Pod Save the World - A Russian Coup Against Putin? (Bonus Pod!)

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Ben and Tommy talk about the extraordinary failed coup attempt against Vladimir Putin by Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner mercenary group in Russia. They cover the infighting that got Russia to this point, what it means for Putin’s image and power, the amnesty deal that ended the insurrection and why Belarus was involved, and what it’s like at the White House when a crisis like this happens.Thanks to our listeners for sending in questions over our subscriber Discord. Sign up for it and more benefits at crooked.com/friends

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. And we are back here. It's Saturday afternoon. We're recording a mini episode. I don't know what even to call it, Ben, because it's been a pretty wild 24 hours in Russia. You and I were texting in the midst of this ongoing sort of maybe coup. It might be over. We'll explain it a second that this is one of the crazier things. I think either of us had seen in foreign policy in our lives. Yeah, Russia's having a total normal one, Tommy. But we said at the beginning of this war in February 22nd, when you launch a major war, you never know what's going to happen. And Putin didn't bargain for this, but here we are.

No, he certainly didn't. Okay, so here's what happened. So on Friday, a man named Giovanni Prygosen, who is the founder of the Wagner mercenary group and a Russian oligarch. And once a close ally of Vladimir Putin decided to take his private army of about 25,000 men who had been fighting in Ukraine and turn them against the Russian state. Prokosian, he's been engaged in this fierce war of words and a power struggle with Russia's military leadership for months. He blames them for not having enough ammunition. He attacks them

in really personal terms in these videos. He releases all the time. It seems like what made him finally snap and literally declare war on the Russian Ministry of Defense was an alleged missile strike on a Wagner camp in Ukraine that Wagner said killed a bunch of their guys and was ordered by the Russian military leadership. I say alleged because everyone involved in the story is a liar and Prokosion could have made it all up as a pretext. We don't know, but that's what he said. So early Saturday morning, we started to see videos of these Wagner forces rolling tanks and other heavy equipment into the Russian city of Rostov, where they seize control of military facilities. These are very important military facilities in staging operating.

for the war in Ukraine for the Russian military. The Wagner forces then started rolling their equipment towards Moscow. And, you know, Moscow wanted some sort of lockdown mode. It's not totally clear to me, Ben, how much combat occurred along the way. There were reports of Wagner forces maybe shooting down Russian helicopters. There was active fighting along this highway where the convoy was traveling, but it didn't seem like there was none. Putin had to come out and give a speech. She called it armed rebellion and a stab in the back of our country and our people. Shortly before we started recording this, Progoshin got on the phone with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, and they negotiated a deal and announced that he would be standing down and turning the Wagner

columns back to Ukraine and returning to their field camps, according to the plan. Putin's spokesman then released a statement saying that the criminal case against Progogian will be closed. He'll go into exile in Belarus, and he'll offer amnesty for all the other Wagner forces involved in light of their service in Ukraine. And it does seem like, Ben, that Wagner will be swallowed up into the Russian military more formally now. So that's sort of the overview of what happened. We asked the folks on our friends of the pod, Discord community, to submit some questions to do sort of a Q&A to help answer everybody's questions about what the hell's happening. If you want to join the Discord, by the way, go to crooked.com slash friends.

But Ben, before we get to the Q&A, was there anything sort of at the top that you wanted to just touch on? No, I think that's a really good summary. I think the only thing I'd add to just kind of the baseline facts here is that after Progoshan launched this partial coup, the city of Rostov that they took control over. This is a city in southern Russia that is near the border of Ukraine. Importantly, it is literally the logistics hub for the war in Ukraine. So a lot of the equipment, the military equipment, the supply lines that run into Ukraine, run through the city of Rostov. So, So it was not a small thing that Progousin took control of the city, took control of the Russian military headquarters in the city, because essentially that gave him control over the choke point

that leads into Ukraine. Back in when I was in government in 2014, 2015, we saw this as a staging area for all of the support, or a lot of the support, at least, that went into so-called pro-Russian separatists and some of the Russian military advisors who went in. That's obviously expanded with this war. So Progosion really did have a chokehold on. the ability of the Russian military to project power into Ukraine and it also gave him a great platform to make a run on Moscow, which he was doing until he stood down.

