Russian Military Reorganization, Modernization & The Market for Private Force

The activity of Russian PMSCs in the Greater Middle East and its periphery shows great continuity with prior Russian and Soviet strategies and tactics. Much as the Kremlin did during the Cold War, when Russia deployed hundreds of “Comrade Tourists,” essentially covert military operators, to its near abroad under military-technical agreements. Covert operators who today operate as PMSCs reinforce Russia’s national security interests in areas of the world where it can ill-afford political instability that adversely affects Russia’s leading exports—energy and arms.

In contemporary terms, as Stephen Blank aptly notes, a direct line can be drawn between twenty-first century Russian grand strategy during the Putin era and policies long promoted by Yevgeny Primakov during the twentieth century.¹ An Arabist and former Middle East correspondent for the Soviet party daily newspaper Pravda, Primakov later became Russia’s foreign minister and one of the most influential architects of Moscow’s foreign policy; he would later, during the 1990s, also serve as the head of Russian Foreign Intelligence and as Prime Minister. Over the 50 years that he covered the region as a journalist, spymaster, and diplomat, Primakov came to know the leading Arab politicians who would transition the Middle East from British and French rule. From the 1950s forward, Primakov insisted that exerting influence was the key to maintaining Russia’s Great Power status. The Middle East, Primakov once said, “is nothing short of Russia`s ‘soft underbelly.’”²

For Primakov, influencing the region meant being on the most intimate of terms with Arab nationalists and, perhaps more importantly, with the armies that supported them. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Algeria’s Houari Boumediene, and Syria’s Hafez Assad, in Primakov’s view, were the Kremlin’s path to influence. Col. Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, too, later became important in this respect but Moscow’s relationship with him was often prickly. All military men, they were the real catalysts behind the pan-Arab movement in the Cold War era.³ The military forces they led provided not only the muscle, but also the political leadership in the absence of a substantive political party structure.⁴

During the early half of the Cold War, from the late 1940s through the 1970s, the Soviet Union concentrated much of its focus on Egypt and Syria. The Kremlin viewed the fate of efforts to penetrate the Middle East as bound up in Nasser and Assad’s political fortunes. Nasser`s pan-Arabism was construed in Moscow as an Arab version of proletarian internationalism and a convenient political entry point for the region writ large.⁵ The 1956 Suez Canal crisis further spurred the growth of a close Soviet-Egyptian relationship, and Soviet military support to Cairo was critical in this regard.⁶

All the above factors ultimately led to the establishment of the Soviet-Egyptian military alliance, a relationship that for a time served as a cornerstone for expanding Soviet influence in the region.⁷ The overall number of the Soviet advisors, that streamed into Egypt is still unknown, but it might have been between 20,000-50,000 during the 1967–1973 timeframe⁸ before Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, ended the arrangement not long after Egypt’s defeat in the Six Day War.⁹ Sadat expelled the Russian advisors after the Soviets refused to provide offensive weapons in an effort to tamp down the risk of an escalation spiral with Israel, and as a result, the United States.¹⁰

Spurred by their bitter experience with Sadat in Egypt, Soviet officials were much more deliberate and careful in their handling of the placement of military advisors from 1967 forward. Soviet military advisors were clandestinely transported to Syria from the Soviet Black Sea ports—mainly via the Ukrainian port city of Nikolayev—and would be dressed in Syrian military uniforms upon the arrival.¹¹ The exact number of so-called Comrade Tourists is unknown but the memoirs of veterans and Soviet diplomats suggest that the number of Soviet anti-aircraft forces alone who specialized in servicing S-200 surface-to-air missile systems in Syria may have reached into the thousands in the 1980s.¹² Russian veterans of such missions to Syria claim it was not uncommon for secrecy to surround casualties from such missions, much as it appears to do today.¹³

Whatever the actual total number, it was likely significant judging from the accounts of some of the 800 survivors of the Syrian “tourist” covert military advisory program who appealed in 2015 to the Kremlin for compensation for their service.¹⁴ Present day Russian foreign policy in Syria, and other countries where Russian PMSCs are active, draws on these antecedent lines laid during peak periods of Russian investment in Arab client states.

