The main stories this week
- 💣 Why is the North Caucasus perpetually unstable? Russia’s failure to address legitimate grievances leaves it reliant on force
- 🪖 Russian PMCs may not exist now. But that doesn’t mean they never did
- 🪖 Sources report substantial African Corps losses in Mali
💣 Why is the North Caucasus perpetually unstable? Russia’s failure to address legitimate grievances leaves it reliant on force
I recently read Frank Ledwidge’s excellent book, Rebel Law: Insurgents, Courts and Justice in Modern Conflict. Some of the points he makes about the importance of legitimacy strike me as relevant to understanding why political violence keeps reemerging in the North Caucasus.
Ledwidge argues that legitimacy is central to governance, and therefore to successful counterinsurgency. In his view, “in the end, any successful counterinsurgency operation, if it has any ambitions to political effect, must take steps — or, more importantly, be seen to take steps — to address the legitimate grievances that insurgents use to generate and sustain popular support.”
What constitutes legitimacy? Ledwidge cites six possible indicators from the 2006 edition of the US Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies Field Manual: “[1] the ability to provide security, [2] the selection of leaders in a manner perceived to be just and fair, [3] a high-level of political participation, [4] a culturally acceptable level of corruption, [5] a culturally acceptable level of social and economic development, and [6] a high level of regime acceptance by major social institutions” (incidentally, I could only find a “final draft” of this version of the manual, and this contained only indicators [2]-[6]).
How does Russia’s governance of the North Caucasus score on these metrics? Democratic participation is lacking, the North Caucasian republics do not get much of a say in who governs them, and parts of the region — Chechnya being the most notable example — exceed even the increased authoritarianism that characterises modern Russia as a whole. In other words, the region scores poorly on [2] and [3]. What constitutes a “culturally acceptable” level of corruption is open to debate — to put it bluntly, Russian citizens expect their rulers to steal from them. Nevertheless, corruption is endemic, meaning [4] is hardly going to redeem the situation. The North Caucasian republics consistently rank towards the bottom of socio-economic development lists, so the score for [5] will be negligible. What exactly [6] means is not clear from the manual, so I’m not quite sure how to assess that. Overall, however, we can point to several significant “root causes” of instability in the region, consistently highlighted by researchers on the North Caucasus, that have been left unaddressed. These include corruption, arbitrary law enforcement behaviour, human rights violations, and a lack of opportunities for self-realisation.
Where Russia has succeeded is in [1], in so far as it has used brute force to suppress insurgency and, through this, provided a degree of security. Yet — if we accept these criteria for assessing legitimacy, and we accept that a legitimacy deficit feeds insurgency — this potentially traps Russia in a cycle of instability. Russian governance lacks legitimacy; that fuels political violence; political violence undermines the claim to provide security; and that then further undermines the legitimacy. Brute force, moreover, becomes a necessity, because it provides the primary basis for a claim to legitimacy.
An interesting question that emerges from this is why we don’t see more instability. On the one hand, it should be acknowledged that a legitimacy deficit does no more than provide the preconditions for insurgency — it does not directly cause it. Russia as a whole scores poorly on several of the criteria, and yet there are no grounds to expect nationwide rebellion. On the other hand, Russia has also been to a degree lucky in the enemy that it has faced. The insurgency that existed until late 2017 devoted very little effort to developing its own legitimacy and, through that, demonstrating its own claims to governance. The main focus of Ledwidge’s book, after all, is the role of insurgent courts and insurgent justice — something the pre-2017 insurgency never adequately developed. Nor did insurgent leaders do a good job of exploiting grievances in their statements (something I explore in my forthcoming book). More capable leaders could, in the future, do a better job of exploiting the material that is available to them.
A note: I plan to share more material like this — drawing on what I’m reading to share ideas as I develop them. Hopefully you find this useful!
🪖 Russian PMCs may not exist now. But that doesn’t mean they never did
It is possible to identify the brief existence of genuine Russian PMCs in the late 2000s-early 2010s, but the Moran Security Group's financial difficulties in 2012 initiated one of two processes that has led to the state-subordinated actors we see today.
Last week, I published an article on contemporary Russian PMCs, arguing that the term is a misnomer: They are not private, exclusively military, or corporate entities competing in the marketplace. You can read that article here.
One of the points that I excluded from the article, for the same of brevity, was the question of whether Russian PMCs ever existed. Some people argue they didn’t: former Russian security service personnel were involved in creating most of them, and there’s really no such thing as a ‘former’ in that world.
There is some merit to this argument, but I would argue that there was a brief period in the late 2000s-early 2010s when it was possible to talk about Russian corporate entities providing military services. The Moran Security Group is a good example: when it was launched circa 1999, it appeared to comply with Russian and international law and competed in the global market place for contracts. There were links to the Russian state, but these were not exceptional when compared to their Western counterparts.
