Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 4 – Well-paid
private Russian military companies are an increasingly important component of
Moscow’s strategy in the Donbass and elsewhere providing the Kremlin with a
serious force that it can use as it likes and then plausibly deny whenever that
suits its purposes, according to RFE’s Andrey Dikhtaryenko.
Among the many such companies are
Vagner, MAR, Yenoty, and the Slavyansky korpus, whose mercenaries make from
2500 to 6,000 US dollars a month, far more than Russian soldiers are paid and
thus at least in principle far more ready to do whatever they are ordered to
against non-Russians or against insubordinate Russian forces (ru.krymr.com/a/28715853.html).
Such firms, Russian military
commentator Pavel Felgengauer says, are “cheaper and less responsible. The defense
ministry can always say: we know nothing about them; these are not our losses.” And in times of confusion, many will accept
that rather than asking the important questions about who pays such firms and
thus who controls them.
But these enterprises do not always
turn out well. Sometimes the mercenaries talk too much or run afoul of powerful
groups within the Donbass militants or the Russian power structures themselves.
In such cases, Dikhtaryenko says, serious retribution may follow and the
mercenaries may land in jail or worse.
That outcome, however, is more the
exception than the rule. According to Felgengauer, these private mercenary
firms are now in almost all cases well-integrated into the chain of command in
the pro-Moscow forces in the Donbass. Indeed, he says, they represent a clearly
defined “hybrid structure.”
Such mercenaries may become a
serious problem in the future if Moscow changes course. In that event, they
could split with the other Russian forces there and even fall victim to Russian
laws prohibiting independent military actions – or alternatively, they could be
used by Moscow to maintain pressure on Ukraine even as the Kremlin denied that
it was doing so.
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