Among these key antecedent lines is the development of a substantial Russian interest in arms sales to its Arab clients. Initiated in 1970, Soviet-Libyan military cooperation bloomed around 1975, reaching almost $20 billion in weapons procurement deals.¹⁵ An estimated 11,000 Soviet military advisors played a role like that of contemporary Russian PMSCs. The Comrade Tourists, in Libya were extensively involved in a series of border skirmishes with Chad, Sudan, Egypt, Niger, and Tanzania.¹⁶ According to some estimates, upwards of 4,000 to 5,000 former Soviet citizens opted to stay in Libya and serve Qaddafi’s regime even after Soviet aid began to taper in the 1980s.¹⁷

It was ultimately Syria, however, that emerged as the real prize of Primakov’s doctrine. Primakov, who for 14 years reported as a journalist for Pravda on Syria’s convulsive evolution from French colonial outpost to autocratic Ba’ath Party socialist redoubt, also doubled as an intelligence agent. Like many Soviet journalists of the era, he traveled frequently across the Middle East gathering critical information for Soviet higher ups, and reported back under a KGB code name.¹⁸ During Primakov’s heyday in Syria, the Soviets put special emphasis on providing the local forces with weaponry as well the equipment and know-how needed to help the Assad family regime suppress perceived domestic political threats.

From 1956 to 1990, the Soviet Union provided Syria with an estimated $26 billion in military-technical assistance.¹⁹ From the 1960s forward, priority was given to supplying battle tanks, aviation, radio-electronic intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities.²⁰ Beyond the extensive train and equip mission, the Soviets also played an essential role in planning Syrian intelligence and military operations. In 1965, for instance, Soviet advisors helped their Syrian intelligence counterparts capture one of the Israeli Mossad’s most accomplished agents, Eli Cohen, with signals detection equipment.²¹ Nearly 20 years after Cohen was charged and executed on espionage charges, Colonel General Grigori Yashkin, the head of the Soviet military contingent in Syria, personally took charge of the preparation of Syrian military maneuvers during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee.²²

Despite the failure of this investment to transform the Syrian military into an effective independent force, the Soviets gained other advantages, particularly in the form of basing rights at Tartus and Latakia. Throughout, major Russian state energy and military-industrial companies supplied the men, money, and materiel needed to cement a strong foothold in the region. The consequences of this Cold War foreign policy in shaping Russia’s strategic goals and use of PMSCs today have been long-lasting. With millions of Russians employed domestically in these two key sectors of arms and energy, the role of Syria and other Middle Eastern client states in propping up the Soviet and post-Soviet economy would be hard to overstate. At the same time, lessons from the failure of military advisors during the Soviet era to convert Kremlin largess into Syrian military prowess would also ultimately be applied later after the Arab Spring began, as noted by Russian defense expert Vladislav Shurygin.²³

Moscow’s deployment of military advisors with weaponry deliveries was a hallmark of Primakov’s influence on Soviet policy that lasted right up to the end of the Cold War. In the immediate years after the collapse, during the bridge from Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Boris Yeltsin’s tenure to Putin’s, there was a marked downshift in Russian involvement in the Middle East, as the Kremlin sought to reorient itself on a friendlier footing with Israel, the United States, and Europe. Primakov as prime minister continued to push the line that Russia’s Great Power status was bound to Moscow’s relations in the Middle East. The bitter end to the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan and the post-Soviet bloody wars against Islamist separatists in Chechnya, however, greatly undercut the Kremlin’s credibility in the region.

However, despite the downshift in the 1990s, Russian strategy in the Greater Middle East during the Cold War established patterns that would continue in the post-Soviet era. First, it established arms sales and military aid as a core part of Russia’s economy—that legacy continues even with the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet military aid in Egypt, at the time the main beachhead for Soviet influence in the region, by some accounts reached roughly $9 billion over the 1955 to 1972 period. ²⁴ In today’s dollar value, that puts it on par with Russia’s contemporary investments in Syria.

