With mercenaries increasingly seen as a go-to solution for some of the world’s most devilish security problems, Blackwater founder and Donald Trump donor Erik Prince is reported to be pitching his private military services in Ukraine.
Russia’s dependence on hired guns for its costly invasion of Ukraine is well-known, at first through the cocktail of atrocities and treason served up by the Wagner Group, and now via an elaborate ecosystem of other Kremlin-linked corporations fielding tens of thousands of Russian “volunteers” on the frontlines, supplemented by third-country mercenaries from Asia and Africa.
African states, too, have started hiring Russian, Turkish, Romanian, and South African private military companies (PMCs) to battle insurgencies, to deploy drones against jihadists, and to reclaim resource-rich areas taken over by rebels.
Far from recoiling at this growing trend, which involves corporate entities performing military tasks independently of the state—and for motives related to profit rather than patriotism and duty—the Trump administration appears to be embracing it. Prince’s visit to Ukraine came only days after it was rumored that President Donald Trump wanted to square the circle of his reluctance to commit U.S. troops to Ukraine with the urgent need for U.S. security guarantees, by resorting to PMCs.
Prince, whose Blackwater contractors marked a nadir in Iraq with the Nisour Square massacre in 2007, currently operates under the banner of Vectus Global. The firm has negotiated a contract to combat gang violence in mineral-rich Haiti, deploying up to 200 private military contractors and weaponized drones. This builds on a deal with Ecuador from earlier this year, where Prince explained that his forces were “providing law enforcement and the military the tools and the tactics to effectively combat the narco-gangs.”
The Trump administration denied it has any links to Vectus Global’s work in Haiti. But the administration has itself quietly turned to American PMCs to solve knotty problems in Gaza: first as a compromise force to man the controversial Netzarim checkpoint during the ceasefire in early 2025, which appeared to be effective; and second, as security providers for the Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has proved a multivalent disaster.
It is no coincidence that mercenaries are making a comeback at a time when all the old rules are being re-written. Pax Americana is ending. Global power is rebalancing. Mercenaries are ideal disruptors in a post-truth reality marked by democratic backsliding and grey-zone warfare. They divorce military adventures from their political costs because voting publics don’t necessarily “feel” or even know about any deaths. They have no official return address, making it difficult sometimes to be certain who an attack came from and how to answer it. They also effectively remove the possibility of redress, as it’s hard to go after them for war crimes.
Alongside this accountability gap, mercenaries are also opening major operational gaps. In Cameroon, so many skilled officers have deserted from the military to fight for Russia in Ukraine for up to $3,000 a month, that in March, the Cameroonian government instituted a ban on uniformed men from leaving the country. The Cameroonian armed forces are currently fighting on multiple fronts: English-speaking separatists in the south, Central African gangs in the east, pirates on the coast, and a metastasising jihadist insurgency in the north.
The Sahel is now the global epicenter of terrorist attacks, which are marked by ever-increasing sophistication and momentum. Throughout this volatile region, mercenaries have become a force for both chaos and authoritarian consolidation. While on the one hand, bands of ad hoc mercenary fighters have bedeviled governments in Sudan, Libya, Mali, and Chad, on the other, a series of military juntas in the notorious Sahelian “coup belt” are now contracting Russian and Turkish PMCs to shore up the state.
It could be a matter of time before these two mercenary models clash on the battlefield—each side with access to its own air force through cheap drones—replicating and expanding the core dynamic of the civil war in Libya in 2019-2020, which was fought by opposing mercenary armies.
Meanwhile, no meaningful or legitimate local capacity is being developed to meet the surging jihadist threat or to confront any of the governance failures driving it. The same concern emerges in places like Haiti and Ecuador, as foreign mercenaries and drones are being drafted in at the expense of building up the local armed forces and the national police.
Furthermore, mercenaries have proven to be vectors of instability. After their contracts ended in Yemen and Libya, mercenary armies returned to the Sahel flush with resources, ambition, and combat experience only to initiate major shocks: Tuareg mercenaries reignited a rebellion in Mali that became a jihad, Chadian contract fighters killed the Chadian president, and the Rapid Support Forces launched a sustained and genocidal offensive to seize control of the Sudanese state.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of African nationals now fighting a high-intensity war in Ukraine may reimport similar destabilizing dynamics to the continent, and to the Sahel specifically, when a ceasefire in Ukraine is achieved.
This boomerang effect is only one of the many risks associated with mercenaries, who make wars more affordable, more opaque, more brutal—and more likely. Renewed American interest in mercenaries and PMCs will only accelerate their use globally and may ultimately (re)normalize the medieval notion of killing for profit.
Dr. Alia Brahimi is a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the writer and host of the Guns for Hire podcast.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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