Yeah, we should just say, Gengni Pryghajan, he's a Russian oligarch. He went to prison for about nine years in the 80s for a robbery. He then became, he reportedly opened a hot dog stand, became a catererer, got to know Putin through that catering work. I think there's actually a photo of Prygosian putting a plate in front of George H. W. Bush when he's, at a meeting with Putin Ben. But he's built the Wagner group into this pretty amazing, like, large fighting force since 2014. I think they first showed up in Crimea, but they've grown their operations since then. They're in Syria. They fought in Libya, Sudan, Mali, Mozambique. The U.S. sanctioned progosian in 2016 for the annexation of Crimea. And the U.S. indicted him in 2018 on

election interference charges because he oversaw the IRA, the sort of troll farms that were, were part of spreading disinformation in our elections. So very well-known bad guy is the long story short here. So, Ben, first question was from Matt, who said, you know, what's the background build up to this, you know, basically is this airstrike more of an excuse or the sole motivation? Do you have thoughts on this one? Yeah. We've been talking about this on the pod off and on for the last few months because what's been happening is progoshin for the last several months has been increasingly airing his grievances about the Russian military command structure, and in particular, the Russian Minister of Defense Shorghue and the other military commanders. Because what was going on is it progoshin,

who had been off, like you said, projecting power abroad in places like Syria and parts of Africa, came back at the beginning of the war. He built an even larger fighting force in Wagner usually has. Estimates are that they had up to 25,000 fighters associated with Wagner. Some of these were hardened mercenaries that had fought in places like Syria. Some of these were literally convicts that they took out of prison and threw at the front lines. Progoshin was at the front in the place called Bakhmut that we've talked about a lot. This is a Ukrainian city that was the focus of fighting for several months. And it was Wagner fighters who were on the front lines in that fight for Bakhmut. And increasingly what Progoshin was alleging in telegram videos and

other communications is that the Russian military was hanging him out to dry, that they weren't giving him sufficient cover, they weren't giving him sufficient ammunition, that essentially his men were being treated as cannon fodder, even though they were the ones who were making gains in Bakhmut. And then obviously Russia was able to complete the conquest of Bakhmut, which is frankly not that important strategic city, but it came very important symbolically. Progoshin kind of announced the conquering of Bakhmut, and he clearly wanted to use that for some prestige. but he was threatening to do something, maybe not this dramatic, but something quite dramatic for some time, because he basically had this beef with the Russian military command structure.

And the way Putin set up this whole enterprise of his regime is you have the military, which is corrupt, then you have guys like Progoshan, who is also corrupt. You have other warlords like Ramzan Khadirav, the Chechen warlord, and they're kind of competing fiefdoms. And what happened is Putin thought he could control these different factions through the war, turns out he couldn't. And that all exploded into, you know, view for the entire world the last 24 hours. Like you said, we don't know if Progoshin used a pretext of an air strike on Wagner or whether that strike actually took place. But this had been building for some time, but I don't think

most analysts thought that it would get this far and this hot. And it did. Yeah. And a lot of, you know, analysts suggest that Putin allows these sort of mini-fifdoms, the Wagner group to exist. He builds up the Chechens. as a way to create, you know, rivalries between people who rely on him to make sure that the military isn't a threat to his personal power because it's obviously the most powerful entity within the state. And then Ben, just a couple of other things on the kind of buildup. Like, as you mentioned, Progosian's been talking shit about the Ministry of Defense for months.

There was a weird moment a few weeks back where he threatened to withdraw troops from Bakhmut before walking that back. There was also an incident where the Wagner forces released a video of some. Russian soldier, they'd clearly just beaten the shit out of confessing, in air quotes, to shooting at Wagner forces. And then more recently, the deputy defense minister announced that all volunteer attachments would have to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense before the end of this month. This was obviously seen as a way to kind of exert more control over Wagner and put them under the MOD. And Prokosion flipped out about that because obviously that would take away a lot of his power

