Angry Planet - Life Inside Wagner Before and After Prigozhin

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comFor mercenaries, death is a business. It’s all about finding the right market. Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have found willing markets in Africa. Journalist John Lechner spent years in Africa among the mercenaries and he’s on the show today to tell us about what he learned.Lechner tells us how Wagner’s men think the U.S. media killed Prigozhin, why every theater (or market) is different, and the training regimen of a fresh convict recruit. It’s all in his new book Death Is Our Business: Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.The threats change…but the mercenaries stay the same.Interlinking militant Islam and the rise of modern mercenariesRussian mercenaries before WagnerPrigozhin risingPutin’s Chef was the father of ‘Hybrid War’Wagner in Africa‘No one said mercenary life was gonna be easy.’Life inside Wagner‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’You can’t judge intent by resultsThe Russian “royal” court is full of self starters and entrepreneursThe Tip of Russia’s SpearDeath Is Our BusinessPardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill AgainTaliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. And we are going to talk about mercenaries today.

I read a really incredible piece in the baffler titled The Tip of Russia's Spear. which is about Progogsion and about Wagner, but more broadly about mercenaries in the modern world. And then I got to the bottom of the piece, and I was delighted to find out that it was an excerpt from a book, which I have not read yet, but I have ordered, called Death is Our Business, Russian Mercenaries, and the new private era of warfare. And we have the author with us today. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me on. My name's John Lechner. I'm a writer and researcher, largely focused on conflict in Central Africa, the Sahel, in the former Soviet Union. And my book on Russian mercenaries and Wagner Group has just come out with Bloomsbury about two weeks ago. As you mentioned, death is our business.

So I've got friends, other journalist friends, other defense journalist friends that are saying that we are, entering the golden age of mercenaries. Some of that is Russia. Some of that is the Trump administration and the resurgence of Eric Prince, who never seems to go away. Do you think we're entering into like a new kind of era of mercenaries? I mean, I think we're already here. I'm not sure there's not really a point kind of a long. the trend line, I think, that you can point to right now that would say, you know, this is the golden age. And as I write about in the book, I mean, first of all, mercenaries have always been around. And so the question is always sort of what is new in terms of this new era? And what is new, especially kind of since the 90s where we've seen this rise of private military companies, I think,

is the scope and the scale and the resources that are available to a lot of these non-state or semi-state actors. And, you know, Progoshin and Wagner Group did not kind of appear independently very much also came out of America's War on Terror, the decisions during the Bush administration to outsource a lot of security roles to the private sector. The Russians responded to it with their own version. And it's unsurprising that now under this current Trump administration that we're seeing at least a lot of rhetoric right now about the U.S. contractors potentially taking on new roles. I'm not sure we've seen a ton of kind of on-the-ground action yet, but it seems that the environment is certainly more permissive for American security entrepreneurs as well. That's one of the things I found really interesting about the Bathler piece, is that you make this

connection and really like, really illustrated very well of the rise of these private military companies kind of mirroring the rise in concern and the pushback against militant Islam, right? And how they're kind of interlinked. Can you talk about that? Well, I mean, I think, and this is in the book more broadly, but Libya was perhaps a great example of it, is, I mean, if you just look at sort of the basic economics, right, of what you are doing, If you are running a private military company, you are marketing your services either to a government, an outside government, to hire you, or to your own government to hire you to augment its own military capabilities or efforts for political influence somewhere. And typically what you are looking for, what sort of the sweet spot is, especially if you are an actor who is looking to be hired by your host government or by your national government, is you're looking for a conflict that is important. enough or represents a significant enough threat that you can sell, if we use the example of America, you can sell the need for an American presence there to deal with the threat.

But the threat can also not be existential enough that it requires actual U.S. soldiers on the ground. And if you think about kind of broadly threats, we've seen. seen sort of these great threat narratives kind of come and go throughout the years. Of course, during the Cold War, the threat was of communism and the need to contain it. We had this sort of brief kind of inter-period in the 90s where the U.S. wasn't even necessarily quite sure what its role should be and who there was left to fight. We saw a lot of focus on humanitarian missions all of the sudden. And then with the September 11th attacks, the new threat that emerged was, of course, global jihadism and the need to contain it.

And very smart security entrepreneurs recognize the usefulness of this narrative and how to position themselves in a way that they could sell their services to governments. And now what we're looking at now, as we're kind of in this strange, kind of hangover from the war on terror and the rise of great power competition is, is a renewed focus on PMCs of PMCs and security entrepreneurs to try and position their services in service of helping their home countries in the competition between China, the West, and Russia. So tell me about all. RSB in Libya then. Tell me about this early Russian entrepreneurial enterprise.

