Russia’s State-Backed Mercenaries Are Building a Brand on Cruelty

A notable aspect of recent Russian strategy in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa has been the use of mercenary forces that have links to the Russian state but are not completely of it. The most infamous is the Wagner Group, known for its involvement in conflicts from Syria to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This use is substantial, coordinated, and open: As Sean McFate, a former mercenary—or private military contractor, as they prefer to be known these days—has made plain, “This is the first time in modern warfare that mercenaries have worked in the complete open.” McFate believes that the relationship between Wagner’s leaders and the Russian state is feudal and that it echoes the role of earlier mercenaries.

A notable aspect of recent Russian strategy in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa has been the use of mercenary forces that have links to the Russian state but are not completely of it. The most infamous is the Wagner Group, known for its involvement in conflicts from Syria to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This use is substantial, coordinated, and open: As Sean McFate, a former mercenary—or private military contractor, as they prefer to be known these days—has made plain, “This is the first time in modern warfare that mercenaries have worked in the complete open.” McFate believes that the relationship between Wagner’s leaders and the Russian state is feudal and that it echoes the role of earlier mercenaries.

McFate has also postulated that the tension between Wagner Group and the regular armed forces of the Russian Federation is one manifestation of a supposedly “ancient feud” between “knights and mercenaries” dating back to “the Middle Ages.” But this is a drastic simplification of the long development of standing armies in Europe, in which the public and the private were interpenetrated. Knights and mercenaries were often the same people: The 14th-century condottiero John Hawkwood served Italian powers like the Pope, Milan, and Florence as a contract soldier but also married into Italian nobility, owned land and castles in Italy, and carried out diplomatic duties between England and Italian states.

During the 17th century, officering for pay was one of the ways nobles served their feudal overlords; conversely, mercenary service could make you a noble, remunerated with land, titles, and positions at court. Just as mercenary commander Albrecht von Wallenstein was made duke of Mecklenburg for his service to the Holy Roman Empire, so too are Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s endeavors deeply intertwined with the Russian state, including Russian military intelligence.

Wagner Group members on the ground do not seem to believe that a conflict between service as a mercenary and as a soldier even exists, let alone the supposed ancient hatred McFate identified. Reuters recently published an interview with five Russian prisoners who fought in Ukraine as members of Wagner Group. While the people in charge of Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defense squabble, these interviewees reported that many Wagner Group members have prior experience in Russian state armed forces, like McFate himself does in the American military. Some people who knew dead Wagner Group fighters interpret their deaths as “for the motherland.” Like many 17th-century mercenaries, these men seem to regard their actions simultaneously as a way to make money, as an expression of personal loyalty to their leader, and as patriotic service to the political entity to which they belong.

Wagner Group’s men’s relationship to their own organization, and to their own society, may be another area where we can speak of an older mercenary mindset. Like the 17th-century mercenaries I have studied, these men believe they are both separate from normal civilian society and better than it. Now, they think, everyone back home must treat them with respect. One reason Wagner Group’s former prisoners are so loyal to Prigozhin is that they see him as securing this respect from other people while they are alive and in fighting for their honor as soldiers after they die.

The Wagner Group is not a manifestation of a long-standing contestation. Instead, it is an example of the “polycratic” structures often found in modern dictatorships, in which the functions of government belong to several powerful people who jostle for control and influence. For instance, the struggle between the army of the Russian Federation and Wagner Group can be compared to the hostility between the Wehrmacht and the SA in Nazi Germany. The SA, or Sturmabteilung, was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, and its control of street violence in the 1920s and ’30s played a significant role in Hitler’s rise to power. At its peak in 1934, the SA numbered more than 3 million men, and its chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, wanted it to absorb and replace the German army. His murder in the Night of the Long Knives was a removal of this threat.

The Wagner Group operates startlingly unlike earlier mercenaries—and earlier armies. Although ancient regime battles themselves were brutal, generals were reluctant to give battle and often avoided it. Whether mercenaries or regular troops, soldiers were difficult to obtain before the development of mass conscription, and an army could be difficult to rebuild after a battle.

