The murky world of outsourced warfare helps no one in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has had no shortage of twists and turns, but the most recent one — mercenaries and contracted foreign fighters allegedly flooding into both sides of the conflict — is arguably the most outlandish iteration of the war to date (the absurd prognostication for nuclear escalation notwithstanding).  

Of course, rhetoric dominates the available open-sourced intelligence on contracted soldiers: Russia’s Wagner Group has been linked to far-right extremists, while the popular refrain on Western social media includes the obligatory #standwithUkraine in the bio.  

All of this to say, the crisis in Ukraine has, like so many things nowadays, been co-opted by a dynamic that is both dangerous to the liberal ideals we hold dear and threatens to plunge the instability in Eastern Europe further into the morass. That so many personnel are entering an active warzone, absent the protections offered by the Geneva Convention in the event of capture, speaks to this reality.  

One example is the Brazilian army reservist with no combat experience who volunteered to go to Ukraine to “wage real-life war on the ideology he believes Vladimir Putin represents (communism).” Another example is the U.S. veterans who documented their journey into Ukraine, only to realize that their willingness to fight for a cause of this ilk includes coping with the utter disorder and chaos that comes with jumping into an unfamiliar and disorganized cluster(redact).  

Thus far, the only function these volunteers have served is disinformation fodder for Russian propaganda, like the claim about three U.S. national guardsmen killed while serving as ‘mercenaries’ in Donbass. The reality is a simple misappropriation of a photo with a military backpack bearing a Tennessee flag patch was used by Russian state media to bolster the report, while those three soldiers have been confirmed alive and well back home in the U.S.  

Mercenaries make for a compelling storyline, to be sure because it adds a novel-like flair to an already dramatic and tragic story. It’s something one expects to find from the pages of a classic Tom Clancy novel or emerging from Hideo Kojima’s brilliant and complex Metal Gear universe. But the reality is far more sobering and has real-life implications. Whether credible or merely part of Ukraine’s desperate act of survival, plenty of state reports emanating from Kyiv have been shared regarding Russia’s employment of for-hire soldiers. The aforementioned Wagner Group (notorious enough based on their own long history of war crimes and nefarious activity), Chechen death-squads whose sole purpose is acquiring Volodymyr Zelensky’s severed head, and Syrian mercenaries who were reportedly being actively recruited by Moscow to join the fight in Ukraine.  

If anyone doubts that Ukraine signals that the 21st century has introduced a new paradigm of conflict, they might be in denial. War goes through evolutions, but it remains largely the same. Unaffiliated contracted soldiers have been part of warfare since tribes were raiding one another for scarce resources. Recall that American independence was won against the outrage of Hessian mercenaries hired by the British crown to put down American colonial insurrectionists.  

The point of this historical example is, and remains today, about credibility. Mercenaries are not some new facet of warfare, but the use of information and legitimizing state actions is unique to today’s world in ways never before imagined thanks to open-source connectivity.  

As desperate as President Zelensky is for foreign aid and combat support, these volunteers who have inserted themselves into Ukraine’s fight for independence and survival against Russian aggression are not part of the solution, they are compounding the problem. We have already seen how a disorganized, professional military force under questionable leadership is struggling to make consistent gains in Ukraine, which speaks for the self-determination of Ukraine’s people nearly as much as flawed strategic decision-making by Russian military leaders.  

That defiance is Ukraine’s credibility. Seeking closer ties to the international, rules-based order and asking for aid is part of that credibility. Entry into the E.U. and NATO (albeit an uphill struggle to attain), is a long-term manifestation of that credibility, although likely a source of the conflict and a much more complicated knot to untie. What makes Russia the aggressor and the villain is in its history of using these kinds of illegitimate, liminal vectors to subvert and undermine legitimacy abroad. Use of stateless, contracted entities whose function as a tool of state influence is built on plausible deniability smacks of illegitimacy and subterfuge.  

Discrediting Russia’s actions requires transparency, legitimacy and credibility. It’s the only mechanism that guarantees the United States and its liberal order partners avoid becoming like the authoritarians against which they are engaged for future global influence.  

Outsourcing warfare, contracting stateless entities whose loyalties are terminal through payment rendered, asking for ‘volunteers’ who do not understand the world they are being recruited into, delegitimizes the gambit for sovereignty Ukraine is currently engaged in. 

Ethan Brown is an 11-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force as a Special Operations Joint Terminal Attack controller. He is currently the senior fellow for Defense Studies at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, a contributor to the Diplomatic Courier, and has written for the Modern War Institute (West Point) and RealClearDefense. He can be found on Twitter @LibertyStoic.