Second, Soviet fears that exposure of the details of that investment could escalate tensions with the United States led Moscow to build a clandestine arms pipeline with secret transfer points in Warsaw Pact countries, such as Czechoslovakia, and to forge surreptitious maritime routes from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and onto the Red Sea for the transit of key military personnel and goods.²⁵ Many of these routes remain sites of competition and key hubs of Russian military influence today, linking Russia’s involvement in proxy wars in Syria and the Middle East to the proxy war in Ukraine.

Third, much like their contemporary compatriots who ran Soviet efforts to cultivate influence with Hafez Assad’s regime in Syria, the obsession with secrecy and discretion led Moscow to send military advisors as “tourists,” a tactic that would replay itself in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine.²⁶ In each of these Kremlin-led interventions, political warfare, espionage, and influence campaigns supported covert reconnaissance and sabotage missions that paved the way for direct military incursions, much as they have more recently in Ukraine and Syria. The playbook of deploying deceptive maskirovka tactics to mask mobilization and hide true objectives is the same, but in the post-Cold War era, globalized supply chains and finance has substantially shifted the configuration of players who deploy the means to reaching Russia’s strategic ends.

Most Russian PMSCs trace their origins back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when the chaotic dissolution of the Soviet Union saw the privatization of state-run industries and a massive reorganization of the Russian military. The transition precipitated a nearly wholesale retooling of the Russian military-industrial complex as it cast off large numbers of soldiers and workers dependent on the country’s defense industrial base. The loss of these jobs generated substantial social upheaval.

During Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure in the 1980s, one U.S. assessment placed the number of active duty forces at 4.9 million with an additional 1 million soldiers active in Warsaw Pact countries.²⁷ Overextension in Afghanistan progressively saw that number downsized considerably, though estimates vary as to how many forces were standing on the eve of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. After the Soviet collapse, the Kremlin reportedly slashed its nearly 3 million force by roughly half—leaving a little over 1 million soldiers active.²⁸ The massive downsizing of the Russian military that began as Yeltsin consolidated power in 1990–1991 created a pool of thousands of experienced veteran soldiers available for hire.

Coinciding as it did with the end of Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1989, the wave of military cuts and mass demobilization of so-called Afghantsy veterans spurred the growth of dual-hatted veterans clubs-cum-protection rackets. Isolated, psychologically battered and marginalized amid a public backlash against the war in Afghanistan, many veterans clung together on Russia’s politically nationalist fringes. They consolidated cliques that conformed to their prior mission sets in Afghan provinces. St. Petersburg scholar Vladimir Volkov estimates that at least one such group—the Herat Association—boasted an 8,000 person strong membership when it was initially set up as a military sports club in 1991.²⁹ Afghanvet, another equally famous veterans club protection racket, hailed from St. Petersburg, which was a key feeder city for many of the military’s most elite units and later became a central node in the PMSC industry.

Many veterans’ association leaders had served during an upsurge in the deployment of spetsnaz groups sent to Afghanistan as a bulwark against agile mujahideen guerillas. These groups included Russia’s Airborne Forces (VDV) paratrooper divisions and spetsnaz forces affiliated with the former KGB and its successor organs.³⁰ Among the most prominent of the KGB spetsnaz units in this category were Alpha Group and its sister unit Vympel, counter-terror and counter-espionage units whose lineage traces back to WWII partisan warfare units and the creation of specialized irregular reconnaissance task forces in the 1950s.³¹

Alpha and Vympel (also known as Vega Group) were formed under the auspices of the KGB Development Courses for Officer Personnel training regime, known by its acronym KUOS³²—later known as the KGB Higher Red Banner Training Academy or Higher School, the KGB and later FSB equivalent of an officers training corps. Most of the higher-ranking veterans of these elite higher-academy trained groups were skilled in foreign languages and trained as advance reconnaissance strike forces.