Yeah. So, yeah, Wagner was not the first Russian PMC. And of course, lots of people will take umbrage about calling Wagner a PMC. And we can go into, is it commercial, is it also kind of state-backed? And the answer is both. But prior to it, there were other versions of these Russian PMCs, and they functioned much kind of more similarly to the Western PMCs at the time. Mercenarism itself is actually illegal in Russia, and so these companies, which largely provided protection for different kind of facilities or convoys or ships during the Somali piracy crisis,

they usually registered outside of Russia and then contracted with a client in one of these regions. And in the case of RSB, it was the first kind of PMC to develop under a guy Oleg Kridinitsyn. And it actually had contracts in Iraq as well, working for Western partners, protecting convoys and doing that sort of security work. And ultimately as well, Krenitsen, who had kind of close ties to the FSB in Russia, which is sort of a successor to the Soviet KGB, also got a contract to demine a cement factory in Benghazi in Libya. around 2016. And

ultimately, I think as folks see in the Baffler piece and in the book itself, he gets sort of pushed out, albeit rewarded, but pushed out by a network of individuals much closer to Wagner's founder, Yvgeny Pugosian. Yeah, and we can't avoid the character for too long. Although we've talked about him on the show before,

who is Putin's chef? Yeah. And I think what people will find interesting about this book is, I mean, for the book, I spent a lot of time in the Central African Republic, in Libya, Mali, Ukraine, and Syria. And I interviewed a lot of guys in Wagner about 40 for the book, including on the ground in Africa. and you're right, you can't tell the story of Wagner without telling the story of Prigodzhen because could Wagner have been possible without being able to leverage the resources

of the Russian state? Probably not. Neither could Blackwater, for that matter. But could it have become what it was without the ambition of Purgos? Joseph also no. And so he plays a key role in Wagner's expansion. And he was a guy who really grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the Soviet Union. He was sort of a street thug, a petty thief. He goes away to prison for eight or nine years for assault and robbery. And when he gets out and is returning to his native St. Petersburg, the Soviet Union is collapsing around him. He first joins up with some gangsters who put him in kind of as the manager of a grocery store chain, and then eventually he becomes the owner of two famous restaurants in St. Petersburg.

They very much cater to the new Russian elite at the end of the 90s, a lot of caviar, French champagne, all of those sorts of luxuries that the Nouveau-Riche love. and one of the clients was a younger of Vladimir Putin. And Progoshin leveraged this relationship and in relationship to other Russian elite to eventually sort of install himself as the provider of meals to the Russian military and to Russian schools. And this is where he earns his nickname Putin's chef. It's interesting, I mean, because his background isn't entirely different from Putin. Putin's himself, right? I mean, Putin was a tough guy on his block. I mean, growing up in St. Petersburg, which was really devastated from World War II and then, you know, from then on, the Soviet life. So, I mean, I just wonder if they hit it off personally. Do we have any idea? I mean,

if they felt some kind of friendship. I don't know if it was necessarily, I mean, I think, I think Putin very much thinks of himself as, you know, certainly a tough guy, but very much a tough guy inside the system of within the security services. And Progoshin has a little bit more of that sort of, well, sort of this kind of double-edged sword. He has the stigma of being an ex-con, a guy who went to Russian prison and came out of the prison system. And that stigma is something that I think he was constantly looking to, overcome in his life because the true Russian elite, the true inner circle around Putin, never accepted him as one of their own. But that being said, he could also take advantage of his uncouth nature in a way that was endearing and probably refreshing to Putin as well, given kind of being surrounded by sort of these more boring sycophantic bureaucratic types all the time as well. And so I think, you know, it was, that kind of status was certainly a double-edged sword for him and one that he was certainly

trying to overcome. So how do you go from being a guy that provides meals to being a guy that provides little green men in eastern Ukraine? Well, I mean, I think you kind of answer, I mean, at the end of the day, it's a logistics problem, right? First of all. And so he already is, you know, an expert in logistics. He's already well connected and embedded within the Russian military. But, you know, I think we need to understand something about kind of the political economy of how Putin's system works, right? Because, you know, as Putin comes to power and over the years, he is looking to sort of revive Russia as a great power, return Russia and to the world stage. And there's no lack of ambition, right, for Russia kind of coming out of the very chaotic 90s and looking to return to that kind of status of the Soviet Union. But at the same time, they don't have the same degree of resources,

certainly as a superpower as the United States. And so in this sort of constrained environment, this provides a lot of room for rich businessmen, guys like Progosh, and to sort of fill the gaps in the budget by kind of supporting and financing these patriotic initiatives. it fills a gap, but it also serves the purpose of virtue signaling if you're the businessman, right? And, I mean, it's not, I mean, it's a version of, say, you know, Democratic, of donating to a political party, right? You're not going to recruit those costs directly, but, you know, it pays in the longer run when the next contract is coming up and there's a chance to extract various rents from it.

