchs, now its military capacity?
This week it has become known that convicts in Russia are being released into Wagner mercenary company.
According to a Prigozhin recruitment speech in one of the penal colonies, prisoners are able to trade in their sentence for a 6-month stint with Wagner in the Ukraine.
After 6 months they receive an official pardon from the state.
Releasing prisoners into military service has a strong historic precedent in Russia. During World War 2 nearly one million gulag inmates were released into the Red Army.
Many started their service in shtraf or penal units. Inmates could exchange 3 to 5 years of their sentence for 1 month in a shtrafbat (penal battalion) or shtrafroty (penal company).
The maximum length of service in shtraf was 3 months as anything longer was considered a death sentence, so only prisoners with 10 years or less remaining were eligible.
Shtrafniki were also considered to have redeemed themselves with blood if they were wounded and were released into regular army units if so.
Recruiting for war in prisons as such thus has a precedent in Russia. But there is a massive innovation here. — Prisoners are being released into the custody of a private commercial enterprise.
And it is in exchange for a stint with a private commercial enterprise that the government promises them an official state pardon.
Why?
These are people who are in state custody and who are going to war for the pardon only the state can provide.
The state has all the power here. Wagner has no leverage.
Why doesn’t the state simply release these men into penal units of the military?
Why open up prisons to Wagner, use your pardon leverage for Wagner, and then pay Wagner for the privilege of running the men that you gave it?
Why not tie the pardon to service in some outfit organized by the state?
Why channel captive (literally) manpower to a private company you’ll then have to pay for managing the resource (to be crude) you provided it with?
I’ve never heard of anything more neo-liberal.
Working with mercenaries is eyebrow-raising to start with. But maybe there’s an argument for it in the sense that a mercenary company might have access to manpower that would otherwise be out of reach for you. For example, people who don’t like military discipline, but who don’t mind corporate discipline.
But what does Wagner bring to the table here?? These are literally your prisoners that only you can provide with the pardon they want.
I’ve heard of private prisons where the state pays a company to house and guard them because they’re able to do it for cheaper. (Which is iffy enough.)
And I’ve heard of private companies that employ convicts inside state prisons against compensation to prisoners and the state. (Which is open to abuse.)
But channeling your captive manpower into Wagner so that you can pay Wagner even more money for fielding more fighters, why is the middle man needed here??
This sounds like the most unnecessary and the most private-favoring public-private partnership ever.
This is as if you gifted a private company a gold mine for free, so that you can now pay the company for gold that until yesterday was yours.
Except it’s worse than that because here you’re engaging in radical experiments in the early release of criminals on top of that, and you’re doing it to enlarge the role of a private company in the field of dishing out violence that is supposedly solely state’s prerogative.
There is already a sense in the military and Rosgvardia that Wagner is privileged. That where Wagner is on the attack that shells and air support are always found to back it, while they themselves are all too often given the ungrateful tasks of defending the most neglected parts of the front.
Hell, Wagner already has a mini air force now. It is fielding Su-25 strike aircraft. Something that could have only been made possible with a direct transfer from the state.
With the state granting Wagner further privileges (a monopoly on captive manpower), what direction is the prestige and the morale of the military supposed to go from here?
Let’s not play dumb. We know there are reasons the state may prefer to work with Wagner rather than its own military.
One reason is that Wagner has a better reputation with potential fighters than the state. The military frequently fails to deliver on promised perks of the job like housing, and who is optimistic enough to fully trust the complicated bonus schemes promised by regions to 3rd Corps recruits? Going to war via Wagner or another mercenary route via the Chechens is regarded as safer.
Another reason might be the very lawlessness of the arrangement. The Soviets ran penal combat units but that was 70 years ago. Nobody in the Russian military today knows how to make a penal combat unit work.
Neither does Wagner, but Wagner operates in the grey area, so perhaps it is hoped that Wagner not being subject to oversight or having to follow military law can make up for the lack of procedures and experience with lawlessness. That is to say, if the shrafniki try to desert the Wagner PMC can deal with them in ways that military police or Rosgvardia — especially without written orders, or procedures drilled into them — would probably balk at. (Indeed in the video Prigozhin promises to summarily execute prisoners who change their minds in Ukraine.)