and he snapped on the defense minister. So, again, no idea if this airstrike really happened, who did it if it was a pretext. But certainly that was a precipitating event to rolling on Moscow. And I just say, Tommy, the irony is you said he has competing fictum so no one got too strong. And I think the main takeaway here is that, you know, Progogian came pretty close to Moscow. He controlled the city of Rushdav. So it shows that that theory may not have held for Putin because this is a guy who got pretty close. And I think what Progossian may have been counting on is he wanted to test if other people would come with him, you know, what parts of the Army peel off and join him, what other Russian leaders, provincial leaders may be joined him. They didn't. So it may be, and no one really knows exactly what happened here. But it may be that Progosion was testing to see if there was kind of a broader collapse and might have allowed him to make a real challenge. When that didn't happen, maybe he took the best deal he could get.

Yeah. So, Ben, Poop Jackson asks, are these reports that Pergson? Wait, isn't there like the basketball player? Not Scoop. Yeah, not Scoot. Poop. Scoop Jackson was a senator, right? Oh, that's right. I'm thinking of the senator.

Yeah, this is, I'm such a nerd. Scoop Jackson is a senator, not the basketball player. Sorry. Close. Look, maybe it's both. So Poop Jackson wants to know, you know, about this report that there was a deal cut between Progoshin and Putin. This was allegedly brokered by Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president.

So I think question is like, you know, on the legitimacy, Is this deal real? Again, like these people are all liars. Russia is a wash and disinformation. The Ukrainians are probably putting out all kinds of disinformation. I saw they're doing their kind of trolling thing at the moment. They released a video of some, you know, drone commander, like eating a bunch of popcorn. I saw Zelensky put out a video talking about how weak this made Putin look.

Like we obviously can't predict the future here. I would not be surprised if progoshin fell out of the window of a tall building in Belarus. in the near future. I just sort of can't imagine Putin tolerating him literally marching troops on Moscow and then living. But I'm curious what you make of Lukashenko, the president of Belarus's role here. Why is this guy, of all people, calling the head of the Wagner group and ending, you know, the negotiated the end of an insurrection? Well, Lukashenko, another guy we've talked about a bunch, right? He's the dictator of Belarus, but he was almost toppled after a stolen election and basically became totally dependent on Vladimir Putin. And he's kind of a vassal state of Putin. A lot of the

staging for the initial invasion came through Belarus. You know, Lukashenko occasionally flies over and kisses Putin's ring. So he's, you know, he should be thought of as another fiefdom, because Belarus is almost de facto controlled by Moscow now. Why is he in this picture? It may be that they needed somewhere to send progosin, and Belarus is someplace that's not in Russia, but is fairly controlled by Russia. Easy commute, yeah. He may, yeah, easy commute. He's got his own relationship with Kyrgyzhen. I'm sure Wagner guys have been part of the infrastructure that has propped up Lukashenko.

So it may be that he was a convenient lackey to carry this out. It may be that he was a genuine person who could be a broker because he's not in the literal Russian command structure. So it would have been harder for someone, say, in the Russian government to broker this. So he was kind of a convenient third party. I think an interesting one, though, in a way, it bolsters Lukashenko's prestige a bit. And you saw him trying to do that. They're the ones who announced at the Lukashenko office. They read out that they had a call with Putin before I think Putin did.

So first of all, for Lukashenko, this kind of makes him look like a slightly bigger, strong man, even though everybody knows he's under Putin's thumb. We'll see if progoshin, A, actually goes to Belarus because he could, you know, maybe hop down to Africa where Wagner has some infrastructure. B, like you said, whether it gets pushed out of window. At this point, again, this could be everything from, you know, a coup that almost succeeded. And ultimately, the guy took the easy way out, the parachute into Belarus when he realized that the House of Cards wasn't fully collapsing in Russia. That's one end of the spectrum. You could take it all the way to the other in the spectrum that this is some Russian information operation, right? Like, we don't exactly know. But what is clear here is that they are trying to signal a de-escalation that is going to

change what Wagner was into something that is, to some extent, brought in the Russian command structure. It will be interesting to see if there are any changes made in the Ministry of Defense command structure, because one of Progosians' grievances was you got to change the guy at the top shoroggi, the minister of defense, who he said was incompetent. If there are changes made at the Ministry of Defense, that might show that actually Progotion accomplished something beyond just flexing here. It would be interesting to see if Wagner stays under. progosan's control with its global operations. So there's a lot of stuff to watch here. But yes, in the near term, this seems like a deal that progosion doesn't, you know,

