Russia's Other Private Armies: The PMC Legion Beyond Wagner

They surged into the global spotlight in 2022—a shadowy, brutal, and utterly bloodthirsty unit that distinguished itself in the worst possible ways during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Before long, they became the source of some of the most compelling high drama of 2023, as the tensions of an attritional war exploded into a mad dash toward Moscow, guns blazing, with the fate of Eurasia’s dominant power hanging in the balance. Private Military Company Wagner, better known as the Wagner Group, has been Russia’s biggest and most dangerous proxy force since it first appeared roughly a decade ago, making its mark not just in Ukraine but in Syria, Libya, and across sub-Saharan Africa. Anywhere its fighters go, their reputation precedes them: an utterly ruthless force that has treated torture, assassination, rape, and pillage as just another part of the day’s work.

But even though Wagner is by far the best-known of Russia’s private military companies, it is not the only one—and not by a long shot. Across the past decade and a half, Moscow has grown increasingly reliant on a wide range of mercenary groups. Present in dozens of countries and more than happy to handle the unsavory business from which the regular Russian military would rather stay separate, these private military companies form a quiet, deadly shadow hand—one you could easily miss if you weren’t looking for it.

This WarFronts analysis peers into Russia’s spiderweb of phantom armies, looking past Wagner to the lesser-known outfits that increasingly carry Moscow’s dirty work. Taken together, they may constitute the most extensive mercenary network in the world, and understanding it means setting aside the single name everyone knows in favor of the half-dozen that almost nobody does.

Key Takeaways

Russia leans on private military companies (PMCs) as instruments of plausible deniability, letting Moscow pursue geopolitical goals—propping up dictators, guarding mines, training rebels—without putting the Russian state’s official seal on crimes against humanity.
Redut, an offshoot founded around 2008, was tasked with assassinating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2022, took heavy casualties, and has since rebuilt into a force of over 7,000 positioned to become a “Wagner 2.0.”
Rusich and the Russian Imperial Movement are ideologically driven—neo-Nazi and Tsarist white-supremacist, respectively—and operate with near-total impunity inside Russia despite undercutting Moscow’s claim of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine.
Gas giant Gazprom now fields its own battalions, Fakel (“Torch”) and Potok (“Stream”), recruited from its own workforce and reflecting a cutthroat factionalism among Russia’s elite.
Wagner’s 2023 mutiny exposed the core danger of the model: mercenaries are reliable until they aren’t, and their proliferation may be building toward a future the Kremlin cannot fully control.

PMCs: What They Are, and Why Russia Needs Them

After the chaos of Russia’s immediate post-Soviet years, the country settled under the firm hand—and then the iron fist—of Vladimir Putin and his circle. Over the past couple of decades, Russia has worked to preserve its place as a global hegemonic power. It has maintained strong influence over neighboring post-Soviet states, befriended pariah states such as Iran, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Eritrea, and kept relatively warm relations with emerging powers like China, India, and Brazil. Moscow has made a strategic effort to appear at the cutting edge of military-industrial development, and to cast itself in firm opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO—both in rhetoric and in wars of expansion against its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine.

Maintaining a geopolitical umbrella that wide takes a great deal of work, and given Russia’s tendency to cozy up to dictators and military juntas abroad while threatening its neighbors, much of that work is unsavory. For decades, that reality has forced Moscow into a balancing act. On one hand, Russia wants to pursue its goals with the partners of its choice against the enemies of its choice.

On the other, it does not want to alienate major players it gets along with, and it does not want to find itself in a conventional—or worse, a nuclear—war with the United States and the European Union if it can avoid one. Whatever its rhetoric suggests, Russia has far more to gain by avoiding direct confrontation with the West, even if it believes it would win such a fight.

Russia’s key to walking that tightrope has been the concept of plausible deniability. It is very important to the Russian state and its senior leaders that they be able to deny knowledge of or responsibility for actions that benefit them—particularly when those actions involve crimes against humanity and similar business. Russia is by no means the only nation to seek such cover; the United States, the EU, China, and every other major player rely on plausible deniability at various times. But Moscow is particularly invested in it, precisely because its balancing act is so delicate: it must pursue aggressive goals while remaining part of a cohesive world order.