Officers trained under the KUOS regime typically wore plainclothes, operated clandestinely and served as either stay behind forces behind enemy lines or as core members of guerilla partisan forces in the event of invasion. Alpha was expressly designed to protect Soviet leaders from blackmail and assassination while Vympel, in addition to its sabotage brief, was tasked with assassinating heads of state and other political targets. In the 1990’s, these specially trained units were additionally tasked with safeguarding transports from terrorist acts and protecting military-industrial infrastructure.³³

Like many elites of the KGB Higher School, the men who served in these special units were tasked by the KGB’s First Main Directorate with supporting and training Soviet-backed guerillas in partisan warfare tactics, including most famously Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.³⁴ The specialized training cemented long lasting relationships between elite Russian officers and counterparts in proxy war hotspots across the Middle East as well as outside it in places like Angola and Cuba, links that would come in handy again as much of the Soviet military began to be absorbed into the private sector in the post-Soviet era.

The end of the Cold War saw the doctrinal focus of these elite troops switch from preparation for war with NATO to containing instability in breakaway republics of the Soviet Union. Spetsnaz units once controlled by the Kremlin were effectively transferred to the control of newly independent states, such as Ukraine, while others that remained in the Soviet sphere were shuffled and reshuffled.

When Soviet leaders began scrambling the organizational structure of its elite forces on the heels of the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners against Gorbachev, Yeltsin era reforms placed Vympel for a time under the command of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD. Alpha remained under the control of the KGB. Later, both were placed under the FSB after the KGB was reorganized again.³⁵

Throughout the 1990s, as noted by Yuri Felshintsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, Russia’s premier state security apparatus generally retained its primary mission and organizational character even as the intelligence agency underwent a massive reshuffling through at least a half dozen different executive orders issued by Gorbachev and former president Boris Yeltsin.³⁶ It bears noting, however, that under Putin the KGB’s successor organ, the FSB, and related security agencies, such as the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, have become much more pervasive in their powers, as observed by Russian investigative journalists Yuri Soldatov and Irina Borogan.³⁷

In the Yeltsin era, mounting financial pressures resulted in late pay, poor housing conditions, and a general downgrade in status for many in Russia’s elite security forces.³⁸ Vadim Volkov estimates that more than 20,000 KGB officers resigned or were discharged within a year of the failed military putsch.³⁹ As with their spetsnaz counterparts in the airborne VDV, the constant churn decimated morale in Vympel and Alpha, leading many of its members to term out their service. Small, elite, and extremely close-knit after years of service in the shadow of Kremlin powerbrokers, several MVD and FSB Vympel and Alpha unit leaders opted to start their own security companies in the heady 1990s, when mafia groups ruled the streets of major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

After the passage of Russia’s first law on domestic private security companies in 1992, the Alpha and Vympel brand proved enduring, propelling the private industry careers of dozens of leading KGB/FSB officers, who would go on to head up security for major banks and financial service companies.⁴⁰ A significant number of such PMSC companies even took the name of their parent organs. While one Alpha-linked PMSC offshoot was apparently purchased by the U.S.-based Armour Group at the peak of the privatization fervor in the 1990s,⁴¹ another, named Alpha-B, proudly touts the elite lineage of its Moscow based owner-operators on its website and states that many of its members served in Alpha before the company was formed in 1992.⁴² Yet, another, Alfa Unit 1, which advertises its services in Crimea, appears to have be headed by Alpha members that were at one point affiliated with the MVD.⁴³

There is no known complete list of various companies that come from the Alpha and Vympel line of private security companies, but by 1998 an official Russian government estimate placed the total number of private security companies operating in Russia at around 5,000.⁴⁴ Given the number of firms that were unregistered and often incubated in sports clubs across the country, the total was likely higher.⁴⁵ These antecedent clubs would continue to figure prominently in the evolution of Russia’s private security industry, serving as important nodes for recruitment, training and other organizational management tasks.