gets the charges dropped against him. The Wagner guys get to go back. Some of them will go on the Russian military. Some of them will leave. And we'll see how this all shakes out. There's a lot of turns in this story that are yet to come. Yeah. And Putin, I think over time has struggled to put his guys in charge of the Ministry of Defense. One of those previous heads tried this modernization effort that failed. Shoy gookily is not really had the firmest grip on control. Maybe Bob Gates is available then. I don't know what he's up to these days.

Spiffy asks, what's it like in the White House during these times? Is everyone on high alert? I don't know if you've been, you're on East Coast. I was texting with people on the NSC at like midnight Eastern last night. I'm sure they were at the office very late and back early in the morning. But the crazy thing about a situation like this is you're probably going to get as much information from social media as you are from the intelligence community. You know, like, I don't know that the CIA is like going to be able to wrangle their sources

such as they exist in Russia in real time to figure out what the Wagner Group is doing unless like progosian is some sort of asset. I imagine they were like, you know, satellites watching troop movements and whatnot and, you know, ssigint of people in the Russian government talking about what was going on. But, you know, the most compelling stuff that I've seen was just getting uploaded to telegram and other social media sites. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you know, what is it like? I mean, the rhythm I remember, for instance, around the first Russian move into Crimea and all the turns that happened in Ukraine after that, right, is that you get called into an emergency situation room meeting that is chaired by the national security advisor. So you go into the situation room and there you've got the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, CIA director, everybody is around the table or on a secure video conference. The intelligence community is asked what the fuck is going on. There's a brief.

And they're like, oh. So in this case, the Director of National Intelligence, April Haynes, and the director of the CIA, Bill Burns, probably are making presentations. Here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. Then you go around to Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and you say, what are you seeing in terms of Russian troop movements? What are you seeing in terms of Wagner troop movements? Then you go to Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and you say, hey, Tony, what's a diplomatic play? What have you learned from your conducts with the Ukrainians?

What have you learned from our embassy? Maybe you go out to the ambassador on a security video conference. And so you're trying to get a full picture here, the intelligence picture, the military picture, the diplomatic picture, and then trying to figure out what the play is. What can we do in response? Is there anything we need to do in response? The White House chose a low profile here, which I think is right because we didn't probably know exactly what was happening. So you didn't see Biden go out and make a statement. You saw him make some phone calls to the British, the French, the Germans, the key allies. I'm sure that Tony Blinken was on the phone constantly with the Ukrainians. Jake Sullivan was supposed to go to Copenhagen to meet with a bunch of countries that have been like fence sitters in the war. He canceled that trip. Mark Millie, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was supposed to go to the Middle East. He canceled that trip. To me, that's a signal that this was a surprise to them, as it was to everybody, when you start pulling down travel like that. What I'd like to know, Tommy, and this is you and I were texting about this last night is the Ukrainian intelligence services, I think, are really good, you know,

and I think they're kind of in the Russian heads. And I'm sure that they were stirring this pot for weeks or months in terms of creating information operations to make the distrust between Wagner and the military grow. Definitely. You know, I'm curious what the Ukrainians were sharing with us, you know, about what they were seeing, what they were doing. But yeah, you're just, it's actually, I miss being in the White House very rarely. It's someone who likes to have a life and has two kids.

The times I miss it the most are when there's a crisis because it's, there's like a frenetic pace, but you're learning stuff every thing. 30 minutes and you're doing stuff constantly and I'm sure that nobody has slept in the last 24 hours. Yeah. And the most fascinating part about a crisis is the sort of the information flows open widely, right? And things that were like, you know, closely held or sensitive intelligence or background on things that get shared more broadly because you just need to figure it out and it might be in the press anyway. I imagine, Ben, that a big part of the NSC conversation about managing to the extent we can at all, what's happening in Russia is telling everyone to shut the