Enter the private military company, or PMC. For Russia, these firms are the crux of the effort to preserve deniability both in its immediate region and around the world. If Moscow has reason to protect a totalitarian dictator but does not want the image of Putin embracing him on live television, then it is a PMC—not the Russian military proper—that forms the dictator’s personal bodyguard.

If Russia wants to protect valuable mines on another country’s territory amid an active civil war with a high civilian death toll, the people standing guard are mercenaries, not soldiers. And if Moscow wants to train a pro-Russian rebel group for an insurgency against a Western-backed government, it is not the Russian military doing the work—at least not officially. Instead, the order goes out to the private sector, and the dirtier business gets done at arm’s length.

What a PMC actually looks like varies depending on the outfit, but several commonalities stand out. In most cases, they operate either on foreign soil outside Russian territory or in parts of Russia that are strategically critical or under threat. They partner with both nation-states and non-state actors, and their responsibilities span the full range of warfighting—from personal protection to guard duty to training to outright combat. Sometimes the goal is to hold a given area for a long stretch; other times it is to slip into a hot zone and out again quickly, or to train local forces who can carry on a mission in Russia’s interest after the mercenaries leave.

Often the arrangement is a direct exchange. Russia meets a client state’s security needs or shields a ruler from coups by dispatching a PMC, and in return it receives gold, gemstones, energy sources, lucrative contracts, foreign labor, or whatever else it pleases. Deployments can run into the hundreds or thousands, as Wagner managed in Ukraine, or as small as a dozen troops, depending on the mission.

And as they work, these forces are functionally unaccountable—not to leaders back in Moscow, not to their hosts abroad, and not to any internationally recognized rules on the treatment of civilians. Murder of civilians, rape, torture, the targeting of local journalists and humanitarian organizations, and the occupation of schools and hospitals have all been observed frequently in the areas where PMCs operate.

PMCs tend to draw on easily defined slices of Russian society—aging military veterans, for instance, or ideological extremists bound by a shared set of beliefs. They are well-armed, well-equipped, financed either by the Russian state or by informal affiliates such as the oligarchy, and, critically, expendable. They work both on the battlefield and behind the scenes, sometimes taking a light touch through influence campaigns or targeted assassination.

And in a final twist of deniability, PMCs are actually illegal under Russian law—one more shield against accountability. After all, the argument runs, Russia could not possibly be using private armies, because they are illegal in Russia.

Wagner: The Model Everyone Else Is Measured Against

At the time of writing, Russia’s best-known PMC by a wide margin remains the Wagner Group. Although it now appears far more integrated into the Russian military, Wagner historically operated as its own entity, serving Russian interests under the direction of the now-deceased oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. The group made international headlines in the years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, taking a leading role in the insurgencies Moscow propped up in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

After the full-scale war began in 2022, Wagner played a major part in the hostilities—sometimes leaning on its more experienced fighters and the former Russian special-operations troops within its ranks, and sometimes throwing mass formations of Russian prisoners into battle. Those convicts were offered amnesty by Wagner if they survived a few months as cannon fodder in Ukraine.

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Around the world, Wagner’s work was far less publicized. The group has protected natural resources and conducted murkier activities in the Central African Republic, provided security to the leader of Venezuela, supported the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, and taken an active role in the Syrian Civil War—even launching an unsuccessful direct attack on US forces in 2018. The fall of Wagner is a story WarFronts has covered at length elsewhere, but in its years of peak activity, the group was the very model of what a Russian PMC is believed to be.

That model is worth stating plainly, because everything else in Russia’s mercenary ecosystem is measured against it. Wagner was a versatile, experienced paramilitary unit able to fill a variety of service roles and support a wide range of objectives, always acting in Russia’s interest but never self-identifying as a representative of the Russian government. It was cheap, typically drawing most or all of its funding from outside the official state structure.

