Vladimir Putin’s efforts to end a coup by the Wagner group may have made it easier for an international court to prosecute him, and the Russian state, for war crimes committed by the mercenary fighters, according to experts in international law.
After the mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin said the mercenaries had been “fully funded” by Russian authorities. In the year to May 2023 alone, they received more than 86bn roubles from the state budget, or over a billion dollars, he added.
“Those words potentially have very significant consequences in terms of exposing the Russian state to responsibility for the acts of Wagner, and Putin, personally and individually as the leader of the Russian state,” said Philippe Sands KC, professor of law at UCL and the author of East West Street, a book about the origin of international humanitarian law.
For years Russia’s leader distanced himself from Wagner, which was founded in 2014, as accusations of war crimes against the fighters mounted internationally, including in a UN investigation into their presence in the Central African Republic.
During a battle in Syria with US troops in 2018, Moscow denied any control over Wagner forces, and a Kremlin spokesman that same year said there were no private military companies in Russia.
Paying for Wagner would not make Putin – or Russia – automatically legally responsible for its crimes, said Dapo Akande, professor of public international law at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford. But it could be an important part of a broader case.
“It’s a significant admission,” he said. “Funding is, in and of itself, not sufficient to say that somebody’s responsible for an international crime … [but] it makes it more difficult to say ‘these things have nothing to do with us.’”
“You said that you were actually funding this group, so that means that in one sense, you were contributing to what this group is doing. Now, the prosecution might need to show more, or a court might need to find more, but at least the first element is present.”
The Ukrainian authorities, and human rights groups, have focused on seeking justice for crimes committed there by Russian forces.
War crimes researchers have fanned out across the country, collecting evidence to be used in court. One of the most prominent, the author Victoria Amelina, was critically injured last week in an attack on a restaurant, which her colleagues say was a war crime itself.
But Wagner atrocities, in Ukraine and elsewhere, are potentially harder to pin to the Russian state than attacks by enlisted soldiers.
There is a precedent for finding paramilitaries guilty of war crimes, but not the linked state. Serbian militiamen were found guilty in an international tribunal of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims but Serbia was found guilty only of failing to prevent genocide. In Belgrade, that ruling was twisted by some Serbian nationalists into an exoneration.
“(The court) could not establish that the paramilitaries were under the direct control of the Serbian authorities,” Sands said. “That distinction was seized upon in Belgrade the next day, and the government-supportive or government-run newspapers, ran with headlines that said things like ‘We are innocent’.”
That makes Putin’s comments potentially key to a different outcome in future trials, Sands added.
Even if there is no trial, debate about responsibility for Wagner’s crimes may push the international legal community to think more about accountability in a world of proliferating militias, said Gerry Simpson, professor of public international law at the LSE.
“Given the increasing fragmentation of states and the use of private military companies, this is going to be a bigger and bigger issue for courts, as time progresses,” he said.
“Putting aside the rather large question about whether courts should be playing this sort of role in the midst of a very delicate political and military situation, it is clear that it’s going to be important and difficult for courts to work out who is responsible for particular acts that take place in a fog of war which has just got a lot foggier,” Simpson said.
