Return of the Mercenaries | The Sino-American Rivalry Needs Guardrails | EU to Launch Platform to Fight Disinformation, and more

Return of the Mercenaries  (Peter Caddick–Adams, The Critic)
Bands of gangsters, operating as soldiers of fortune across eastern Europe, are back in vogue. Whilst the Thirty Years’ War marked the historic peak of mercenary troops, they are making an impressive comeback. The best known of these, the Wagner Group, is run by Vladimir Putin’s close associate, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He employs an estimated 40,000 worldwide, of whom around 25,000 are in Ukraine, the balance serving in theatres like Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya and Mali. Known as Putin’s chef, Prigozhin served time in prison as a young man, became a street vendor of hot dogs, won catering contracts for the army, and eventually founded Europe’s largest private military company. He is one of the most powerful men in Russia today.
It was Prigozhin who came up with the idea of bulking out his personal army with convicts. Regarded as expendable in combat, Russian jailbirds are offered a deal of six months at the front in Ukraine, in return for remission of the rest of their prison sentence. Desertion is deterred by execution. Video has emerged of one Wagner refusenik being despatched by sledgehammer. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) report that at least 2,000 of their mercenaries have been killed in human wave attacks, with three times that wounded, but a few are starting to return home at the end of their contracts. The release of rapists and murderers back into society, likely with PTSD from months of suicidal fighting, will plague Russian society for decades to come.
Prigozhin is a canny operator, who receives oil revenues for his services in Syria and profits from mining rare metals in the Central African Republic. He is not the only one in the guns-for-hire business, of which glimpses were also seen during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Whilst most mercenary groups are established around former professional elite soldiers, selling their skills to the highest bidder, in drawn-out conflicts local mobs of gangsters also form private armies, enticed by a bloodlust and the prospect of operating in a lawless landscape.

Putin’s Real Threat Comes from Russia’s “Turbo-Patriots”  (Mark Galeotti, The Spectator)
Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly the message coming from loyalists.

What Happens When Israel’s Lawbreakers Become Lawmakers  (Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic)
Although few Israelis could pinpoint Evyatar on a map, and although its existence is illegal under Israel’s own law, this tiny settlement is set to play a large role in the new Israeli government’s plans and the future of Israel and the West Bank. The reason for this is math.
The country’s new governing coalition is composed of six parties that together received just 48.4 percent of the vote. But rather than moderate the coalition’s ambitions, the fragility of this arrangement has empowered its most extreme elements, because they have become essential to the government’s continued existence. Just as U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy must now rely on the backing of radicals such as Marjorie Taylor Greene to maintain his perilous perch atop a narrow Republican majority, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on his coalition’s far-right flank to maintain his precarious position atop Israeli politics.
And that flank has plans for Beita and Evyatar—plans that threaten to reverberate far beyond the two enclaves, and potentially upend the tenuous balance of power that has held for almost two decades between Israel and the Palestinians across the West Bank.

Why Security Cooperation with Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas  (Khaled Elgindy, Foreign Policy)
West Bank coordination is vital to Mahmoud Abbas’s and the Palestinian Authority’s survival. It’s also hugely unpopular among ordinary Palestinians.

The Sino-American Rivalry Needs Guardrails to Contain Small Incidents  (Economist)
The Chinese spy balloon was shot down over the weekend, but in order to prevent more serious incidents, the U.S. and China need to establish more robust rules of the road.

Why Giorgia Meloni Won’t Distance Herself from Italy’s Fascist Past  (Giorgio Ghiglione, Foreign Policy)
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni paid an official visit to the Jewish ghetto in Rome on Dec. 19, 2022, it was a big deal. Meloni, who was appointed in October 2022, is Italy’s first prime minister with a past in a neofascist organization: As a teenager, she was an activist with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a now dissolved neofascist movement that was openly apologetic for former dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime. But when she visited the ghetto, Meloni used tough words to condemn one of Mussolini’s greatest crimes: “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she said. Then, she hugged the president of the local Jewish community, Ruth Dureghello, and briefly wept.
Only two weeks later, however, Meloni publicly defended MSI in a press conference. “It was a party of the democratic right,” she claimed, adding that the neofascist movement “ferried millions of Italians defeated by the war towards democracy.”
The two episodes encapsulate Meloni’s savvy but ultimately misleading communications strategy: Rather than distancing herself from her neofascist past, as some people might have expected, she’s trying to distance her neofascist past from fascism itself.