Armed Conflict Foreign Relations & International Law

Lawfare Daily: Emily Hoge on Russian Mobsters at the Front

Benjamin Wittes, Emily Hoge, Jen Patja
Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 7:00 AM
Discussing Russian mobsters and the war in Ukraine. 

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Benjamin Wittes sits down with Emily Hoge, a historian at Clemson University, who has written a pair of pieces for Lawfare recently about Russian mobsters and the war in Ukraine. They’re getting out of prison in exchange for service at the front. Some of them are surviving their service there and returning home by way of reward—and the Russian crime rate is skyrocketing as a result. Is all of this altering the Russian social contract, which promised to make the violence of the 1990s a thing of the past in exchange to submission to Vladimir Putin’s rule?

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Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Emily Hoge is an assistant professor of Soviet History at Clemson University. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled "Combat Brotherhood: Disabled Afghan War Veterans, Traumatic Masculinity and the Mafia State," studies Russian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
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