The Age of the Mercenary Is Here to Stay

Despite the Wagner Group’s decline, it represented a fundamental change in contemporary warfare.

In the last year, Russia terminated the Wagner Group’s decade of battlefield domination almost as suddenly and violently as it did its former leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. With the age of the modern mercenary only beginning to dawn, Wagner has provided a blueprint that other state-sponsored groups will inevitably adopt. As guns-for-hire reshape conflicts from Ukraine to the Sahel, it is important to recognize that Wagner was not the first private military company (PMC) to rewrite the terms of war, nor will they be the last. The West needs to learn this painful lesson now, before we are caught off guard again.

Across the West, governments have wasted a vital ten years since Wagner’s 2014 inception. We have bought into the myth that Wagner is an outlier; a unique Russian monster, stitched together from corruption, imperial nostalgia, and the thirst for violence and glory. All this may ring true. Prigozhin called himself “Putin’s Butcher” and hardly distanced himself from the Russian government. When he led his troops on a march to Moscow in June 2024, though, the Kremlin and West alike were left astounded.

One month later, the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee published its scathing report, with its Chair, Alicia Kearns MP, finding that “for nearly 10 years, the Government has under-played and under-estimated the Wagner Network’s activities.” The disintegration of the group after ten years of successful combat records in Ukraine, Syria, Mali, and beyond is not, despite what some governments may think, a happy ending.

By treating Wagner as an aberration rather than a profound structural shift in modern warfare, policymakers will inevitably criticize, condemn, and move on, without confronting the root of the problem. The reality is that the international community had no effective legal or institutional mechanisms to regulate Wagner, either under international humanitarian law or public international law.

The group occupied an ambiguous warfighting space; too independent for Russia to be held directly accountable, yet too closely tied to the Kremlin to fit the traditional legal definition of a mercenary, which is grounded in financial motivation and independence from state actors. Rather than being the disease itself, Wagner was therefore a symptom of a changing international order, in which the state-adjacent mercenary has become a new and resilient feature of modern conflict.

We can look to recent history for similar examples. In the closing acts of apartheid-era South Africa, thousands of combat soldiers and officers, who had achieved operational excellence out in the Bush during the South African Border War, found themselves suddenly unemployed and unwanted by the new democratic, post-Apartheid government. They founded the PMC Executive Outcomes, which demonstrated just how effective a hired army could be. The fledgling group successfully undermined rebel forces in Angola and Sierra Leone, where UN missions had failed for years.

Analysts have always considered Executive Outcomes an anomaly—a relic of apartheid South Africa’s militarism that was unique to its geopolitical context. This should be starting to sound familiar. Wagner shattered that illusion. It proved that mercenary companies, well-connected to state actors, can thrive in modern conflicts: winning battles, seizing territory, and shaping state formation. They do so with enough legal ambiguity to give states involved plausible deniability.

It is this combination of effectiveness and distance that makes PMCs so attractive to governments. Why fight public opinion, curtailed budgets, and domestic checks and balances, all to send conscripts to die in unpopular foreign wars? Instead, simply hire a private army to do the job, with a smile and a countersigned invoice.

PMCs are far more ambitious and independent than policymakers want to admit. Sure, Wagner may well have originated out of a conversation held between two particularly creative interns in the Russian Security Services, but the group proved that private militaries can do their jobs better than state armies and offer an unregulated avenue for intervention.

It was Wagner that led the bloody 2022 assault on Bakhmut, supported by the Russian army, not the other way around. Wagner troops were first into the Donbas in 2014, allowing Russia to maintain plausible deniability until later on. Wagner’s plain-clothed troops were kingmakers in the Central African Republic, crushing rebels and engaging in “state capture.”

Confronting this new reality brings us to an uncomfortable conclusion: modern mercenary groups can be effective and operate globally. They allow their affiliated governments to keep their hands clean while conducting irregular foreign policy through violence.

Western governments must develop a new regulatory framework that treats state-linked PMCs as extensions of state power and components of strategic calculations, rather than as mere commercial actors offering only tactical support. This means considering how international law can better account for hybrid entities that blend national priorities with private execution, and building monitoring and sanctions mechanisms capable of targeting both state sponsors and their private proxies. Unless we modernise our legal and strategic toolbox, the next Wagner PMC won’t just surprise us, it will leave us outmanoeuvred, and trying desperately to catch up—again.

* Amar Singh Bhandal is a policy fellow at the Pinsker Centre, a UK-based think tank focusing on Middle Eastern affairs and international relations. Amar is reading for an MPhil in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is a recent alumnus of the Hertog War Studies Program at the Institute for the Study of War’s Petraeus Center for Emerging Leaders.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-age-of-the-mercenary-is-here-to-stay