 By Ruslan Trad
Ruslan Trad is a Bulgarian journalist
In February 2018, people in the Russian town of Asbest were surprised to learn that several of their fellow citizens had died in Khasham, eastern Syria, 4,000 kilometers (2,489 miles) from home. When Maxim Borodin, the star news hound from the newspaper Novy Den (New Day), arrived in Asbest, the deaths were still shrouded in mystery. Asbest, in the Sverdlovsk region, is known mainly for its asbestos factories, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, the population in this industrial hamlet was hit hard. Residents lost their jobs, and to feed their families they increasingly turned to employment opportunities in private security for individuals and companies, a sector that has grown since the early 1990s, thanks to the associated risks of doing business in Russia’s nascent market economy.
Borodin was determined to find out what the men were doing in Syria and how they had died. He interviewed relatives and the commanders of the dear departed and attended their secret funerals. His resulting article provoked a national scandal and drew attention to a topic the Russian government had wanted to keep quiet: the use of private military companies (PMCs) to serve the Kremlin’s foreign policy objectives and secure and protect the business interests of the kleptocrats in charge of Russia’s most lucrative resources. The article would be Borodin’s last.
On April 12, 2018, Borodin was found seriously injured and in a coma in his hometown of Yekaterinburg. Police say Borodin "fell" from his balcony while smoking. The day before, he had contacted a friend and told him that he’d spotted gunnies in camouflage near his apartment. Three days later, he was dead.
Through his investigation in Asbest, Borodin discovered that the dead had joined a mercenary force known as the Wagner Group, a PMC created in 2014 and financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and catering magnate close to President Vladimir Putin
 ...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
. While PMCs are technically illegal, private security companies are not. PMCs like the Wagner Group adopt the facade of a security company, but at the same time they have clear ties to Russian intelligence agencies such as the FSB (national security services) and GRU (military intelligence) and to both the Russian special forces and the army. In making the connection between the deaths of Russian civilians in Syria and their work with the Wagner Group, Borodin uncovered a tangled web of state, business, and security interests that are primarily concerned with preserving their influence and power.
There are a number of PMCs in Russia, but the Wagner Group typifies the way global business and geopolitics operate in Putin’s Russia. Mercenaries who work for companies like the Wagner Group provide security to sites (such as mines and oil fields) that are of strategic interest to the Kremlin and its kleptocrats. PMCs also perform such functions on behalf of foreign governments, and in this way, they have become an important tool for the Kremlin to promote its foreign policy objectives. For each of the key parties involved — the Kremlin, foreign governments, state industries, and private business interests — PMCs not only offer lucrative opportunities but, due to their quasi-legal structure, also provide plausible deniability for their clandestine activities.
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