And so Progrosian was very astute. He knew kind of what and could position himself in front of what he sort of divined would be important to Putin and to the Kremlin more broadly. And so when events in eastern Ukraine began getting outside of the Kremlin's control and the separatists there needed support, they needed to turn to a way of both supporting and not support. the separatists. Obviously, Russia annexed Crimea, but they were not interested in annexing further territory at that time, risking further sanctions and international isolation, and risking a full-scale war with Ukraine directly. And so they turned to sort of these ad hoc measures like sending in contractors and mercenaries, and this created an opportunity for someone like Progoshan to come in as a financial sponsor. And he's ultimately connected in Donbos with a former GRU officer,

Russian military intelligence guy Dmitri Udgen, who provides the mercenaries, and Progoshin provides the political cover and the financing for the operation. And this small force, which no one knew at, the time was going to become what it did, came in and played a relatively important role in shoring up some of the separatist forces in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine at the time.

How did he fuck it up so bad? Because he's dead, right? I would say a little bit humiliated in that death. He was a guy that was broadcasting almost daily to people on telegram and had become kind of a celebrity figure. He was known in the West. Decides to do like a half-measured march and then not. And then, you know, fast forward dies in a plane crash under a mysterious circumstances that I think we can all agree. I don't know that they were that mysterious.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I think we all know what happened there. I'm saying. Like, why do you have any sense of, like, what he got in his head that he was going to do and then why he bailed? I mean, I know that that's a, you don't, like, we can't talk to him, right? We, you know, we can't get the, like, the word directly from his mouth, but, like, you've talked to 40 different dudes in the organization. Like, you know this, this thing better than anyone else does that I think we've ever had on the show.

Like, what's your sense? Yeah. I mean, look, he was. always, we talked about it earlier, he was always an incredibly ambitious, egomaniacal guy who was, and, I mean, at several different moments, right? After the Minsk ceasefire in 2015 in eastern Ukraine, that could have easily been it, right? Those guys would have gone home, they weren't really needed anymore. But Progoshan, again, he sees that he, like, has now this force at his fingertips, and he's lobbies. And he's lobbying.

being extensively to get them into Syria. And then they're largely doing a lot of their own business development in Africa, and he's growing the organization and very much working within the Putin system, right? He's selling back to the Kremlin this idea of Russia as a great power and planting the flag in all of these different places. And he has a lot of freedom in a place like Africa, which is not an incredible kind of national interest to the Kremlin. And so he gets kind of a whiff of independence as well out there. And when he's initially shut out of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, because you can imagine that type of personality and what we were talking about earlier, he's made a decent amount of enemies in Putin's inner circle

along the way, not least of which is the Minister of Defense Sergei Shoygu and some of the top staff in the Ministry of Defense. And so they try to keep him out. They have to let him in when it becomes quite clear that the Ukrainians are not going to be welcoming the Russians with open arms. And luckily for Progoshan at that time, he actually had this force that, you know, certainly the war in Ukraine is very different. but he had the guys who had eight years' experience of being shot at, which most people in the Russian military didn't have. And so ironically, these mercenaries are actually kind of more skilled in a lot of respects

than guys in the Russian Special Forces. And so they come in and they log victories, and Progosian is now he's openly the leader of Wagner, he's come out of the shadows, he's on Russian state TV, He's a hero of Russia. The Ministry of Defense needs Wagner to recruitment to the front. Progogian himself gets exclusive permission to tour all of Russia's prisons and recruit convicts to the front line. He gets about 50,000 to do so.

And he promises he's going to take Bachmoud. At the same time, like you said, he becomes the face of the war itself, CNN, Fox, you know, BBC, whatever. they're trying to interview him every day. And he's a narcissist. He reads everything that's written about him. I've talked to guys in the media companies, and they said, yeah, we wrote a lot of articles. But we always knew that we were writing for an audience of one.

Right? He's reading everything that's written about him. His ego is reaching kind of these new heights, but he still has those enemies, and they're looking to check him. And eventually, the Ministry of Defense decides that they're not only going to cut him off from convict recruitment and thus his means to deliver victory in Bahmoud, but they're also going to make Wagner, all the members of Wagner, everyone fighting in Ukraine, resign a contract with the Ministry of Defense. And so he recognizes that this force that was making him political, and the leverage that he had over his rivals was going to be taken away.

