The Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and PMC–State Relations in Russian Foreign Policy: Explaining the Enlistment of Private Military Companies During the Ukraine War

Relations between Russian private military companies (PMCs) and organs of the Russian foreign policy and security apparatus make the headlines almost daily, oscillating between cooperation, competition, infighting, and mutiny. This behavior makes relying on PMCs puzzling and seemingly irrational. Hence, this article explores why Russia has enlisted and ultimately de-enlisted Wagner PMC during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The first section reviews previous explanations for using PMCs developed in the contexts of liberal democracies and assesses their transferability to an autocratic context. Based on these explanations, the article builds a synthetic theoretical framework by combining ideational, political–instrumentalist, and functionalist explanations in a domain-of-application approach. The empirical section is based on the qualitative analysis of the daily Russian Offensive Campaign Assessments published by the Institute for the Study of War. The article finds that while ideational explanations highlight the broader trend to privatize security through PMCs and the ways that certain historical narratives legitimized the Kremlin’s insertion of PMC Wagner into Russian foreign policy in the first place, the political–instrumentalist and functionalist explanations help understand the cooperation–conflict dynamism during the Ukraine war. The findings contribute to a better understanding of autocratic security privatization and the increasing role of non-Western PMCs as domestic, regional, and global political actors.