Yet the evolution and demise of Moran also provides insights into the trajectory of the sector as a whole. A critical turning point for both occurred Nigeria in October 2012, when the authorities seized a ship registered to Moran and arrested Russian sailors on charges of illegal arms smuggling. The people were eventually released, but the ship was never recovered. Barabanov and Korotkov highlight this as an incident that plunged Moran into financial difficulties and led it to pursue new and riskier strategies. One of these was involvement, through the Slavonic Corps, in the Syrian conflict. Syria, in turn, is one of two parallel developments that are central to the origins of the contemporary Russian "PMC” landscape; events in Ukraine from 2014 onwards are the other. Wagner ultimately emerges from the confluence of the two.
Thus, I think we can talk of four distinct phases in the evolution of Russian PMCs: Pre-2013, 2013 through in the start of the invasion of Ukraine, February 2022 through to Wagner owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin's death in August 2023, and the post-Prigozhin era. Russia PMCs as genuine corporate entities did exist, but only in the first of those phases.
🪖 Sources report substantial African Corps losses in Mali
Various sources — including pro-Wagner Telegram accounts — have reported that African Corps and the regular Malian military were ambushed following a sandstorm.
A group of Tuareg rebels that are fighting for independence in northern Mali claimed that they had inflicted significant losses in fighting near Tinzaouten on 27-28 July. The rebels also claimed that they had taken some surviving Malian soldiers and African Corps members prisoner and seized armoured vehicles, trucks, and tanks.
The rebels reported dozens of enemy losses, as well as seven of their own killed and 12 injured. The Malian military reported two of its soldiers killed and 10 injured. One of BBC Russian Service’s sources claimed African Corps’ losses could be at least 82 people, representing the most significant losses since Wagner’s operations in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, in February 2018.
Among the losses confirmed by pro-Wagner Telegram channels were Sergey Shevchenko (Prud), commander of the 13th Storm Detachment and Nikita Fedyanin (Belyy/Pyatisotyy), an administrator of the Grey Zone Telegram channel. Senior Wagner commander Anton Yelizarov (Lotos) has reportedly been taken captive.
The incident — and the capture of such a senior figure as Yelizarov, who has sought to shape the transformation of Wagner into African Corps following the death of its owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin — represents a blow to the image of African Corps and its claims to be able to provide security to local regimes.
If Yelizarov was in Mali (nothing has been heard of him since February this year), then it also suggests the factional boundaries in the post-Prigozhin Wagner world are quite fluid. Yelizarov, after all, had sought to avoid the group’s absorption into the Ministry of Defence, securing the support of the National Guard (Rosgvardia) instead.
In the news
💣 The Federal Security Service (FSB) Directorate for the Eastern Military District has accused a resident of Khabarovsk of treason, collecting data on military personnel for Ukrainian intelligence, and attempting to recruit such personnel to fight with the Free Russia Legion against Russia.
👺 The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel claimed that Turpal Kuchiyev, a nephew of State Duma Deputy for Chechnya Adam Delimkhanov, was killed in a car accident on 11 July. The media did not report on the incident. Kuchiyev was a suspect in the murder of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
🪖 A court in Sochi sentenced former Wagner fighter Oleg Mullayanov to nine years for attempted drug dealing. As is customary, the court considered Mullayanov’s participation in Russia’s war on Ukraine and Wagner awards to be mitigating circumstances. Mullayanov has three previous convictions — two for drug-related offences and one for stealing a car — and was recruited to Wagner from prison.
🪖 A court in Rostov-on-the-Don sentenced former Wagner fighter Andrey Zheludkov to four years for beating a man to death. The attack was a response to the man’s abusive comments about the war in Ukraine. As with Mullayanov, fighting in Ukraine and Wagner medals were considered as mitigation.
💣 The FSB claims that it has prevented another attack on an Orthodox church and law enforcement in Dagestan. It reported on the detention of three residents of Kaspiysk and the seizure of an improvised explosive device, firearms, and the flag of an unspecified international terrorist organisation — presumably the Islamic State. In June 2024, Dagestan experienced o major terrorist attacks in Derbent and Makhachkala.
💣 Investigators in Chechnya have opened a criminal case against a local resident accused of transferring more than RUB 300,000 to the Islamic State. It is unclear if the suspect has been detained.
Visual reference guide
Some of you are only interested in one of the topics that I cover. That's cool! Use the emojis to quickly see which topic a story relates to — so you only need to read the material that matters to you.
🪖 — Private military companies
💣 — Terrorism & insurgency
🚔 — Chechen security services
👺 — The Chechen elite
🚨 — Other security-related issues