And that ultimately fuels this decision to, and I talked to the guys who participated in it, the mission was to go back, you know, leave Ukraine, go back into Russia, and capture and kills Shoygu, his rival, and create sort of a fate accompli for Putin, where he was basically saying, you've got to choose between me the Minister of Defense, I'll make it easier for you by just killing the Minister of Defense. It's very kind of like prison logic. And you're right, as they couldn't find him in southern Russia and Rostov at the southern military command. And so they start marching north onto Moscow.

And they're kind of marching into empty space. And very quickly, even though he is signaling via telegram and these other things he's saying we're not trying to overthrow Putin we're not trying to overthrow the regime we're just looking to get shogu he's kind of accidentally starting to end up doing just that and i think that is ultimately i mean he was a guy who had an insane risk tolerance like he was always sticking his neck out taking huge gambols right because he had to compared to other guys in Putin's system. But like the one time that he really probably should have doubled down, he called it off.

And, you know, who knows, we could argue all day on what would have happened if he made it into Moscow. But, you know, that did also seal his fate in a way, too. And we saw that later in the plane crash. It was not the time to walk away from the table. Probably not. But that was the scariest. moment too, right? That was, and that's when he folded. It was strange, though, to see him sitting with Putin at a table not long after, right?

And did he for a second believe that Putin wasn't going to have him killed? I mean, you know, all of the, sure, all is forgiven. We're going to sit around this table. We love each other. No one could have believed that, right? I mean, I wasn't thinking. it was going to happen, and I know nothing. I mean, Progoshin knows how Putin works. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I mean, who in the first place decides to mutiny in March on Moscow, right? And so I think to a certain extent, again, you can't analyze this without thinking about kind of his own emotional state, his own e-eastern extent. and I mean, I think that there are two things. I think one, he probably did, and he was seeking

the entire time to show that he was irreplaceable. So I think he knew that people were after him. But the deal, to the extent that we know it, was exile in Belarus, and then it became really a battle on who's going to take over the operations in Africa. And he was doing everything he could to show that he still needed to be the guy, and he was the only guy who could run those operations. And so I think he was hyper-focused on retaining as much of his empire as he could. And he also, if you just look at kind of where he was mentally at that point, I don't think he was constitutionally capable of just retiring to a log cabin in Siberia

and chopping wood quietly for the rest of his life. he just wasn't. One of the more interesting quotes was that I heard from one of the people who was close to him was that it was ultimately Western media that killed Progoshan. Because when he all of the sudden became a world name, that was too much for his ego to take. and I don't think he could have gone back from that. I think he was a guy who had to be in the spotlight.

I mean, look at Kanye West. He doesn't, you know, he can't just disappear, right? He has to do ever more insane things to stay there. So I think there was a little bit of, I think that there was also a lot of that that was going on too. I like thinking of progocean as a cancelled influencer. Yeah, exactly. You think of the pictures of him and the different costumes as like his apology video somehow.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But what's interesting is that he always, he always, he was very, he had a very good sense of the value of soft power in trying to control the information. environment, and especially in Africa, so much of what we chalk up to as kind of Russian hybrid warfare tactics, that was progozhen. That was progoshin bringing together his various companies in a way that he saw as sort of synergistic. And when he was getting shut out from access to Putin in Ukraine during that Bahmoud campaign, he recognized that what he did have, or where he did have an advantage over his kind of stuffy bureaucratic rivals in the Ministry of Defense, is that he had this brand, Wagner, which was like cool in Russia at that time,

and he had all of these telegram channels and the various kind of war bloggers. And so he leaned into that and he became, despite his lifelong ambition to be a member of the Russian, elite. He became an anti-elite populist in the end as a way to try and circumvent his rivals. And so he did tap into that. He became an influencer, a calculated influencer who was looking at whatever potential kind of advantage he had over the guys who were trying to shut him out. The Russian prisons and graveyards are full of influencers who have tried to push against the regime. That's right.

That's right. It's not been going well for the, for the Gherkins of the world. No. Or Trotsky. So let's tell me about, let's switch gears a little bit. And I like at the end, I kind of, I want to know like where Wagner is now. But like, tell me about this empire that was built, if we can call it an empire that was built in Africa. how many different countries is Wagner operating in?