fuck up. Because what Vladimir Putin loves to do is take any little statement, you know, some moderate criticism of, you know, an election or whatever it might be, like you did Hillary Clinton back in the day and then try to make this about, you know, a Western plot to take him down or some sort of coup. And like he might do that anyway, but you don't want to give him any ammunition to sort of hang that on. Yeah, you don't, you know, now, Progousin is the last guy that you could call a Western asset, but, you know, Putin's not above anything to say that this is a Western plot. But it's also the case that, like, look, for guys like us, like we can go on Twitter way in, you know, you don't want to be wrong either, you know, like you don't want to, when you don't know what's happening and you know what's going to happen. And I don't think anyone knew what was happening last night. I don't think Vladimir Putin knew what was happening last night. I don't think Prozhen knew exactly what was going to happen. happen. You also just want to hold your powder until you have more information, right? And so you don't want to play in the Putin's hands. And you also don't want to come out and, you know, declare victory,

whatever that is, or like start calling, you know, you don't know, and you were the communications person on the front lines, like, you don't want to become the narrator of what's happening in Russia when you don't know exactly what's happening. So I think if people are wondering, well, where was Biden? Why aren't they talking more? Like, better to wait and see and then go out and say your piece. Another question we got was, you know, what does this say about the strength of the Putin regime and his sort of image in the country? It does seem clear that this is the biggest threat to Putin's power since 1999 when he became president, right? And his whole image is to be like the strong man and the father of the country. But he had to go out and give this grave speech about a coup attempt.

You've got progosion, by the way, messaging that the first. whole war itself. The war in Ukraine was waged under false pretenses by the MOD. They're saying Prigotion was saying Russia is losing that bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defense are stealing all the money for the war. That's why we evaded. You've got like the FSB putting out statements calling on Wagner to take progosian captive, right? The whole country is freaking out about a coup attempt. They're digging up roads on the way to Moscow to block tanks from rolling into this. Like, it has to undercut Putin's image and in his argument that the invasion somehow, you know, made the country Russia safer from the fascists in Ukraine, right?

100 percent, Tommy. I mean, like, first of all, this was real. So Putin had to go on television and talk to the whole nation. So this isn't something they could hide. Putin told everybody this was happening, right? So this is something that they can just sweep under the rug. Second, they were like tanks in Moscow. You know, they were military vehicles in Moscow.

They were kind of taking emergency measures. So for Russians, they saw the war coming home in a way that they haven't seen before. They felt an instability that they haven't felt before. And so even though this ended pretty quickly, don't think for a second that the Russian population is thinking about Putin the same way today that they did 48 hours ago. He has been dealt a blow. there is a big crack in the edifice of the Putin regime, even with the way this ended. And by the way, the fact that it didn't end the way he said it would, right? He said that, you know, like you said,

the FSB said to detain Progoshan. They put out a statement saying he was going to go to jail for 20 years. The fact that even though Putin held power, you know, Prozion was given amnesty and that there was a deal announced by Lukashenko, Belarus, right? That's not what Putin told people was going to happen when he went on television. And that makes him look weaker too. And so to me, even though this didn't end with like a civil war and tanks and fighting in Moscow, this does kind of feel like the beginning of maybe not the end, but the beginning of a different period of time where Vladimir Putin has to worry more about his personal

security. Because there are people in that system that are strong like Progoshin who, now there's thinking, hey, maybe I'll take my shot, you know. Putin's going to have to start worrying about that in a way that he didn't before. Who's the next person who might take a run? The Wagner guys, based on reports, were like 125 miles from Moscow. You know, this was not a fire drill. They got close. And so I do think he's weaker across the board. The other thing I'd say is the whole world saw this, right? So there are all these fence-sitting countries we've talked about, India, Brazil, the whole continent or most of the continent of Africa, the Chinese who've been betting on Putin,

they're looking at this and thinking like, hey, does this guy really have control over this thing? And so I think the pressure on Putin from within and maybe even from without to kind of pull back the war in Ukraine, where the Ukrainians are on the counteroffensive and to try to get his shit together at home is going to go up. So I think he leaves this like a pretty significantly diminished figure. Yeah. It's also interesting to see there were some images coming out of the Wagner forces sort of packing up and getting back in their trucks and going back to the front lines. And they were surrounded by citizens applauding them and cheering for them. So like these guys aren't seen as enemies. They didn't not seem like they did anything wrong. They're still seemingly beloved. Now, you know, lest were sort of leading oppression that this is the beginning of the end for Putin. I mean, you know, Ben, the counter argument would be tie up Erdogan in Turkey, right, who fought off a coup attempt in 2016 and then just down brutally on everyone and further cemented his control. So I guess a lot of it depends on Putin's

