Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 19 – The Russian
Duma will soon be taking up draft legislation regularizing the status of nominally
“private” military companies, even though such mercenaries are banned by
Russian law. And among the first places they may be deployed is Ukraine’s
Donbass, according to Kyiv observer Aleksey Kaftan.
In today’s Delovaya stolitsa, he says that the way the new law has been proposed
highlights the problems Moscow faces regardless of whether it legalizes these
private armies or not but that the timing represents a Russian response to the
Verkhovna Rada’s declaration that Moscow is in occupation of Ukrainian
territory.
On
Monday, Kaftan reports, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed his “personal”
opinion that Russia needs a law governing private military companies so that
the people taking part in them will be “within the legal field and thus
defended” by the power of the state (dsnews.ua/world/novye-ihtamnety-zachem-putinu-legalizatsiya-chvk-18012018220000).
On Wednesday a senior Duma member
said that the Russian legislature would take up a draft of this measure later
this month, an indication Kaftan says that a final version either exists or is
close to being drafted. And yesterday,
Putin’s press secretary supported the idea but noted that it wasn’t within the
Kremlin’s purview and thus was not a Kremlin initiative.
There are good reasons for the
Kremlin’s public restraint, Kaftan continues. “Having begun aggression against
Ukraine, Russia has gotten involved in a series of local wars (Syria, the
Sudan, Afghanistan and Libya) in which the application of [regular] armed
forces is difficult or undesirable.” Hence it wants to be able to use private
military companies instead.
The death of a private military
company contractor will attract less notice and concern among Russians, but
Moscow has a problem: its preferred “instrument of Kremlin geopolitics is
illegal in the Russian Federation.
Paragraph 359 of the criminal code calls for a punishment of from three
to seven years for those who take part in military conflicts as mercenaries.
Of course, Kaftan continues, in the
case of Russia, “the term ‘private’ … is a figure of speech” because if Moscow
organizes them they aren’t private and if it doesn’t they aren’t legal. “In fact, these are state companies with a ‘private’
façade working in the interests of the FSB and GRU.” What Moscow is moving to
do is to make that “official.”
As the Duma deputy pushing the
measures observes, “the law will allow getting employees of private military companies
to take part in counter-terrorist operations abroad and in actions in defense
of the sovereignty of allied governments from external aggression.” They can
also be used to defend “various objects” include oil and gas wells and
railways.
In some of these cases, they will be
in more or less open competition with regular Russian military units. But “there
is a niche in which Russian private military companies will be beyond any competition.”
Ruslan Leviyev, the head of the Conflict Intelligence Team, says that they can
be used in “the self-proclaimed republics of the Donbass, Abkhazia, South
Ossetia and the countries of Central Asia.”
It is not likely to be a coincidence
that this discussion began in Moscow on the eve of the Verkhovna Rada’s
discussion of a law on the re-integration of the Donbass.” The Russian
government appears to have decided that it will “formally withdraw” its defense
ministry and FSB forces from that Ukrainian region and make use of “private
military companies” instead.
But Moscow is making a big mistake
if it thinks it can get away with this, Kaftan says. By ensuring that the
private military companies are part of the Russian legal field, the Russian
government has ensured that everyone will recognize that “Moscow all the same
continues to bear responsibility for their actions.”
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