Ukrainian Soldiers, Potential Mercenaries: Have Gun, Will Travel!

Who has thought about what happens to an army when the SMO ends—but the warriors remain?

History offers plenty of warnings. Africa has spent decades wrestling with the problem of demobilized combatants, soldiers and guerrillas, whose military skills suddenly have little obvious place in civilian economies.

South Africa and Georgia both provide an instructive case studies. After apartheid, using the South African example, the labor force had to absorb, integrate or demobilize personnel from competing military and paramilitary structures. Thousands of former combatants faced unemployment and uncertain futures, while the new South African National Defence Force itself eventually had to undergo substantial downsizing, and not only among white troops.

So what happens when the largest European land war in generations finally winds down? What will happen with the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen do when the battlefield no longer needs them, and the economy cannot reintegrate them?

Many will also have significant trauma, both mental and physical, the former being far harder to identify, it is an unfortunate fact that many former combatants will have developed a taste for killing.

And that is where the story becomes considerably more uncomfortable.

In 2024, UNODC and international organized-crime specialists were already examining the possibility that Ukraine’s enormous post-war veteran population could become a source of organized-crime risk—not because veterans were inherently criminal, but because demobilization, weapons proliferation, inadequate reintegration and the availability of trained manpower could create conditions attractive to criminal networks.

Have Gun, Will Travel is an old American expression, but it may acquire a new geopolitical meaning in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. The world already has a market for soldiers, military trainers, private security personnel and combat veterans. Africa, the Middle East and other conflict zones have repeatedly........

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