When its soldiers succeeded, it was simply a happy coincidence that Putin’s interests were served; when they died, there was no reason for those deaths to be reported to the Russian public. Wagner was a private organization, the reasoning went, and everyone in its ranks had signed the waivers before they started. It is precisely those distinctions that define the lesser-known PMCs that fill out the rest of Russia’s shadow legion.

Redut: The Heir Apparent

The first of those outfits, Redut, was founded during or around 2008 as an offshoot of an organization called Antiterror-Orel. Established by former members of Russia’s Ministry of Defense, the splinter group has cycled through several names, but the one in common use is Redut—Russian for “redoubt,” a word for a supplemental fortification. In its early years, Redut was exactly that: a supplement to the Russian military, used to fortify its defenses.

The group ran protection operations for Russian convoys traveling internationally, shielding them from ambush without involving formal soldiers, and it looked after corporate real estate, military installations, and Russian diplomats—much as the American Blackwater firm did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among its most prominent clients was Gennady Timchenko, an oligarch and former KGB officer with oil interests in Syria that needed protecting during that country’s civil war. In effect, Redut became an extension of the Russian military that let oligarchs use the military’s services without formally requesting them.

For most of its history, Redut was small. Its handful of detachments ran somewhere between 55 and 65 men each, and its weapons and transport came courtesy of the Russian military. That changed when Russia began serious planning for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Wagner was then Moscow’s largest PMC and was set to be a major player in the invasion, but Redut was brought in to take some of the load off Wagner and handle some of the operation’s finer points. According to a joint investigation by Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, and the Russian outlet The Insider, Redut was assigned responsibility for the assassination of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—an important, nasty job that Russia did not want to stamp with its official approval.

Redut’s preparation for the task was not without controversy. The group had been chosen by the deputy head of Russia’s military-intelligence service, the GRU, a general named Vladimir Alexeev. He and his associates tried to poach Wagner fighters to bolster Redut’s manpower, aiming to forge a force formidable enough to storm Kyiv and end Zelenskyy’s life. The same investigation reported that this became a contentious enough topic between Alexeev and Prigozhin that the two actually came to blows.

It would not matter much. When Russia’s attack stalled, Redut took shocking casualties as one of the advance units meant to be first on the scene, and for the following year the organization all but disappeared to lick its wounds.

Then came the Wagner mutiny. Prigozhin’s failed march on Moscow left a vacuum in the Russian PMC space that, within a couple of months, Redut was already working overtime to fill. Not long after the mutiny, Redut began recruiting aggressively and even poached one of Wagner’s most elite commanders—likely bringing along a great deal of credibility and the interest of many Wagner fighters looking to jump ship.

Redut now appears to control a force of over 7,000 soldiers and is the likely choice to take over Wagner’s operations in Syria. It is also actively recruiting for new postings in Africa, and according to some independent analysts, it is poised to become a kind of Wagner 2.0—Russia’s primary PMC as its ranks continue to swell.

Like Wagner, Redut has started recruiting from high-security prisons and has been willing to waive some of the strict entry requirements Russia officially expects its mercenaries to follow. Unlike Wagner, it also appears to be recruiting women into its so-called Borz Battalion, to serve as snipers and drone operators. And it has begun to earn a reputation for the same sort of war crimes Wagner was accused of, including the torture of military veterans and civilians in Ukraine’s far-eastern reaches.

Expert opinion varies on how directly Redut answers to the Russian Ministry of Defense, but it is firmly under the thumb of military intelligence. If it can establish itself as a low-drama, high-effectiveness successor to Wagner, it will likely find work in Ukraine, Africa, and elsewhere for years to come.

Patriot: The Defense Minister’s Quiet Specialists

From Redut, the trail leads to Patriot, an organization with its own close ties to the Russian Ministry of Defense and the military-intelligence service. Unlike Wagner, Patriot is believed to operate under the direct influence of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, whom some sources describe as owning the outfit outright. That ownership made Patriot a critical asset in the protracted power struggle between Shoigu and Prigozhin—a struggle Prigozhin appears to have decisively lost.