The transition of elite security cadres from government service to private security overlapped with several phases of privatization and reorganization of state enterprises of strategic importance for Russia’s export base. State-backed energy firms soon emerged as a key incubator for the PMSC industry.⁴⁶ A few years after the Soviet collapse, Yeltsin issued an executive decree that allowed Gazprom and Transneft to set up their own militarized armies to protect newly built infrastructure.⁴⁷ Transneft and Gazprom subsequently joined a wave of state-run firms in the finance and energy sectors that staffed their specialized security divisions with former top KGB officers at the time. A few years later, in 1997, Yeltsin issued a series of decrees that essentially reconsolidated Kremlin control over Rosboronexport, the country's main arms exporter.⁴⁸

In 1993, Gazprom’s late and legendary longtime director, Rem Vyakhirev, hired two separate teams led by former KGB Alpha officers to head up Gazprom’s security. Out of power and out of work, KGB Reserve General Major Vladimir Medvedev tasked a group of former Alpha team members to run Vyakhirev’s personal protection detail.⁴⁹ That same year, the staff of former KGB General Major Viktor Ivanenko at the KGB’s Higher Red Banner Training Academy—most notably Col. Vladmir Marushchenko—took the lead on securing Gazprom company infrastructure and interests.⁵⁰

Marushchenko, who reportedly as recently as 2018 served as deputy head of the Department of Economic and Information Security of United Instrument-Making Corporation,⁵¹ a Rostec subsidiary, was born in Ukraine. He also served for a time as vice-chair of a national council on security entrepreneurship and founder of the Council of the Association of State Security Veterans,⁵² and is credited with recruiting the first wave of Gazprom’s official army by leveraging his personal connections as head of a veterans’ association. A key target of these recruitment efforts were spetsnaz graduates of the KGB Higher School, which sloughed off officers from and reorganized as the FSB in successive waves of reshuffling during the 1995 to 2000 period that marked the transition from the Yeltsin to Putin presidency.

Volkov estimated in 2002 that Gazprom’s security division had some 13,000 employees with 41 distinct subdivisions.⁵³ With roughly 300,000 employees total on the books by 2006, Gazprom stood as one of Russia’s single largest employers while tax revenues generated by the gas giant accounted for approximately 25 percent of the entire Russian state budget, according to a 2010 study by American military analyst Cindy Hurst.⁵⁴

By 2007, Gazprom employed 20,000 or more in its security service.⁵⁵ When Russia’s parliament, the Duma, began considering that same year whether to prohibit private security companies from arming their staff, Gazprom and other state majors, such as Transneft, put up stiff resistance. The successful lobbying effort led the Duma to ultimately include in the Federal Law on Armaments a work-around for strategic enterprises and corporations like Gazprom and other majority state-owned energy firms.⁵⁶

It was around this same time—2005 to 2007—that Putin led an effort to quietly privatize still more portions of the Russian economy by handing the reigns of major exporting industries to longtime KGB/FSB associates and a handful of politicians with ties to state security organs. As documented by Vadim Volkov, shortly before stepping down after his first term as president, Putin signed into law the creation of a raft of “nonprofit nongovernmental organizations dubbed goskorporatsii, or ‘state corporations.’”⁵⁷

It was under this scheme that Putin appointed his two close colleagues Sergei Ivanov and Igor Sechin to head the first of these special strategic state corporations, the United Aircraftbuilding Corporation and United Shipbuilding Corporation, respectively.⁵⁸ This approach facilitated the reconsolidation of state properties as joint-stock firms in which the Russian state is the majority shareholder. The 1999 Law on Non-Commercial Organizations, as Volkov has noted, established a second type of state cooperation in which state funds or property were donated to create and secure public goods.⁵⁹

The assets of Rosboronexport, the defense industry giant headed by Putin’s other close colleague Sergei Chemezov, were first consolidated in a 1999 statute and would later form the majority state-owned enterprise known as Rostec.⁶⁰ Part of a package of 1990s legislation that seeded a massive reorganization of Russia’s military-industrial complex, and put the GRU effectively in charge of managing military-technical cooperation agreements for foreign arms trade deals, the moves to transform parts of strategic industries continued through the early years of Putin’s first presidential term.

