Private security contracting — a booming industry that makes billions in various conflict zones across the globe — is heading for full legalization in Ukraine.
A recent draft law seeks to eliminate a decades-long legislative void in the sector entitling Ukrainian nationals to form Ukraine-based private military companies (PMCs) that render services outside the country.
The bill in question proposes that Ukraine accepts the unpleasant reality of the industry and bring it out of the shadows: As its authors note, many Ukrainians have been hired by foreign contractors to participate in warfare. And the practice is legal in countries where the contractors are based.
As a result, the new legislation aims to ensure the rights and formalize the duties of Ukrainian soldiers of fortune and to strictly regulate PMCs in Ukraine, allowing veterans interested in the industry to get legal, well-paid jobs rather than being recruited by rogue armies and risking criminal charges at home.
However, the law also envisages questionable mechanisms of government control, particularly over PMCs importing and using weapons in Ukraine.
Many experts also fear the law would provide Ukrainian oligarchs with a legal instrument for organizing personal armies.
“This would be a serious affront and threat to the established national security system,” Glen Grant, a retired British Army Colonel, told the Kyiv Post.
War for sale
The global market for private security contractors is showing exponential growth.
Worth nearly $100 billion in 2003, by 2019 global revenue was $211 billion. According to ReportLinker, a U.S.-based analysis company, the industry will reach $420 billion by 2029.
Companies like G4S (UK), Securitas AB (Sweden), Vinnel Corp (Saudi Arabia), GardaWorld (Canada), and MAG Aerospace (United States) are among the biggest players in the market, according to multiple reports.
Contrary to popular perception, most legal PMCs aren’t sending mercenaries to fight wars on behalf of the highest bidder. They mostly provide security for VIPs or maritime vessels, conduct combat and medical training for troops and offer technical and logistics support.
Many Western governments, like the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and even the United Nations, use PMCs to supplement official forces in hostilities zones and relieve them of tasks that can be carried out by contracted civilians.
And despite Ukraine’s formal ban, the country isn’t a stranger to the industry.
In March 2019, the Conflict Intelligence Team, involved in investigating war crimes in Syria, accused the Ukrainian company Vega Strategic Services of training pro-government forces in Syria. The company’s co-founder, Anatoliy Smolin, claimed in an interview with BBC Ukraine that the group is a legal security consulting company with branches around the world, including in Damascus. He denied involvement in Syrian hostilities.
According to Ukraine’s SBU security service, at least 125 Ukrainians have been recruited to Wagner Group, a notorious Russian mercenary army linked to the Kremlin and involved in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and elsewhere, starting in 2015.
Fighters of the Right Sector, a Ukrainian nationalistic paramilitary formation, provide battlefield medicine training near the city of Uzhgorod on June 27, 2015. (AFP)
Launching the market
The bill “On the Military Consulting Business” was registered in the Verkhovna Rada in early February 2020. Its initiator is Olha Vasylevska-Smagluyk, a lawmaker with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 248-strong Servant of the People faction.
In the bill’s explanatory note, the authors write that the role of non-governmental military consulting contractors is becoming increasingly important in global politics, the world economy, and the military.
“In Iraq, employees of military consulting entities earn between $100 and $1,000 a day, depending on the nature of the tasks fulfilled,” the bill’s supporting note states.
“Additionally, many military consulting entities envisage considerable social benefits and appropriate insurance (for their contractors). At the same time, this business sector remains unregulated, even though a range of private companies render such services in Ukraine.”
Moreover, according to the document Ukrainian specialists employed by foreign PMCs, either as consultants or combatants in “full-fledged hostilities,” can be subjected to criminal prosecution in Ukraine.
The draft law proposes to change that, allowing “military consulting entities” established and registered in Ukraine to render their services, albeit to governments, legal entities, and individuals solely and exclusively outside Ukrainian territory.
According to the authors, such a provision “excludes the possibility of the creation of ‘private’ armies inside the country.”
Licensed by the SBU security service, Ukrainian PMCs would then be entitled to provide certain services but are forbidden from direct involvement in hostilities or rendering services to Russian citizens and entities.
