How do wars end? Details are starting to leak about how Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine could be implemented. Not surprisingly, given the many competing inputs, it’s a bit of a mess, just as a horse designed by committee can end up looking like a camel.
But the various drafts point to certain inescapable realities: Ukraine is running out of fighting men; the Russian army is close to the limit of what it can achieve on the battlefield; America is adamant it does not want its troops in action in Europe; and Trump’s allies are reluctant to commit large numbers of peacekeepers without a US backstop to deter Vladimir Putin from escalating.
One ingredient, everyone seems to agree, is the need for the deployment of private military contractors — guns for hire — in any western-crafted peace plan. Essential, it seems, to defend the reconstruction of Ukraine, guard the mineral and rare earth excavations which Trump has agreed to develop with Kyiv after the war, and to train up Ukrainian special forces.
There’s more to be done: repairing Ukraine’s damaged western kit. There is a current arrangement whereby Ukrainian military engineers can call on a secure line to a US expert for advice on how to patch up complex weapons systems. But the preferred method has been to ferry broken kit by train across the Polish border to a US base there. That may not be a long-term solution. The Russians already closely monitor all Nato weapons movements into and out of western Ukraine.
Moscow, of course, has used mercenary units throughout the war, though it became more cautious after 2023 when the leader of the Wagner military contract group Yevgeny Prigozhin overreached and led a coup attempt against Putin. Unsurprisingly, he died soon afterwards. But Wagner has reinvented itself and remains part of a still flourishing hired-gun sector that includes former security employees of state companies like Gazprom and the space exploration agency Roscosmos. They are part and parcel of the military-industrial complex, a lucrative grazing ground for difficult but often battle hardened soldiers in search of cash.
In Putin’s eyes Wagnerians proved themselves in his first campaign against Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea in 2014. To westerners it seemed initially as if the deployment of these supposed irregulars was designed to confuse the world — but also as if Putin was holding back his regular army for something bigger and more shocking. And as if he was not quite sure about the loyalties of the military.
But Crimea went well for Putin and he decided he could expand the Wagner model, as a shock force in Ukraine (one that committed brutal atrocities, notably in the fall of Bakhmut) that could also serve as a reproach to more cautious regular commanders. Now it looks as if Moscow has a new role for them — to radicalise the whole concept of “peacekeeping”.
As long as post-Wagnerians remain part of the Putin success formula they can serve as a counterweight to whoever ends up protecting the western side of the frontline. Putin’s use of the troops of foreign allies, such as the 14,000 North Koreans, has no place in a European “peace”. They will be replaced by mercenaries given the usual fanciful guarantees of high wages and big payouts to families in case of death or serious injury.
The recruiting has already started even though the peace deal is not yet anything of the sort. Rather, it’s just a mesh of ideas, unpriced and untested, that sees a freeze of the still disputed frontline and the creation of a 20km demilitarised buffer zone. The Ukrainian side of the zone would be policed by armed Ukrainian forces and behind them would be a still-notional European peacekeeping force.
Deeper inside Ukraine, its troops would be trained by British, French and possibly German instructors. Private military contractors could be part of that process and would also be involved in one of the expected flashpoints — the reopening of Ukrainian airports. The US seems ready to supply real-time intelligence to the peacekeeping force; Turkey is expected to lead a naval operation that keeps Ukraine’s Black Sea ports open for trade.
Will it work? Will it only work if an American is made the symbolic head of the peacekeeping force — or will that simply facilitate an opportunity for Putin to complain to Trump and get him to make further concessions? Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisers see pitfalls ahead. But he too has become open to a greater use of foreign mercenaries. He has a dwindling pool of recruits struggling to come close to 27,000 conscripts a month. Mobilisation tactics, including press gangs, have been stepped up and hit at the core legitimacy of Zelensky, who still rules by martial law. The Russians stoke the discontent by firing drones at recruitment centres.
Pro-Ukrainian mercenaries are thus seen locally as a useful (though not battlefield-changing) addition to the country’s military line-up. But their recruitment muddies some of the big questions overlooked in Trump’s rushed campaign for world peace. Who defends western interests in eastern Europe if the West has lost a sense of anything being worth fighting for? Are mercenaries merely giving national combatants clean hands? At its root, though, the tortured charting of a map of a future frozen Ukraine highlights a grim reality: that actors in long, expensive wars often lose the ability to end them. Maybe that’s when you call in the consultants, aka mercenaries, to get things fixed — or make them even bloodier.