And what exactly are they doing? I mean, it really depends on, and I think this is important for the book, and I think you see it in the Libya excerpt, is that I really made an effort, and I spent five years hanging out in the Central African Republic where Wagner operates. you can't understand what Wagner was doing in Africa if you don't understand the local environment and the local actors themselves because these other actors have an incredible amount of agency

and Wagner's operations are incredibly different in each one of these theaters in which they were involved and so in Sudan where they sort of showed up first they sign a deal to provide military instruction and they get concessions in gold mining and it pretty much stays that. Military instruction, they provide some political services. I mean, whether Bashir actually needed those services

is pretty debatable, and the Wagner guys themselves were frustrated because they felt like nothing they wrote was ever read by the people in Khartoum. In the Central African Republic, they again it starts out as sort of this very run-of-the-mill military training mission they get some concessions for minerals this isn't something that was invented by progoshin by any stretch of the imagination it's something that's actually to the advantage of these governments because cash is king and the extent that you can outsource investment of exploiting these concessions and receive

a revenue stream from them that's that's to your advantage and so but ultimately they put together an actual peace agreement, which is a great part of the book. Progoshin goes out, and he puts together an internationally recognized peace agreement between the Carr government and 14 armed groups. Of course, six of the armed groups then break it and try to take Bangi. I was there at the time when they tried to do so,

and Wagner switches from being a training mission to a counter-insurgency. And so they come in, and they resurgence. restore vast majority of territorial integrity to the car state, and that opens up this whole new world of chances to engage in business from gold mining to timber, they open up breweries, vodka distilleries. I mean, anything that he can expand into that's an opportunity, he will. And there's not, again, there's those rivals that he has in Russia, they're not there in the Central African Republic. It's not important to the Kremlin. And so, again, that's an advantage and a disadvantage. It's an advantage because he can try and go out there and do all sorts of different things, but also the subsidies that you're going to get from the Russian state for your operations there are few and far between. And so he has to figure out ways to try to make them self-financing as well. And I think a lot of the reporting on how much money they're making in these places is incredibly overblown. I mean, the idea that they're making $2 billion in the Central African Republic, the GDP of the Central African Republic, the GDP of the Central African Republic, public is about a billion at best. So they're not at this, you know, making two billion a year in Africa puts them as like a competitor to Rio Tinto. It's just, you know, like folks aren't checking their math when it comes to some of these estimates. I mean, it's artisanal mining, right? It's people out there. These are conflict zones. Very, very isolated. There's not a lot of infrastructure.

It's very expensive to work in these places. But they probably managed to get somewhat to a degree of self-financing. And in the long run, if they could have really developed some of these places at an industrial scale, it would become a pretty profitable enterprise, not at a level that you're funding the war in Ukraine or, you know, of interest to the Russian state. But, you know, to an individual like Progoshan, you know, who's going to say no to a couple hundred million bucks, right? I mean, it's a rounding error for the war in Ukraine, but, you know, it's pretty good for Progosion. And from there, the successful counterinsurgency opens up new opportunities, especially in the Sahel. We mentioned kind of Libya as well in 2018.

Again, it's mostly just a counterinsurgency. Their efforts, Mali's a very different country than the Central African Republic. It has kind of very entrenched institutions, and their efforts to get involved in gold mining and these things kind of went nowhere. They weren't able to, they would get slow rolled. In fact, what you'll see throughout the book is all the time they're getting taken advantage of by the governments that they're dealing with. Assad won't pay them. they are, you know, constantly running into obstacles in the Central African Republic. And Mali, they can't even, like, get access to the concessions that they're granted.

I mean, it's, you know, they're bumbling their way through as well. No one said mercenary life was going to be easy. Yeah. No, it's a tough, yeah, yeah, yeah. If it was hard, everyone, if it was easy, everyone would do it, right? Well, I have a couple of questions about the actual mercenaries themselves. Yeah. So are they all Russian? And do you go into Wagner or whoever's the successor PMCs are like already trained, you know, your former military or will they take you and train you? Do they have like an officer corps that's professional? I'm just curious how like these things really look. What's the equivalent of like the Blackwater Great Dismal Swamp like compound where they're training.

these guys. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, for the most part, these guys, I mean, it won't be surprising to people, right? I mean, they tend to be former military. They tend to be guys who, for whatever reason, had a difficulty adjusting to civilian life. They didn't enjoy being a Russian version of a mall cop, and they would get recruited into what they called the company by a friend who was already there. And so, yes, they, they, they, I, to my knowledge, everyone that I talked to had experience, had military experience. And even most of the guys who would fall into it, too, were also the type of people who would not have, uh, have, um, and, and even most of the guys who would fall into it, too, were also the type of people who would not, uh, have, avoided the, what was originally a two-year conscription in Russia and slowly kind of became

18 months over time. So everyone had a degree of familiarity at the very least. And there wasn't like a ton of, there wasn't like a basic training program for people who didn't have experience. So you kind of showed up and if you passed a few tests, you were accepted. into the group. This is not taking into consideration the convict recruit program where

those guys who recruited and who were given basically a contract that said if you fight for Wagner for six months and you survive you go free and your criminal record is expunged. Those guys went through an intense two-week

training program that was led by Wagner officers, Wagner instructors, but also, I think, some special operations officers as well,

to train those guys. I mean, two weeks is still not a long time, but everyone I spoke to, you know, said that, you know, they also didn't get a lot of sleep.