Patriot is structured differently from Wagner or Redut. It is believed to comprise a handful of sub-entities clustered under the Patriot label mostly for organizational convenience. Compared with other Russian PMCs, Patriot has long recruited the best and brightest of the Russian military, able to vastly outbid rivals for the most experienced and qualified troops.

That includes a priority on recruiting intelligence agents and special-operations soldiers capable of asymmetrical, unconventional warfare, intelligence-gathering, and delicate sabotage—missions that generally proved beyond Wagner’s capabilities. In doing so, Patriot extends to Russia the same veneer of plausible deniability over its own operations, making itself indispensable for work that demands discretion and a lighter touch.

Around the world, Patriot has stayed far less visible than Wagner, but it has not avoided the spotlight entirely. Sporting a logo that harkens back to the Oprichniki—Ivan the Terrible’s personal guard corps and death squad—Patriot is thought to employ thousands of people, many of them making well over triple what they might earn at Wagner. Operatives are also believed to have the option of earning commissions on their work, which ranges from direct action to intellectual exercises such as propaganda and negotiation, as well as cyberintelligence and cybercrime.

Patriot is known to have operated in Syria for some time, working alongside Wagner and Redut to guard the facilities of the oligarch Gennady Timchenko. It also conducted reconnaissance there, according to pro-Russia military bloggers, identifying Russians who had gone to fight with the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in order to prevent their return home. In Africa, Patriot has deployed to Sudan, Gabon, and the Central African Republic, where it has been alleged to have taken part in the murder of three journalists who were tracking secret Russian arms shipments.

In Yemen, it has supported separatist rebels while on the payroll of the United Arab Emirates, and in Ukraine it deployed during the Battle of Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast. What Patriot has done since the fall of Wagner is harder to say—possibly because the end of the Shoigu–Prigozhin rivalry let it return to its quieter work rather than participate in power squabbles. Either way, it remains a dominant force inside Russia’s PMC ecosystem, wherever its operatives may be today.

Rusich: The Neo-Nazi Sabotage Group

Next comes the Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance Group, better known as Rusich. Where Wagner, Redut, and Patriot espouse ideology only after their primary objectives as mercenaries, Rusich is a deeply ideological unit with profound ties to Russia’s far right. Often—and quite accurately—described as a neo-Nazi organization, the group traces its history to 2009.

It was founded by a neo-Nazi named Alexey Milchakov, who first drew public attention by filming and posting himself torturing and decapitating a puppy. Milchakov had ties to the now-deceased former military leader of the Wagner Group, the fellow neo-Nazi Dmitry Utkin, and he gained experience alongside Utkin in Russia’s Air Assault forces. In the years that followed, his growing organization drew recruits from Russia and Europe, offering them combat training as a private unit for hire.

Rusich first arrived in Ukraine in 2014, as part of an ongoing Russian effort to support separatists in the far-eastern Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. The group was present at battles over each oblast’s airport and carried out sabotage behind enemy lines, while also participating in skirmishes and larger battles alongside other pro-Russia forces. In September of that year it gained international notoriety by destroying a Ukrainian military convoy and then posing for pictures surrounded by the dead.

Rusich remained in Ukraine until June 2015, when it left amid a dispute with the leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic. For a time it returned to its camps, running firearms training, tactical drills, and survival-skills courses.

Even among Russia’s PMCs, Rusich has earned an especially vicious reputation—mutilating and decapitating both corpses and living soldiers, engaging in systematic rape and torture of civilians, and executing prisoners, civilians, and children. None of it has brought meaningful accountability inside Russia, where the group operated and trained with impunity for years before the full-scale war. During that period, Milchakov and other prominent members surfaced periodically in Syria, including in reports that they had taken part in the torture and dismemberment of a Syrian prisoner. By 2021, Rusich appeared to be massing on Russian territory near Ukraine’s Donbas region in preparation for later hostilities, with online indicators suggesting it intended to cause trouble around the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

When the invasion began, Kharkiv Oblast is exactly where Rusich went. In the months that followed, its fighters were condemned internationally and sanctioned by the United States for what was described as “special cruelty” in the fighting. The group took part in hostilities in and around the city of Izium, where after liberation many bodies in mass graves showed signs of torture.