Consolidation of Russia’s military-industrial complex would prove a boon for Rosboronexport, Gazprom, and other Russian strategic enterprises, as would subsequent efforts to restructure the massive debts incurred by Syria and other major Middle East arms and energy clients. In 2005, Russia agreed to wipe out $9.78 billion of a total of $13 billion debt owed by Syria to the Russian state for Soviet era energy and arms deals.⁶¹ Both moves—the militarization of state strategic enterprises and debt consolidation among major energy and arms trading partners in the Middle East—were critical for Russia’s progressive push to recalibrate its role in the Middle East and in Africa. They also represented a new, more robust extension of Primakov’s doctrine of leveraging the Kremlin’s tight hold on the Russian military-industrial complex to gain influence in the region and project power.

Putin, who inherited Primakov’s one-time role as head of the KGB/SVR successor agency FSB, has subsequently revived the Primakov Doctrine, even surpassing his predecessor’s legacy by building on old patterns of cooperation with Moscow’s longtime Middle East client base and at the same time tapping what Kimberly Marten has called Putin’s “informal political networks” to manage relations with Middle Eastern elites.⁶² In addition to powerful ministries, such as energy and internal security and defense, leaders of Russia’s defense, energy, and maritime industries form part of Putin’s powerbase. Where state enterprises, such as Gazprom, Rostec/Rosboronexport, and Sovcomflot, turn their attention, so too does Russian foreign and domestic policy. Rich in energy and geopolitically pivotal, the Middle East and Africa, therefore, are just as important for power projection as it is a conduit for Putin’s ability to corral rent-seeking Kremlin insiders.

Russia’s dependency on oil and gas exports as its central economic pillar is well known and Putin’s singular focus on positioning the country as an energy superpower has been well documented.⁶³ With $93 billion in annual revenues, the Russian energy giant Gazprom constituted more than 7 percent of Russia’s GDP in 2007, and remains a substantial generator of Russian national wealth.⁶⁴ It is also a key source of Putin’s personal wealth, according to several well-known Russian and Western experts.⁶⁵ Gazprom, Tatneft, StroyTransGaz, Zarubezhneft, Rosneft, and Surgutneftgaz, not coincidentally, are helmed by longtime close associates of Putin, and lay claim to the bulk of the export and transit network infrastructure for energy production networks that span the Middle East and parts of Africa.

Like most energy majors, the fortunes of state-run firms, such as StroyTransGaz, or STG, have fluctuated overtime with structural changes to globalized markets, such as the shale gas boom. Rosboronexport is another such example. Geopolitical shifts in Asia during the first 20 years after the Soviet collapse saw a reorientation of many of Russia’s traditional markets for arms toward greater integration with the West. Demand for Russian arms in Russia’s largest arms market fluctuated as a result, making expansion in one of its largest markets, the Middle East and Africa, even more critical for economic and political stability.⁶⁶

Building on its Cold War importance, Syria holds a key strategic place for these economies. In addition to providing support to the Russian naval base in Tartus, Kremlin-backed energy, transportation, and construction companies have operated in mineral rich areas across the country for decades. Moscow’s foreign investment expanded and contracted in three distinct waves over the last 60 years, hitting record peaks in the mid-1980s before the Soviet collapse and increasing again from the mid-2000s up to the Arab Spring.⁶⁷ From 1957 to the early 2000s, the Soviet Union initiated some 85 major infrastructure projects in the country, completing construction on a little more than 60 of them by 2005.⁶⁸ Some of the largest included a string of hydropower electric stations along the Euphrates, oil fields in the northeast, and the Homs-Aleppo oil pipeline. Russia had also helped lay thousands of miles of railway and power lines across the country.

Although the Soviet collapse and First Gulf War in 1991 saw a brief Kremlin downturn of investment in Syria, Kremlin relations with Bashar al-Assad’s regime grew stronger in tandem with Putin’s rise and growing tensions between Washington and both Moscow and Damascus.⁶⁹ Syria’s progressive isolation as a result of its occupation of Lebanon had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, Assad’s erratic relations with its neighbor were cause for concern, but it also made Assad more dependent on external stakeholders like Russia. U.S. sanctions against Assad in response to the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri provided fresh entry points for Russia to gain more leverage in Syria’s faltering economy—primarily via energy and arms deals.

