In the spring of 2023, a “hot discussion” broke out again among the Kremlin factions regarding the criminal “legalization of private military companies”. It touched upon the occupied Crimea not only in the context of widespread criminal activity on the peninsula of the terrorist “Wagner”, as well as attempts by Crimean collaborators to promote themselves on supposedly “own” criminal “military companies”, but also given the active lobbying of “PMCs’ legalization” by collaborator Oleg Tsarev, who is closely associated with the peninsula.
It is noteworthy that neither before the large-scale aggression, nor within its framework, nor after the invaders actively involved “private companies”, the “talking heads” of “Wagner” and similar terrorist structures themselves did not lobby for the issues of their “legalization”, being satisfied with their “gray status” as so-called criminal “volunteers” mentioned in the aggressor’s laws.
For several years, the figures of the “systemic opposition” of the aggressor such as Sergei Mironov and Zakhar Prilepin were the main PR people for “legalization”, and they were opposed by similar “guardians” of Russian imperialism, such as the “systemic” Duma deputy Yevgeny Fedorov, who justified the need for a formal ban by saying that “the oligarchs will create their armies”.
However, this issue, to put it mildly, did not affect the practical issue of the activities of terrorists from “Wagner” and similar structures, but Tsarev’s PR on the topic of “legalization of military companies” is not accidental.
Since Tsarev’s “worst friend”, Sergei Aksyonov, began a stormy PR for “private military”, both collaborating with the “Wagner” terrorists, and trying to copy them “at the local level”, and since the issue of “legalization” for Aksyonov and other “talking heads” is extremely “toxic”, it is obvious that the failed “petrel of aggression” Tsarev will continue to exploit this topic, which is extremely unpleasant for his “Simferopol colleagues”.