In 2023, Rusich fighters posted a video to their Telegram channel in which they beheaded a captured Ukrainian soldier, and for much of that year they were known to be active around Robotyne, one of the most embattled Ukrainian positions of the period. They also stirred trouble online, at one point asking their Telegram followers for intelligence on border posts and military installations in the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—all NATO members whose targeting would trigger a massive response.

Despite these provocations, Rusich still appears functionally immune from repercussions whenever its leaders return to Russia. Instead it seems to serve as a kind of useful evil for the Russian Ministry of Defense: enthusiastic in its mission to sow death and destruction across Ukraine, yet uninterested in the political battles and power struggles of the oligarch class. The group still crowdfunds its operations relatively often, and it is currently believed to be conducting reconnaissance and sabotage as part of the war effort. All the while, it fits neatly into the Russian military apparatus while openly parading itself as a neo-Nazi outfit—continually undercutting Moscow’s claim that its offensive is meant to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

The Russian Imperial Movement: Exporting Extremism

If Rusich were not bad enough, it is joined on the ideological flank of Russia’s PMC network by the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. First founded in 2002, the RIM strikes a somewhat different tone: rather than neo-Nazis, its members are virulent white supremacists and proponents of Tsarist Russian ethnonationalism. The group began largely as a political organization under its founder, Stanislav Vorobyev, but it has since become best known for its armed wing, the so-called Imperial Legion.

The RIM got its military start between 2002 and 2010, when a small group of recruits took up martial arts and paramilitary training while their political affiliates worked far-right Russian circles. In 2014 the RIM began organizing its own training centers to prepare recruits for service in pro-Russian militias in Ukraine. As the group told it, this militarization was born of a desire to rid purported Russian territory of an anti-Russian regime, and from quite literally the day after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, the RIM was active in the conflict in the Donbas. The organization became a direct mechanism for interested recruits to reach the front, trained and ready to fight, and its Imperial Legion took an active role in the fighting through at least 2016.

After pulling out of the conflict, the RIM turned its attention to a thriving training academy known as Partizan. By 2017, hundreds of recruits were passing through Partizan at regular intervals as the movement claimed a prominent place in Russian ethnonationalism. Its influence spread from Russia to other post-Soviet states, to Europe, and even to the United States, where it held conferences attended by global neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Some recruits who passed through Partizan went on to carry out terrorist attacks. In 2017 the RIM organized a visit to the United States and networked with American white supremacists in pursuit of shared goals.

As Russia ramped up toward full-scale war, the RIM began deploying fighters abroad—first to Syria in 2019, then to Libya, where they turned up in support of the breakaway warlord Khalifa Haftar in that country’s civil war. By 2020 the United States had designated the RIM a terrorist organization, and when the invasion of Ukraine began, RIM-trained fighters appeared across the conflict. The Imperial Legion has operated on the front lines, but the RIM also occupies a more unusual role for a PMC: the continued large-scale training of new recruits through Partizan, which carried on even through 2023.

The group has become known for top-tier showings in inter-organization military contests and shooting competitions, and it stands out for an abundance of heavy weaponry, armored vehicles, and varied advanced small arms. Rather than handling operations abroad for which Russia hopes to evade blame, Partizan and the RIM appear focused on work at home that Russia does not want to claim as its own: training ideologically extreme recruits who can take up arms and cause chaos as partisans in Ukraine and around the world.

PMC Gazprom: Fakel and Potok

Finally there is one of the newest entries into Russia’s PMC architecture: the companies formed on behalf of the state gas giant Gazprom. Gazprom is believed to run two primary PMCs of its own—a battalion called Fakel, meaning “Torch,” and one called Potok, or “Stream.” Some reports suggest a third group, Plamya (“Flame”), though that unit’s status is hazier. Together, Fakel and Potok maintain murky links to the Redut PMC; some analysts believe they have been integrated into Redut, while others think Redut is fully or partially responsible for their recruitment drives but holds no real oversight over them.

