Potential Russian Uses of Paramilitaries in Eurasia

Executive Summary

While much remains uncertain following the June 2023 mutiny of Russia’s Wagner Group and the August death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russia will likely continue to work with semi-state armed formations. Russia’s degraded military capacity and constrained economic resources, especially as sanctions persist, will increase the attractiveness of these organizations as low-cost tools for advancing Russian objectives and competing against the West, including to a greater extent in Eurasia where Russia likely perceives the competition as most intense.

Prigozhin and his Wagner Group created a model that other opportunistic Russian actors will likely seek to replicate. Fewer financial resources available to Russia’s military and elite could increase the incentive to establish such groups, especially if these organizations can increase opportunities to improve Russia’s reputation as a reliable security provider or access new sources of wealth for the regime. Newly created organizations would likely face high barriers to entry in areas where Wagner already operates, including Africa. Therefore, if such semi-state paramilitary organizations proliferate—a prospect that has grown more likely after Prigozhin’s death—they could focus on new regions such as Eurasia. Given Russia’s declining influence in Eurasia, a region of long-standing historical importance to Russia, such groups could undertake new actions there to curry favor with Putin and the Kremlin.

There are several ways the Kremlin could use semi-state security formations to advance its interests in Eurasia, including by waging political influence and disinformation campaigns, physically protecting friendly governments, sustaining Russia’s influence as a key security provider, destabilizing unfriendly governments, and limiting any threats that Russia’s diaspora population might pose to the stability of the Putin regime from abroad.

Although Russian paramilitary and semi-state organizations are in many ways an extension of the malign activities carried out by the Russian state, the proliferation and increased activity of these groups would make it more difficult for the United States and its allies to attribute such actions to the Kremlin, complicating Western response options. These groups and the opportunistic individuals who lead them could, for example, stake out positions independent of the Kremlin or even at odds with it, especially in the case of extreme ethnic nationalists who have criticized Putin for not going far enough in his actions. The proliferation of these groups would also make it difficult to discern when and under what circumstances the Kremlin might be willing to escalate on these groups’ behalf.

Introduction

The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin on August 23, 2023, likely signals the demise of the Wagner Group as an organization, at least in its current form. The group might continue in some form under more compliant leadership, or it may eventually fragment, with some of its functions being absorbed by the Russian state while other individuals and assets are appropriated by existing and newly created organizations. Nonetheless, despite Prigozhin’s death and the failed mutiny he orchestrated in June, Russia is likely to continue working with semi-state armed formations in the future. Moscow’s resource constraints and geopolitical headwinds as a result of its war in Ukraine increase the Kremlin’s need for such semi-state organizations and the assets and capabilities they contribute to Moscow’s ability to assert influence beyond its borders.

So far, outside of Ukraine, the Wagner Group and other similar organizations have been most active in Syria and Africa, where they have contributed to Moscow’s ability to sustain its great-power status. As Russia’s reputation as a great power is increasingly challenged closer to home, however, these groups may expand their activities to new geographies. As Moscow tries to maintain its self-defined status as a great power, its budgetary and reputational constraints may make turning to supplementary contractual sources of resources and personnel more attractive than using permanently employed state actors and resources.

There is already ample evidence that Russia’s influence is declining in Eurasia as some countries have grown more wary of Russia’s presence and role in the region. Although Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has accelerated the trend, it predates the war. The limitations of Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, for example, have become painfully clear for the regional economies linked to the ruble in an era of Western sanctions. Russia also has a recent track record of inaction in the face of regional instability, failing to help its ally Kyrgyzstan control violent unrest in 2010, or to mitigate the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia and restrain Azerbaijani aggression there. Now regional fears of Russian intentions have amplified such concerns across the region.