RUSSIAN PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES AS A CATALYST FOR STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY AND DECEPTION
RUSSIAN PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES AS A CATALYST FOR STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY AND DECEPTION

Summary/Abstract: Russian private military companies (PMCs) – being in fact neither private nor com-panies – have become an important instrument of strategic influence for the Kremlin.Apart from their military activity, as manifested especially during the war in Ukraine,such deployments abroad induce strategic ambiguity and deception in line with the na-tional foreign and security policy objectives. The examination of this influence is themain research problem of the study. For this purpose, a seven-element analytical mod-el by Robert Mandel concerning strategic manipulation has been employed. This al-lows to emphasize these elements of the Russian PMCs’ specificity that enable actionsof this kind, present Russia’s strategic objectives being pursued this way and assess theefficiency of the discussed actions. The approach applied in the paper, unlike most ofthe publications concerning those entities, allows to address the use of PMCs by Russianot as military power providers but as actors making a psychological impact on othersboth directly (by performing information and psychological operations) and indirectly(by shaping the perception of the Russian Federation internationally). As the paper pre-sents, the latter might be considered crucial, as Russia benefits from having a handy tool for, among others, increasing the threat perception in targeted countries or regions byputting political-military pressure “below the threshold of war” and providing itself withlow-cost power projection capabilities (even if very often unreliable).

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