Like these earlier regimes, Russia has also had to grapple with the question of how to find enough soldiers without antagonizing its population. One reason for Wagner’s importance in this war has been the Russian state’s attempt to conceal its true death toll. The state has also confined its heaviest requests for mobilization to ethnic minorities. These attempts to mobilize have been heavy-handed and spasmodic, and the state has backed off of many of them. For instance, Wagner may have halted its prisoner recruitment program in part because of the conflicts between it and the Russian Ministry of Defense.

However, the Wagner Group’s tactics do not seek to minimize its own casualties. This is in sharp contrast to 17th- or 16th-century mercenary forces, for which obtaining men at all was such a challenge that they sought to avoid battle if possible. It is also out of keeping with its limited size; about 20,000 Wagner Group men may be in Ukraine. Observers have been baffled by this organization’s repeated tactical liberality with the lives of its men. On Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner Group mercenaries with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s forces lost several hundred men in a clash with U.S. special forces near Khasam, Syria. According to messages posted on Telegram, Wagner pre-planned its clumsy assault on U.S. positions, even though the support it was expecting from Russian military air units failed to arrive. The rumor was that some pilots were denied permission to take off. The United States estimates that Wagner has suffered 30,000 casualties in Ukraine, with 9,000 dead. This is not only a high proportion of killed to wounded for a modern conflict, but it may also translate to casualties for this small force of up to 50 percent.

One example of Wagner’s carelessness with its own soldiers’ lives is its “assault detachments,” small units of heavily armed infantry attacking on foot that are designed to chisel away at entrenched defenses. (Despite the friction between their leaders, this doctrine has reportedly spread to the regular army of the Russian Federation.) These small, localized attacks have often not been followed up or pursued in a concerted manner. This tactic has therefore come at a high cost to the attackers, and its gains have been unclear. The battle for Bakhmut has been so difficult for Wagner that the Institute for the Study of War has theorized that the Russian Ministry of Defense is deliberately expending its rival’s troops.

Wagner is different from early-modern mercenaries in another way, too. The mercenaries I study were often flamboyantly cruel to other soldiers or civilians. Historians used to think that early-modern armies were characterized by savagery to their own members as well. After all, Frederick the Great famously said that his troops should fear their own officers more than the enemy. In contrast, in some of my recent research I have found that internal military governance in the early 17th century, like the military legal system, was in practice flexible and responsive to soldiers’ concerns. Military law was more likely to pardon accused men than execute them. This was not because of any great compassion on the part of the officers, but for the same practical reason that made battle a weighty decision: willing soldiers were hard to find, and therefore valuable.

Because Wagner is not large, it would make sense for these modern mercenaries to be as protective of their forces as 17th-century ones had been. Yet its tactical liberality is paired with a distinctive internal cruelty. Wagner officers have cut soldiers’ fingers off for using their phones. According to one report,  “Prisoners were allegedly threatened not to try to escape or they would be shot, and shown a video of a prisoner being skinned alive as a warning.”

This internal cruelty is not only historically interesting, but Wagner also appears to be using it to build a brand. We can see this in its use of sledgehammers as a tool of torture and execution. Ever since Wagner Group members filmed themselves killing a deserter from the Syrian military with a sledgehammer, the instrument has been a symbol of this group and its supporters, as well as of the supposed strength of resurgent Russian nationalism. Members of Wagner Group recently filmed themselves torturing and killing Yevgeny Nuzhin, 55, who defected to Ukraine, with a sledgehammer.

Wagner-associated sledgehammers are popular on the civilian market. Politicians have had themselves photographed brandishing sledgehammers, some daubed with red paint. The intended message is that Wagner is savage, that savagery to its own members is matched by savagery toward its enemies, that Wagnerites are tough men, and that by extension Russians are tough men, too. The members of Wagner Group interviewed by Reuters are profoundly loyal to Prigozhin: Four of them had been recruited by him personally. In a society based on patronage and personal relationships, it’s good to have one of the most powerful patrons of all. And if Wagner Group treats its own men brutally, well, so does the regular Russian army, and so do the Donetsk separatists.

Although it shares some traits with earlier mercenary mindsets, Wagner Group is also an unusually bleak iteration of war in context of the new globalization. The nation-state is warping and shifting to something else that has similarities to earlier political forms but is not identical to them. Modern mercenaries, which are at once archaic and new, are an example of this change. Wagner disseminates its brutal message internationally and displays it in Syria, Africa, and Ukraine. This is the advent of an army as a global brand.