Reports this week that the United Arab Emirates is potentially financing Russian mercenaries in Libya affiliated with the notorious Wagner Group, according to a Pentagon watchdog, appear to be sending mini shockwaves through Washington. But the UAE has long had a fixation on mercenaries, and the fact that Russia is a regular supplier of soldiers of fortune should surprise no one. Much more worrying is the lack of policy coherence in Washington on what to do about it.
A seemingly insatiable appetite for proxy wars and hired guns has helped fuel the rise of these shadow armies. President-elect Joe Biden’s administration can quickly get at least one thing right by standing up a joint task force on the proliferation of privatized militaries and their implications for American national security. If Congress is smart, it will take aggressive legislative steps to ensure that happens.
As first reported by Foreign Policy, the Defense Department’s Inspector General in a recent report cited an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that the UAE “may provide some financing” for the Wagner Group’s operations in support of Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar. The news comes as members of Congress and human rights groups have called for a halt to a pending $23 billion U.S. arms deal with the UAE. It hardly seems like a coincidence that the revelations, buried in a dense, 100-page Pentagon report, follow congressional scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive push to ram through the sale of F-35 fighter jets and drones to Abu Dhabi. The Pentagon report also noted that U.S. Africa Command estimated that there were approximately 2,000 Russian-backed Syrian fighters in Libya, echoing similar reporting from Libya, including a recent U.N. report on mercenary activity.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the UAE’s apparent links to the Wagner Group will be enough for Congress to override President Donald Trump’s potential year-end veto of a bipartisan Senate resolution blocking the sale to the Emirates. But the allegations point to two troubling challenges that Biden’s incoming national security team will face as it tries to square the circle on Russia’s growing influence in both the Middle East and Africa with America’s own long history of backing military strongmen and authoritarian regimes there. First, Russia’s use of private military security contractors to expand its reach threatens to complicate U.S. ties in the Gulf considerably. Second, it could distract from the important U.S. goals of winding down military engagement in the Middle East and stabilizing U.S partners in the region and across Africa, if more careful consideration isn’t given to policy options for dealing with the problem of mercenaries and privatized militaries.
As it is, Congress and the American people have developed a strong allergy for any further U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East, including arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia for their disastrous war in Yemen. The UAE probably hasn’t done itself any more favors if it has in fact cut deals to fund Russian mercenaries implicated in human rights violations in Libya. The best evidence of that is the ongoing tussle between the Trump administration and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate that has repeatedly tried to block White House-supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, given their abysmal human rights record in Yemen, where they have been implicated in war crimes using American weapons.
The fact that Russia is a regular supplier of soldiers of fortune should surprise no one. More worrying is the lack of policy coherence in Washington on what to do about it.Last year, Trump invoked an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act to sidestep a congressional halt on billions of dollars in arms deals with both Gulf countries, and he then vetoed bipartisan measures meant to stop the sales. Revelations about the UAE’s possible ties to the Wagner Group are an indication that the schisms between Congress and the White House over Emirati military adventurism is still problematic, even as Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scramble to stitch up their legacy in the region via a series of last-minute normalization deals between Israel and Arab states, which started with the UAE last summer. Saudi Arabia would be the biggest prize. It also suggests potential internal divides within key U.S. national security agencies that could persist long after Trump is gone, making coordinated policy responses to Russia’s use of private military contractors difficult for the next administration.
Russian paramilitaries are strengthening the grip of authoritarians in both the UAE and Egypt, two of America’s supposed allies in the region. Wagner Group operatives are likely supporting Russian military air operations in Libya from the Egyptian coastal towns of Marsa Matruh and Sidi Barrani, just over the border. Given the additional implications of the heated competition between Russia, Turkey and other players over the oil- and gas-rich waters of the Mediterranean, including off of Libya’s coast, and the impact of proxy forces in Libya on migration, it is obvious that European security interests will also be affected by Russian mercenary operations for the foreseeable future.
Even though U.S. intelligence agencies are increasingly unified in their assessment that Russian mercenaries and the front companies that the Kremlin uses to manage them pose a substantive threat to U.S. interests, the Pentagon, the State Department and the Treasury Department seemed divided over how to deal with this problem. That could be another potential headache for Biden.
AFRICOM has been notably and commendably aggressive in publishing detailed information about the movements of Russian paramilitaries and materiel in Libya, as well as joint Russian air operations with Haftar’s breakaway Libyan National Army. The Treasury Department, too, has come down hard on the network of Russian firms backed by Kremlin insider Yevgeny Prigozhin, sanctioning him for his alleged business interests in a variety of security arrangements spearheaded by the Wagner Group and the tangled web of Russian political consultants and hackers for hire. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center has also laid out detailed evidence of the labyrinthine inner workings of Prigozhin’s suspected role in Russia’s disinformation machinery.
Yet no U.S. government body has laid out a compelling case for what, if anything, should be done about the fact that, with or without Prigozhin, Russia’s deployment of privatized forces poses a host of challenges for Washington and its allies. Most of the information about the Wagner Group has been revealed through credible but unofficial channels of enterprising investigative reporting. But other than the recent European blacklisting of Prigozhin, reports in the media appear to have done little to convince the EU and other U.S. allies of the need to take the problem of Russian-backed mercenaries more seriously.
That is a glaring policy gap given all the uproar at the Pentagon and the State Department about the rising threat of great-power competition. Even if Biden’s team is unable to take up this thorny issue of mercenaries more broadly right away, the new Congress can compel it to do so in the next National Defense Authorization Act. It could stipulate that the Pentagon work with the Treasury and State Departments to prepare a joint, public report on the security challenges from Russian-backed privatized armies in the Middle East and North Africa. If such a report turned up substantially more credible evidence of the mercenaries’ widely suspected ties to widespread money laundering, sanctions evasions, corruption and other illicit trade, then Congress could take further action. At a minimum, Congress should consider outsourcing deeper and more substantive monitoring of these shadow armies to a body like the congressionally mandated Helsinki Commission, which already got off to a good start by raising the issue publicly in a hearing last year.
Whatever comes next from Biden and Congress, inaction against the Wagner Group and the rest of Russia’s mercenary network is no longer an option.