Foreign nationals, individuals with a criminal record (including expired convictions), active military and law enforcement members or former service people dismissed for disciplinary infractions would also be barred.
Other than that, Ukrainian national older than 21 who has passed a yet-to-be-developed certification test would qualify for work with a PMC.
Legalized activities include providing training to foreign armed forces or security agencies to ensure “recruiting, financial, logistical, and informational analysis support.” Other options include maintaining and delivering military hardware and equipment, security consulting, construction works, minesweeping, medical and paramedical care, and mediation in negotiations, as well as serving as bodyguards and providing security.
Importantly, a PMC would be obliged to collect statute capital worth nearly Hr 5.9 million ($240,000) within a year of its registration.
Licensed contractors would be entitled to possess military-grade and dual-use hardware, either imported from abroad or exported from Ukraine in compliance with Ukrainian legislation and international restrictions. Though such weapons would be banned from use on Ukrainian soil except at training facilities. All military hardware possessed by PMCs would also be registered in a database.
The law proposes forming a national commission consisting of representatives from the Verkhovna Rada’s defense committee and all defense and security agencies to regulate the industry.
All Ukrainian PMCs would be required to report their contracts, personnel, and weapons to the commission.
The document is currently under review in Rada committees.
A volunteering civilian instructor provides training in combat medicine for Ukraine’s 74th Reconnaissance Battalion near the city of Dnipro on May 19, 2015. (UNIAN)
No private armies?
Major General Serhiy Kryvonos, the deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, quickly endorsed the initiative, saying that the issue “requires an immediate solution in legislation.”
“Because who if not us — military specialists in hybrid, unconventional, and asymmetric wars — understands the incredible role of private military companies in the management of such conflicts?” the official said in a Feb. 4 statement.
According to the general, the Ukrainian government needs to take the lead in using PMCs to uphold national interests overseas amid new global political realities.
“In our country, thousands of specialists returned from the war with Russia and failed to adapt to civilian life,” he said. “Private military companies enable demobilized combatants to maintain their skills and experience and to be backed by the state.”
Experts polled by the Kyiv Post, however, have a much less optimistic view of the draft law.
The ban on PMCs working on Ukrainian soil will not prevent oligarchs from raising and training their own “private armies,” Glen Grant said, despite the draft’s explanatory note stating the opposite.
“True, the law says (PMCs) cannot be used inside Ukraine,” Grant said.
“But the law has never been followed in this country, and (PMCs) would possibly only need to be used once.”
In this way, if the law is poorly enforced, it could enable pro-Russian power brokers like Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a powerful pro-Russian lawmaker in the Verkhovna Rada, “to raise a company that can be used as ‘little green men’ in civilian clothes in a time of crisis,” he added.
Ivan Stupak, a legal expert with the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, a Kyiv-based think tank, also warns that most Donbas veterans would not be able to raise statute capital of more than Hr 5 million, “so they would be forced to go cap in hand to those with money and connections — with all the obligations this would imply.”
Beyond that, the rise of private military contractors in Ukraine is likely to harm the country’s struggling Armed Forces and other security services. Many young people with a taste for military-related trades would seek better-paid positions in the private sector rather than careers in the Ukrainian military.
The draft law provides no preventative instruments, such as a requirement for PMC recruits to have experience in active military service.
Mykhailo Samus, deputy director at the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, another Kyiv-based think tank, is generally skeptical about the market viability of Ukrainian PMCs.
In many ways, he said, PMCs in conflict zones are supported and facilitated by national governments and security services. Top players like the United States and Russia do not simply admit alien PMCs into regions where they have interests.
“I don’t think there can be a case where a Ukrainian company comes to a region where the CIA is present and American private contractors operate and says, ‘We can do the same things but for 10 times less money,’” Samus said. “I don’t think the CIA would change their guys for Ukrainians.”
Moreover, Ukraine does not have significant interests overseas for PMCs to support, Samus said.
“And if we’re talking about someone’s private interests, I have a feeling that this would end up doing more harm than good.”
