Thread by @yuvalweber

New publication 📃 "Not So Private Military and Security Companies: Wagner Group and Russian Prosecution of Great Power Politics and short explainer 🧵. Published by @CSIS and @CSISRussia and sponsored by @US_EUCOM, it is available here: csis.org/blogs/post-sov….

This was the outgrowth of a #BruteCast held by @TheKrulakCenter @MCUFoundation and available here: on how to think about the informality of Russian private military and security companies (PMSCs)

And here's the structure of the paper: 1) I identify Russia's core strategic dissatisfaction with the international order, that it began with the 1991 collapse of the USSR and not the 1989 resolution of the Cold War;

2) Since Russia's been unable to resolve this dissatisfaction at the great power level, it turned to revising the int'l order through developing a new hierarchical alliance network. This is hard to do on a budget, so it turned to PMSCs to intervene on the margins of int'l affairs

3) So why Wagner versus any other PMSC? Its patron, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has no military background but he's part of Putin's court, so he provided the bureaucratic connection between this particular company and the very top. Operational control is by Russian military intel GRU.

4) Wagner's success is therefore reflective of how informal politics works in Russia, and less of its battlefield success or organizational innovation. I spend a lot of time on this in the paper and have further papers in the works on the policy effects of Russian informality.

5) The paper then goes over why Russia uses PMSCs, including some obvious ones (plausible deniability and others) but also non-obvious ones: *implausible deniability*, meaning the information value of being present in place X and absolutely protesting that it's not true.

6) It then reviews Wagner's very broad range of international activities: supporting leaders, trying to overthrow them, getting minerals to market, interfering in elections, physical and plant security for Russian businesses abroad, etc.

7) There's a lot of great work out there on Wagner and PMSCs: @KimberlyMarten, Thomas Arnold, @seanmcfate and others. Not sure how to upload a .pdf but here's a picture of the bibliography.

8) TO CONCLUDE: Thanks to @DrJMankoff, @r_gabidullina, @cy_newlin, Heather Conley, Mark Cancian, and the absolutely tremendous @CSIS team for giving me this opportunity. ✌️

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