They were just trained nonstop for two weeks, and then you get trained up pretty quickly in Bachmout, if you make it through. And, And so, yeah, those were kind of the vast majority of guys. You had people from special force, former special forces, former officers, former grunts, specialists, of course, signed up as well for all of these positions.

And, you know, it's the same sort that have also joined these other groups that would also join some of the success. or not quite successors, but kind of alternative structures to Wagner that are popping up in Africa and elsewhere. Other than survive, how does one rise up the ranks in an organization like this? I mean, if you're on the military side, you, you, I mean, there are guys in the book who, who, who rise up. I think the way anybody rises up, right? They're respected by the guys around them. They, you know, perform certain tasks very well.

They do something that is, you know, particularly brave, you know, those types of things. And they can rise up and become commanders. Even within the convict program as well, there was ample opportunity for guys who were particular. particularly good to become leaders. And if they survived the six months, they had the opportunity to join Wagner as just a regular Wagner contractor and no longer part of the Convict program. And so some of those guys, too, rose up to become, you know, to higher ranks within the structure as well. Is there any kind of separation between a typical construct or construct?

a typical conscript and a, or sorry, let me rephrase this, is there any kind of separation between like a typical Wagnerite and one of the prison conscripts? Are they like in different groups? Are they all melded together? They would be used for different tasks. And so the convict recruits would be used as the human waves that were kind of quite infamous in Bachmute. And the more experienced non-convicts would be behind.

sweeping up, you know, coming in afterwards. And so that was certainly the case. And I mean, I've talked to people who said there was no difference. Like, we're all in this together. Others admitted that there were still somewhat of a stigma for some of the convicts. And so I think, you know, it very much depended on sort of a personal level. The convicts were certainly treated or sent to do more dangerous work, that was kind of part of the deal. What was interesting was always, you know, with the convicts that I spoke with

who fought, there was not really this like sense of being taken advantage of, right? You go in there and you're ready to ask these questions about, you know, how do you feel now that you saw what was going on in Bachmut? Like, was this what you signed up for? and they were like, yeah, no, it was pretty much exactly what we thought it was going to be, and, you know, it was fair. And I'm like, what?

Like, it was fair. And they were like, yeah, I mean, he said it was going to be bad, and it was bad. Like, you know, it was a fair exchange. And obviously, I'm talking to the guys who survived, so they thought that they came out of it, like, you know, for them, it was great, right? They're now free men or prisoners of Ukraine. But, you know, so. you don't, you don't talk to the ones who, who, who, uh, felt like it wasn't a fair exchange, but, um, but in general, they would say, and I think this is pretty normal that, you know,

when you're getting shot at together, you, you, you, you tend to develop bonds, uh, over time that can, uh, transcend, uh, a lot of stigmas and, and, and, and, and various kind of cultural differences. There's a really interesting series. I, you probably saw it. The New York Times did a year to, maybe even two years ago talking about how some of these convicts after their six months went home and they were really bad guys when they were arrested and they were really bad guys when they went home and were terrorizing people and you know people that they'd raped previously well they went back and did that again and um i mean yeah it just seems like these are nasty people right

I mean, for the most part. Is Wagner known particularly for brutality versus the regular Russian forces, which are known for brutality? No, I don't think there's a difference. And I think, yeah, I don't think. I mean, perhaps maybe convicts bring some specific degrees of violence from the prison system. but convicts are also, I mean, found throughout now all kind of Russian military units as well. It's not a Wagner-specific program. I think where we saw something that was kind of like more specifically convict kind of type of or prison type of violence would be some of what was enacted on themselves, right?

