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Last year, the Associated Press obtained a contract between a Wagner-linked company and Syria’s state-owned petroleum corporation, which promised a twenty-five-per-cent cut of the profits from oil and gas production at fields captured from militant control.

Complicating all of this is the fact that, at least technically, private military companies are illegal in Russia, and previous attempts in parliament to draft the necessary legislation to formalize their status have gone nowhere. “We’re at crossroads,” Ivan Konovalov, a defense analyst and the author of a Russian-language book on private military companies, said. “Either we’ll see the winding down of the operations of such companies or the passing of legislation to regulate their activity.” One deputy in parliament this week called for exactly that. Konovalov hopes a law will soon appear. “Without it, there’s no mechanism to deal with such situations, no one knows what to do,” he told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-shadow-army-suffers-a-setback-in-syria