From 2003 to 2010, Russia and Syria inked several cooperation agreements, including several weapons procurement deals with Rosboronexport worth hundreds of millions.⁷⁰ Most importantly for the burgeoning post-Soviet Russian private security industry, the rekindling of Kremlin relations with the Assad regime during this period also led to the establishment of the Syrian-Russian Business Council in 2008.⁷¹ In addition to Russia’s ministries of defense, energy, and economic development, the council includes representatives from Russia’s largest state energy producers.

This expansion of Russian strategic trade in arms and energy in the Middle East and Africa sparked the outgrowth of Russia’s PMSC industry in the 2000s.⁷² Russia’s dependence on energy and arms trade for hard currency and the creaking state of its industrial infrastructure is well-known and has long been its Achilles’ heel.⁷³ The global proliferation of Russian PMSC contingents coincided closely with the tail end of the global financial crisis, a steep drop in oil prices, and the final stage of a years-long effort to modernize the Russian military in the wake of hard lessons learned from its 2008 incursion in Georgia.

As during the Cold War, access to the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and the Caspian Sea—and consequently to major maritime routes to the Global South—closely linked Russian involvement in the Middle East with Russia’s core interests. Such access has long been a central concern of the Russian state since the time of Catherine the Great. The first Crimean War is a testament to that fact. Post-Cold War, Russian incursions in Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast also reflect those concerns.

The 2011 Arab Spring and the 2013–2014 Euromaidan uprisings in Ukraine represented a triple threat for the Kremlin with regard to its sea access to major arms and energy markets. Putin saw echoes of the Color Revolutions and an “invisible American hand” in both instances. The uprising against Viktor Yanukovych’s regime in Ukraine threatened to upend Russia’s longstanding access to important maritime and land routes for energy trade and arms transit.

Regime change came first in Egypt then Libya and Ukraine, and the threat of it in Syria imperiled Moscow’s longstanding share of markets critical to the stability of the Russian economy. Social upheaval in each of these counties roiled energy markets at a time when Russia was still recovering from a precipitous drop in oil price from $145 to $60 and below a barrel almost overnight in 2008.⁷⁴ At the same time, instability rocked Russia’s arms trade. The collapse of Qaddafi’s regime alone vaporized an estimated $7 billion in Russian arms contracts.⁷⁵ For the Kremlin, the arms trade was to prove an important means for ensuring stability for imperiled authoritarian partner regimes in the region and reinsuring Russian influence in this time of upheaval in the region’s energy markets.

As noted by Richard Connolly and Cecilie Senstad, Putin’s closest advisors have openly referred to Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation as “the country’s second foreign policy agency.”⁷⁶ The $15 billion-a-year Russian defense industry is especially central to the Kremlin’s tried and true strategy of using military-technical cooperation agreements as a means of wielding influence abroad.⁷⁷ By way of example, Syria frequently ranked among the top recipients of Soviet arms exports from 1980 to 1996.⁷⁸ During much of the Putin era, Russia has supplied close to half of Syria’s arms imports; a trend that was an important consideration before Moscow’s 2015 decision to aid Assad’s regime, and that will presumably continue to influence Moscow’s close relations with Damascus.⁷⁹

Increased Kremlin reliance on PMSCs in Syria during the first two years of the civil war also coincided with the maturation of Russian Ministry of Defense efforts from 2008 to 2012 to implement sweeping military reforms under the direction of former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. While a full analysis is far beyond the scope of this paper, it would be difficult to understate the importance of changes in response to the embarrassing breakdown of command, control, and communications links during the 2008 Russian intervention in Georgia.

The introduction of the so-called “New Look” reforms for Russia’s private security industry on the one hand led to a massive top to bottom shake up of spetsnaz forces, prompting a wave of departures and eventually the resignation of the head of the GRU. On the other, the changes created new force management approaches that led to the establishment of a unified command structure for special forces under the auspices of the Special Operations Forces Command, or SSO.⁸⁰ Contracted officers, or kontraktniki, under this coordinated command structure officially came online in 2013, while joint training centers, including one in Molkino, Russia that would serve as an entry point for PMSC contingents like Wagner, were set up a few years earlier.⁸¹