So there were cases where one guy, one convict actually deserted to the Ukrainian side and then gave a bunch of interviews to Ukrainian media. And then for God knows what reason he volunteered to be exchanged. And so he went back into Russian hands. And he was quote unquote tried by his peers and had a sledgehammer taken to his skull. that is sort of a kind of prison, you know, you're brought before, you know,

the criminal court of the, the Vorti, and then, you know, you're judged and executed. But, I mean, no, I think, you know, these guys come out of, the other guys, they come out of the Russian military, right? And so they practice the same type

of doctrine. They practice the same type of counterinsurgency. And even if you look in Africa, and this is something I try to point out to people, is that there are human rights abuses, of course, in all of these theaters, but the patterns are different in each conflict. And they tend to reflect the patterns of abuses and violence that preexisted their arrival. And this makes sense, right? They're being hired by these host governments they tend to over time begin to start to mirror

the norms and the culture I mean every conflict has its own norms that can be quite different you know what you can do in Mali you can't necessarily do in Libya

right and so those patterns of abuses tend to mirror the same abuses that you see from local forces over time as well. And so in the context of Ukraine, a long way of answering your question, they are with

the Russian military. It's kind of they, what they do is no different, I don't think. They're rising to the, or they're adapting to the local environment in each case. Yeah, which, you know, when you think about it, it just,

it makes sense, right? I mean, and I think they're not the only group that we see. I think a lot of U.S. interventions too, you see how over time the intervening force has to adapt to the culture of those being intervened upon. One thing you've hit a couple of times that I just want to highlight again that I think is pretty important, and we've tried to do on the show repeatedly, is that talk about host countries have their own agency and their own culture, and everyone is a little different, and the deal

is always a little bit different when you're talking about mercenaries. An interesting line in your piece is, in the Baffler piece, in proxy warfare, outside powers are typically willing to invest enough resources to ensure their preferred proxies won't lose, but not enough for them to win. I would also say that mercenaries, you know, the longer the conflict goes on, the more money you get. at, right? So a low level of conflict always seems to be a good idea, yeah. Can you talk about, I guess, kind of, I guess the clearest example to me would be Syria, which went on and on and on and was, you know, how much you want to call it a proxy conflict when there was so much direct involvement from a lot of different sizes is,

is in question, but I think that's like a pretty classic case of what you're talking about here, yeah? Yeah, I mean, I think well, first of all, I agree with my own words in the Baffler piece, so that's good. But to your other point, I think that

and this was apparent because I had been around and and seen all different phases of the conflict in the Central African Republic. And what I would say, and people kind of ask me about this too, it's, you know, like, oh, keeping a low level of conflict, it's to their benefit. But having spoken with those guys, I think they, what becomes clear is like you show up in these places.

And like you said, there's a lot of local agency. And so you might have this plan, right? But then as Tyson said, you know, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And very quickly, whatever kind of forward-looking thinking you've got turns into just a very reactive, how do we solve the crisis of the day? And these guys in Wagner, when you talk to them, are, they fully believe that what they are doing is trying to bring stability to these countries, right? I mean, there's never this moment, and this is what I've found just reporting in general all the time, is you always think that there's going to be this moment of where the cynicism is revealed, right? like they pull the curtain back and they're like, we say we do this, but what we really mean is doing this. And it doesn't exist.

Like they fully believe that what they're doing is bringing stability. What they're doing is good for the country. And there's such a high degree of othering that goes on kind of now in our very kind of geopolitically polarized world, right, that like with the other, there's this tendency, well, first of all, we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by the results, right? And so the Russians, they look at, say, you know, Western intervention in the Sahel,

and they say, well, they came, and now there's more jihadists. So that must have been what they were trying to do, was destabilize these regimes and make them, these countries and make them more dependent on Western aid and capitalism. And we likewise look at what Russia is doing, and we see that, you know, the results of their intervention is, you know, exacerbating in many respects to conflict. And we say, well, that must have been their intention as well to sow chaos and discord as a way to kind of poke the eye of the West. And, you know, I think they are running a counterinsurgency in these places that they think is the best way to go about it.

And it happens, of course, that the violence that's associated with it also creates new insurgents. I mean, if the U.S. kind of, we're not that good at coin either. And so, you know, it would be kind of a little bit the equivalent of saying, you know, that the U.S. was, you know, we created more Taliban than existed before, you know, we arrived in Afghanistan. And so I think. But we also built them cubicles. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that they are trying in the way that they believe to. to bring in their mind stability, but the byproduct of that, the externalities that they don't control, is often the same issues that we've gotten with the million different versions of coin that we've tried as well. It's also important to remember, and I think everything in this conversation underlines this,

is that the world is more chaotic and less controlled than everyone thinks it is. Yeah. And people look at Putin, and Putin would surely love everyone to believe this. You know, he's this mastermind who's in control of these things and he's sending these mercenaries out to Africa to extract resources. That's not quite what's any country as big and as complicated as Russia and also America. There's all sorts of competing interests. No one person can be in control of this massive machine at any one time. And like, stuff just happens. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why I think this book was so important, is that, you know, especially for, you know, it's written for a general readership. And, you know, it's tough to sell a book about Russia that's not about Putin, right? And so this was like this once in a lifetime opportunity to sell a book about that touches upon Russia and is not about Putin and actually shows that, you know, not only do people have agency in the Central African report. public, but people have agency in Putin's Russia, too. This, you know, what we think of is obviously a very authoritarian system. And if you are ambitious and entrepreneurial and you frame your ambitions as furthering the interests of the regime and the state, you get a lot of leash.