Fakel and Potok recruit their fighters primarily from within Gazprom itself, a company estimated in 2018 to have no fewer than 450,000 employees worldwide. Between that enormous workforce and revenues of nearly $90 billion in 2020, Gazprom is one of the largest companies on Earth—and that money lets it pay its mercenaries very well while keeping protection essentially in-house, returning employees to their day jobs when they rotate out. It can be a comfortable arrangement for military veterans and Russian fans of first-person shooters: play soldier for a couple of years, relatively unlikely to see active combat, then go back to work for one of the world’s richest firms. Even so, it is not unheard of for Fakel and Potok troops to deploy to Ukraine, where at least one unit took part in the protracted fighting around the city of Bakhmut in 2023.

In practice, Gazprom workers who have spoken to Western sources describe recruitment as less a matter of volunteering than of taking instructions from one’s employer. In one account given to the Financial Times, a Gazprom security manager at an installation in central Russia gathered his staff and stated that at least two of them would have to volunteer for combat, in exchange for pay raises, equipment, and a holiday upon their return. In another account from Siberia, employees were asked one by one to volunteer for a million rubles—enough to change their circumstances dramatically.

Gazprom’s methods may have shifted since then; those stories date from a period when Russia was desperate for bodies willing to serve around Bakhmut, while the war has since settled into more of a stalemate. But that early recruitment push suggests Fakel and Potok are no longer small bands of fighters, and that at least some of their soldiers have picked up valuable combat experience.

It should be no surprise that for outfits like these, most of the work for their corporate benefactor amounts to guard duty—defending fixed assets such as oil refineries and drilling fields in areas where they might be attacked, sabotaged, or otherwise threatened. In the West, Exxon and BP have similar groups at their disposal. But it is not only Gazprom’s foreign assets that need guarding; it is the domestic ones too.

The economic and military tensions of the war have exposed a cutthroat factionalism within Russia’s elite, in which corporate sabotage, theft, and even skirmishes between rival oligarchs’ private armies are becoming part of the game. Gazprom in particular is vital to lock down, because the Russian state, the war effort, and Putin’s personal power base all depend heavily on it. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller has his own enemies, among them the late Wagner head Prigozhin and several surviving members of Putin’s inner circle.

The very existence of Fakel and Potok signals a potentially growing shift inside Russia’s PMC network. Gazprom is opting into a tight market, competing for a limited pool of recruits and arms against every other PMC and the Russian military, and it has had to build a full training and support infrastructure to make its mercenary wing function. Its willingness to pay out suggests the deterrence and protection on offer are worth the cost—which in turn suggests Gazprom’s decision-makers do not expect Russia’s power ecosystem to grow any less venomous soon. Instead, they are making a long-term investment in a military unit under their own direct control, betting that one day they will be glad they had Fakel and Potok at hand.

The Trouble with PMCs

As hostilities in Russia’s war with Ukraine continue to wax and wane, and as Moscow’s use of paramilitary groups seems to grow even amid Wagner’s decline, analysts and onlookers have rightly asked whether this is the new normal. It bears emphasizing that the groups examined here are only a fraction of the Russian PMCs in operation, with more seeming to crop up by the day. But even amid their continued rise, one key question remains: are PMCs really worth it?

One reason they might not be is plain to anyone who watched the Russo-Ukrainian war with interest in 2023. Mercenaries get paid, and as long as they get paid they are under control—until they are not. However you slice it, Wagner’s 2023 attempt to capture senior Russian Defense Ministry officials and its subsequent march on Moscow was a stark reminder to Putin and his advisors that PMCs are not as reliable as they claim.

They are their own entities, their own in-groups, and if they are allowed to amass enough military power, it may be a mistake to provoke them. What that means for Russia’s current PMCs cannot be said for certain, but it is clear that Moscow’s effort to shut down Wagner did not shut down all PMCs. If anything, it created a vacuum for the others to grow stronger—and just how strong they are allowed to become is a metric Russia will surely watch far more closely in the years ahead.