Finally, by working with a PMC the government can make corruption and inefficiency in the ranks not its problem. If the government spends resources on the upkeep of a military unit only to discover, once the unit has been called up, that the outfit sucks because the officers have been selling off the materials intended for training and maintenance then the government has a big problem on its hands.
But if the government pays Wagner to deliver a certain result and the latter fails, then the next time Wagner simply won’t get a contract.
The problem is, what happens when PMC stakeholders gain access to the highest reaches of the government? When the mercenaries fill their pockets to the extent that they can buy up officials? Or when high-ranking officials like Prigozhin and Kadyrov become shareholders in mercenary enterprises? Suddenly you have a section of influential people with the ear of Vladimir Putin with every incentive to darken the reputation of the military, to starve it of resources, and even to corrupt it further.
A private military might be more efficient and less corrupt than a state-owned one. Just like a private defense plant or a private oil drilling company might be. But does that mean that you end up with less corruption? No, it doesn’t. In practice what happens is simply that corruption migrates to a higher plane.
A state-owned defense plant burdens the budget through its lethargy, waste, and theft. But the “well-run” private defense plant buys up Congressmen and think tanks and then runs your budgetary and foreign policies.
What happens if the Wagner pie becomes so large that they can hand out lucrative ownership stakes to men in Putin’s inner circle? What happens when not just Prigozhin, but Medvedev, Sobyanin and Petrushev have an incentive to see the military humbled and Wagner ascendant?
Might we see a scenario where Russian draftees are presented with the choice of serving in either the regular military or Wagner? It would be surreal and I honestly don’t expect it, but it is also surreal that Moscow is handing out pardons to criminals to raise Wagner’s numbers. Who knows where this leads?
This is very weird and surreal stuff that is going on. Stuff that 6 months ago nobody predicted.
What would we say if in 2004 George Bush started pardoning criminals if they signed up for a 6-month stint with Blackwater in Iraq?
Mercenaries broke the ice in America, but it is in Russia that they have attained heights unseen before.
And what does that say about the nature of Putin’s rule? He was once regarded as a statist. Someone who is all about sovereignty, stability, procedure — and most of all state capacity. Well, I see very little of that left. More and more I see improvisation and neu-feudal wheeling and dealing.
I do wonder what a Soviet general from the 1980s who would have been a part of a staggering 3-million military — a massive monument to state capacity — would have made of a prediction that 40 years later Moscow would be reduced to opening its jails to a mercenary company in order to replenish its manpower. And that in a war for places like Kharkov and Odessa!
Putin once cracked down on private companies in oil extraction when they started hijacking the system to benefit themselves. It didn’t matter that they were legitimately well-run. Yet now, in the name of convenience and a little more efficiency, he is opening the door for private interest to take over parts of Russia’s military capacity.
Across the post-Socialist world, it is believed that when the old system fell the ex-Communist managers of state-owned companies intentionally ran them into the ground so they could acquire them on the cheap for themselves.
Well at the start of this war the Russian military was set up for failure. It was thrown into war without notice and the chance to prepare, told to cut a third of its manpower, spread out across numerous axes, without a unified command or operational plan, and to fight in direct contravention of its doctrine and structure — but was made to pursue numerous and extremely ambitious targets (Kiev, Nikolayev, Voznesensk, Sumy, Chernigov…) anyway. It continues to be set up for failure to this day as conscript manpower, which it is structurally built to rely on in a large war, is not made available to it. The result is that the military is in the doldrums and that Wagner and other mercenary connects are ascendant. Now that the state-run military has been discredited, the private militaries can flourish as never before.
I’m not going so far as to say it was a conspiracy. But if it were, what would be done any different?
Simmer down, dude. The US has been doing this since Iraq. Within a decade all US troops and police will be commercial. Damn it, lets use the real word... mercenaries.