Airpower and Wagner Group’s expeditionary operations: exploring the “exceptionality”

Though Russia’s Wagner Group and its expeditionary operations in the Middle East and Africa are the subject of extensive analysis, assessment, and scrutiny, consideration of the group’s relationship with airpower is largely missing. To close this gap, the article first contends that this relationship is in keeping with the Russian historical experience regarding different armed actors with state linkages. In some ways, Wagner Group exercises a degree of agency in terms of action and ownership while in others the Russian state has a greater hand. It then contends that airpower is an important force multiplier due to the strategic minimalism inherent in Russia’s utilization of Wagner Group and the group’s own quantitative restraints. Finally, the article stresses that, unlike the Western counterinsurgency (COIN) experience, and especially as it pertains to armed actors and airpower, the longstanding Russian approach involves human rights abuses, especially against civilian populations, for instrumental purposes. In the present day, Wagner Group mirrors this; it delivers violence from/through the sky, the sort that is integral to Authoritarian Conflict Management (ACM).