MPs are going to develop a law on PMCs, but not too soon

Despite the fact that immediately after the end of the rebellion of the private military company (PMC) Wagner, many deputies actively spoke out in favor of legislative regulation of the activities of PMCs, this issue was not discussed at the State Duma council on Monday. Nevertheless, the leader of the party “Fair Russia – For the Truth” (SRZP), Sergei Mironov, announced his readiness to re-submit last year’s bill of his faction on this topic. True, there is still no unity on this issue among parliamentarians: if the head of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov says that work on the document is already underway, then the chairman of the committee of the Federation Council on state construction Andrey Klishas assures that there is no need for such a law.

The meeting of the Council of the Duma on June 26, according to Kommersant’s information, began with the speaker Vyacheslav Volodin thanking the leaders of the factions and chairmen of the Duma committees for their firm position on the Wagner rebellion and work over the weekend (on Saturday they held meetings on this topic ).

At the same time, the speaker did not give any instructions related to the consequences of the rebellion, although the day before, many deputies spoke about the need to quickly introduce the activities of PMCs into the legal field in order to prevent a recurrence of such a situation.

At the same time, Andrey Kartapolov (United Russia), Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, said on Monday TASSthat his committee is already working on a bill on PMCs, but it may not be ready until autumn, given that in a month the deputies go on vacation. “We have already adopted a number of laws that apply to people who are employees of PMCs today. We will need to merge this matter with each other so that there is no contradiction in different laws. Therefore, this is a big job,” explained Mr. Kartapolov.

In the committees on state construction and security, Kommersant was told that they had not yet joined this work and that it was being carried out exclusively by the defense committee. A member of this committee, Dmitry Kuznetsov (SRZP), assured Kommersant that Andrei Kartapolov “needs to be trusted,” but did not say anything about the specific stages in the preparation of the bill. In his opinion, now we need to think “not about the law on PMCs, but about how our elites can get together and work better.” It should be noted that Mr. Kuznetsov actively participated in the development of a bill on PMCs, introduced in March 2022 by deputies from the SRZP.

On the other hand, the leader of the SRZP, Sergei Mironov, on June 26, not only reminded about this document again, but also announced his intention to introduce it again. “I expect that this will be done in the very near future, because it is unreasonable now to develop a new version when there is a ready-made bill that takes into account the world experience in the activities of private military companies,” said Mr. Mironov. “RIA News”. He also expressed the opinion that if the initiative of the Social Revolutionaries “had not been ignored”, then the events of June 24 could have been avoided.

Recall that, according to the SRZP bill, the issues of licensing PMCs should be regulated by the Ministry of Defense, and it also determines the places of their permanent deployment and issues permission to conduct operations. According to the authors, PMCs have the right to work exclusively outside of Russia, and it was proposed to include, for example, participation in peacekeeping operations through international organizations, the provision of military consulting services, the suppression of international terrorist activities, the protection of the sovereignty and integrity of a foreign state, and the training of personnel foreign armed forces, participation in activities to restore social and constitutional order.

It should also be noted that deputies from A Just Russia have submitted bills on PMCs to the Duma four times already (in 2012, 20142015 and 2018), but their adoption was opposed by the government and relevant departments.

Pavel Sklyanchuk, a member of the RASO Committee on Political Technologies, explained to Kommersant how work on bills on PMCs can be built: “According to the regulations, if two or more bills with similar goals appear in the Duma, the Duma Council can recognize them as alternative and instruct the profile committee to prepare them simultaneous consideration in the first reading. In this case, at the plenary meeting, they are put on one agenda item and a rating vote takes place, as a result of which the one that gets the most votes is adopted. There is another scenario in which the responsible committee submits for consideration a priority bill, for example, from United Russia, and drafts similar in concept, but from other factions, will later be rejected due to the loss of relevance. The third option is that the initiative that was introduced first is adopted, after which it is substantially rewritten for the second reading already as a general Duma. Finally, the fourth option: a single inter-factional project is introduced, and the previous ones are removed from consideration by their authors.

At the same time, Andrey Klishas, ​​head of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building said “Kommersant”, which does not consider the development of a separate law on PMCs an urgent issue: “PMCs can act within the law, there is no ban on PMCs. There is no need for a separate law.

According to him, the articles of the Criminal Code on illegal armed groups (Article 208) and on mercenarism (Article 359) do not interfere with the work of such companies. In the first case, it is necessary to prove that the goals of the PMC are contrary to the interests of the Russian Federation, the senator emphasized: “It has not been proven – there is no composition.” And Art. 359 contains a note according to which a mercenary is a person who acts for mercenary purposes and is not a citizen of a state participating in an armed conflict, does not permanently reside on its territory, and also does not perform official duties. Accordingly, participation in a PMC does not fall under the definition of mercenarism either, summed up Mr. Klishas.

Ksenia Veretennikova, Andrey Ash