Happy Wednesday!
I hope your week is going well and you’re filled with inspiration. Or, if you can’t manage inspiration, at least vaguely satisfying!
This week, I want to offer a brief reflection on Ukrainian proposals to legalise private military companies (PMCs). It’s an idea that makes sense, but also carries risks — as the Russian experience shows.
Here’s what you’ll find this week:
- Zelenskiy proposes legalising PMCs
- The logic of legalisation
- Cautionary lessons from the other side
Zelenskiy proposes legalising PMCs
On 6 May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that work was underway to legalise PMCs. He said that he had instructed several branches of the state with an interest in security issues — the Interior Ministry, intelligence agencies, government officials, and the Presidential Office — to develop the legislative framework. His aim is to pass a law by the end of 2026.
Zelensky framed the call as a response to market opportunities: “It is important to give our state its own response to this niche, to this opportunity, to this demand in the field of security exports”.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, in turn, positioned it as an opportunity to exploit Ukraine’s “unprecedented combat experience” and provide jobs to veterans of its ongoing war with Russia.
The logic of legalisation
On the surface, the idea of legalising PMCs has much to recommend it. It is undeniable that Ukrainian actors have acquired considerable combat experience – not only through the war itself, but also through efforts to counter Russia’s own PMC activities in Africa. Although much of this experience has to date been channeled through state structures, the line between the state and “private” military companies is a blurry one around the world, so privatising it should not prove too challenging.
It also makes sense to provide employment opportunities to veterans. A challenge for any post-conflict society (let us put aside for a moment the inappropriateness of the label “post-conflict” for Ukraine) is providing pathways for combatants to reintegrate. Often this is considered from the position of reintegration into civilian life, but continued military service is an option for some. And the war has wrought considerable damage to Ukraine’s society and economy so, for some people, the lives they led before the war may not exist to go back to.
Finally, providing a legal framework can help establish mechanisms for managing armed groups that might anyway exist. Ukraine potentially has fewer issues than some post-conflict societies: Warlordism isn’t likely to be a problem in the way that it was for, say, Chechnya after the First Chechen War. But, if there is a genuine market opportunity, someone is likely to try and fill it irrespective of what the law says. Moreover, there will be some actors — pro-Ukrainian Chechen and Russian paramilitaries, for example - that Ukraine will need to decide what to do with. Of course, these may not be covered by PMC legislation, but they can be considered a related problem. Overall, it might be better to manage an issue to the advantage of the Ukrainian state, including through taxation, rather than leaving violent entrepreneurs outside the law or driven offshore.
Cautionary lessons from the other side
Russia does not exactly provide a model for legalising PMCs: There, they remain somewhat ambiguous and contradictory – simultaneously legal and illegal. Nevertheless, Russia’s wider experience of PMCs offers some notes of caution for Ukraine.
Perhaps the most obvious lesson to draw from Russia is that it is dangerous to presume that paramilitaries will always be controllable. Russia embraced the Wagner Group and afforded it a prominent role in its war on Ukraine, only to find Wagner forces marching across Russia in summer 2023 when its leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, grew dissatisfied with the progression of the war and his own place in its political system.
Could the same thing happen in Ukraine? It is worth noting that this is not the first time legalisation has been mooted. Zelenskiy raised the idea in June 2025. Major General Serhiy Kryvonos, at the time deputy secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, and Verkhovna Rada Deputy Olha Vasylevska-Smahliuk promoted the idea in February 2020. Perhaps most tellingly, Right Sector leader Dmitro Yarosh tried to propose legislation in April 2015. At the time, he was working with Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy — whom the Ukrainian state now considers a criminal. As Sergey Sukhanin wrote about some of these earlier initiatives, “given the political role historically played by oligarchs in Ukraine, it, indeed, seems dubious that some of them will not be tempted to use this potentially powerful instrument – PMCs – for their own needs”.
On a more mundane level, the Russian experience showcases how privatising security can present an opportunity for corruption: Prigozhin secured major state contracts, allowing budget funds to be transferred into private hands in return for questionable service delivery. Given Ukraine’s own persistent problems with corruption, including in the field of military procurement, the possibility that privatising security provides a mechanism for enriching favoured actors is hardly negligible.
How successful Ukraine is in balancing these risks and rewards will be shaped less by the fact of legalisation and more by the specifics of how it is implemented. But it is worth noting that Russia’s experience of PMCs started with the likes of the Moran Security Group — an operation broadly comparable, with multiple caveats, to Western PMCs. Over time, Moran morphed into the Wagner Group that marched on Moscow in summer 2023. Where things start isn’t necessarily where they’ll end up.
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