Then there is the capacity for division and even violence among the PMCs themselves. That phenomenon has already appeared around the devastated city of Bakhmut, where members of various PMCs—Wagner among them—engaged both in posturing about whose heavy guns were better and in very real disputes over how engagements were handled. In a world increasingly defined by lawless private paramilitaries, it is not inconceivable that an exceptionally cutthroat environment could take hold.

Every fresh Russian demand for a force of 300 to guard a diamond mine could spark infighting, brawls, or even targeted kidnapping and assassination among paramilitaries hunting for the contract. If that kind of violence runs long enough, individual PMCs might choose to fight it out to settle their disputes. Should that happen on the soil of one of Russia’s foreign partners, that partner will not be pleased—and should it happen on the streets of Moscow or St.

Petersburg, the consequences could be graver still.

That leaves a final, open question. If Russia decides that PMCs are worth the continued trouble—and that does appear to be Moscow’s current verdict—then what does the resulting ecosystem actually look like? Does maintaining Russia’s hegemony eventually become a bidding war among bounty hunters, each job auctioned off to whichever freelancer secures that day’s contract?

Does one group start making power plays, pushing rivals out of the market and swelling its own ranks? Do private armies become a fashionable accessory among Russia’s oligarchs, as much a status symbol as a yacht or a mansion? Or do they drift ever closer to the Russian military and intelligence services, operating as explicit extensions of the state’s will so that Putin can keep them in check?

How Russia’s flirtation with PMCs ultimately resolves cannot be known until it happens—and it may never be seen at all, since the entire point of these forces is to keep Russia’s internal matters hidden and to project influence in a way that looks as if Moscow was never there. But whatever comes next, Russia’s PMC legion does not appear to be shrinking. By the day it grows larger, even as Russia’s traditional global influence seems to diminish. Follow that logic to its conclusion, and the PMC legion may one day become a PMC nation—though, for now, the world will simply have to wait and see.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Russia rely on private military companies instead of its regular armed forces?

PMCs give Moscow plausible deniability. They let Russia protect dictators, guard valuable mines, and train pro-Russian rebels without putting the state’s official seal on actions that may amount to crimes against humanity. They are cheap, expendable, typically funded from outside the official state structure, and—conveniently—illegal under Russian law, which lets Moscow disclaim any connection to them.

What was Redut tasked with doing during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine?

According to a joint investigation by Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, and The Insider, Redut was assigned responsibility for assassinating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The plan, overseen by GRU deputy head General Vladimir Alexeev, involved poaching Wagner fighters to build a force capable of storming Kyiv. When the invasion stalled, Redut took shocking casualties and nearly vanished for a year before rebuilding to over 7,000 soldiers.

What makes Rusich and the Russian Imperial Movement distinct from groups like Wagner?

Both are driven primarily by ideology rather than profit. Rusich is widely described as a neo-Nazi sabotage and reconnaissance group, founded in 2009 by Alexey Milchakov. The Russian Imperial Movement, founded in 2002, consists of white supremacists who champion Tsarist ethnonationalism and runs the Partizan training academy. Both operate with near-total impunity inside Russia, even as their open extremism contradicts Moscow’s stated goal of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine.

Why does Gazprom have its own mercenary battalions?

Gazprom fields Fakel (“Torch”) and Potok (“Stream”), recruited mainly from its own roughly 450,000-strong workforce, primarily to guard fixed assets like refineries and drilling fields. They also protect Gazprom against the cutthroat factionalism among Russia’s elite, since the company is central to the state, the war effort, and Putin’s power base. Some of their troops have nonetheless fought in Ukraine, including around Bakhmut in 2023.

What did Wagner’s 2023 mutiny reveal about the PMC model?

It demonstrated that mercenaries are reliable only as long as they are paid and content—and that once they amass enough power, provoking them becomes dangerous. Wagner’s attempt to seize senior Defense Ministry officials and march on Moscow reminded the Kremlin that PMCs are independent entities, not fully controllable tools. Shutting down Wagner did not end the model; it simply created a vacuum for rivals like Redut to grow stronger.