And so I think, you know, progosin is one of, I think, many characters who pop up and are progosians in their own right in Sudan, the Central African Republic, in Libya. And his mutiny is not the only one that you see. You see it, too, with the local PMC that he partners with in Syria, where the Syrian oligarchs become too big and have to be disbanded. You see it with Haftar, who eventually looks to take over the Libyan state. You see it with Hameti, with the RSF, which again, you know, the product of outsourcing security in the borderlands. And, again, you know, the creation looks to take over its creator. So what has now in a post-progogean world become of Wagner?

Who's in charge? It's all under various guises under the Ministry of Defense now. But, you know, how it was subsumed was, again, different in different places, which again, speaks to kind of the local context, but also the degree of cooperation between the Russian state and Wagner, depending on the theater. And so in Syria, obviously, they worked very closely together. there was a relatively kind of easy transition. The Russian MOD is already there, right? And so, well, I mean, now it's a little bit more debatable. But at the time when Progoshan had died,

it was a little bit easier to hand over. The same with Libya as well. And again, Libya, you know, not in open conflict since a ceasefire in October 2020. And so you got guys sitting on base, it's easy to show up with a new contract. ask them to sign. And it's very different than the Central African Republic, which still has a low-level insurgency. And it's very different from Mali, where Wagner was out there with 2,000 guys on the loose going against two different, you know, one Al-Qaeda, one ISIS-affiliated jihadist group, and then fighting against separatists in the north. And so the handover has been very different in those two places.

In the Central African Republic, these guys in the MOD show up, and they look at it, and it's like breweries and, you know, and they're like, okay, like, we don't know what's going on here. If it's not broke, like, don't fix it. And so, you know, the same guys basically stay around, right? And it's not important enough to like, given all of the other constraints to, like, given all of the other constraints, state is facing right now in Ukraine and elsewhere. Molly is a little bit different. The Sahel is a little bit more strategically important.

The MOD has always had a small presence there with military officers, but they've been trying to figure out a way to hand over these forces, but it's a total mess in terms of command and control. You have Wagner commanders out in the countryside, Russian military generals, and And then you have obviously the Malian leadership as well and like no one's talking to each other.

And the handover has been just a mess. And so, but there is sort of this effort or there was to sort of rationalize all of the Africa operations under this new entity called Africa. core. It's been going, you know, okay in Libya, not so okay in Mali, but in, they've also touched down in a couple new places like Burkina Faso and Niger, sort of these places, too, that Progoshin's death made it possible for the Russians to show up, because again, each, each country is different. The Burkinawaffe and Burkina Faso were looking at what Progoshin was up to in the Central African Republic, and they didn't want any. thing to do with it, now sort of this very official state to state training mission only is

something that is a little bit more palatable to them. It's a different when it's not just a guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, Progosian thrived in that ambiguity. So he certainly, he presented himself differently to different people. And certainly, he certainly presented himself to Central African authorities as the Russian state. But as we found out, he wasn't always reflecting the interest of the Russian state. And if you go to a place like the Central African Republic, like this is totally normal. Like, again, it's not a place

that's of massive interest to the United States, to France, to Russia. And so you run into all of these guys, I mean, mostly guys, who kind of present themselves as representing these interests that they don't really represent either. And no one's going to make a phone call. Yeah, no one's going to make a phone call. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's just a lot.

It's just a very kind of shadowy world and prognosion thrived in it. Jason, do you have anything else? No, thank you. Wow. The more you learn about this guy, kind of the more interesting he gets, I think. Oh, my God.

Yeah, he's Shakespearean. Like, he's a Shakespearean character. It's like, it's tough for me because, you know, I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to write another book, but I'm like, I don't know if I can find another guy like Prokoshin any time soon. It's going to be tough. John, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to us about this. Will you give us the title of the book one more time and tell us where people can find it? Sure. The book is called Death is Our Business, Russian Mercenaries and the new era of the world.

private warfare, and you can get the book wherever fine books are sold. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, go to Angry Planetpod.com and get early commercial-free versions of all the episodes and back catalog of some bonus episodes and access to the Angry Planet Discord.

We will be back again a little bit less than a week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.