reaction, but obviously different situations, different systems. Yeah, but you know, you said something really important about progosan's criticism of the war, because to date, progousin's criticisms were about the incompetence of the Ministry of Defense, the corruption of the Ministry of Defense, the prosecution of the war. He went at the core rationale. This whole thing is a bunch of bullshit. And we've always wondered about Russian public opinion. Those pictures of people kind of cheering them. Like, he may have been the first guy to say out loud, like, what the fuck is going on? The emperor has no close, you know? And if he's now saying the quiet part out loud, if he's saying something that everybody's kind of feeling from the frontline troops who are being treated like

cannon fodder, to the people back home who are losing loved ones, to people who were just wondering, look, what the fuck is going on? It's hard to put that genie back in a bottle, too. And so it'll be interesting to see the boy, this goes, like you said, doesn't mean Putin's going to topple tomorrow. And frankly, he may become more belligerent and more brutal and more extreme. But this is not going his way. You know, history is long. And we're only like, what, 16 months into this war? Where are we going to be in 60 months from now? I would not be buying stock in Vladimir Putin right now. No, I wouldn't either. And, you know, watching all this unfold reminded me. I think it was that big Atlantic cover piece on Ukraine that said something like, you know, look, anybody would be better than Putin.

And I think this, what we just watch is a pretty good example of how flawed that thinking is, right? Like, Prokotian's a bad guy. He's a crazy person. A chaotic civil war in Russia with a mercenary forces and a bunch of nukes floating around. Like, actually, that is probably worse than Putin kind of locking that shit down or at least having control. Well, yeah, to tie it back to the question about what's going on the White House, I bet you that the nuclear weapons were a big topic of focus in the situation room. because if there is a civil war in Russia, this is the largest nuclear power with the United States in the world. Who had control those nuclear weapons?

What if there was a war in the Wagner Group splinter the military and the Wagner Group had some nuclear weapons and the Russian military had some nuclear weapons? Just because we don't like Putin and we all would like to see something different than Vladimir Putin in Russia, doesn't mean that like a civil war

is necessarily good. Because if you have loose nuclear weapons, then the stakes suddenly become existential. Yeah. So I think like the big picture question is, and maybe it's unanswerable, is what does this mean for the war in Ukraine itself? I saw reports that the Ukrainians have launched, or at least said they launched some additional kind of military offensive in the midst of all this chaos, seemingly to try to take advantage of it. I don't know how impactful that will be. I don't know the impact really of these Wagner forces being off the battlefield for a

period of time or whether they might end up demoralized or, you know, I think long story short, we probably should not expect that these events will lead to some sort of game-changing military effort in the next couple weeks or two. It'll probably continue to be a grinding long-term assault this Ukrainian counteroffensive. But I don't know. I didn't know if you had thoughts on sort of that broader question. I think that there's like a couple of aspects to this and it's a good question. One is, is the Russian military distracted by this or demoralized by this in a way that allows the Ukrainians to make some more headway? Or are they not? Right? They're dug in there, their trenches, just things like that that they can use for defensive purposes. The second is the Wagner fighters themselves, who've been, you know, pretty good as a part of the Russian campaign here. If that's taken off the table for the Russians, does that harm their ability to? to prosecute the war. And then just Putin's own mindset, does it become kind of consumed by internal stability? He was a bit exposed in Moscow because there's so many Russian military deployments

into Ukraine. Does he have to pull people back now because he's worried about internal stability? Are there units that have to kind of come back and protect Moscow, like a kind of presidential guard here? So there are a lot of questions, but none of them are really good for Putin. Nobody's going to say like, well, this is good for Putin. We'll see how it goes to the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the weeks and months to come. But I have to think that on some level, whether it's all of those scenarios, Wagner off the battlefield, Russian military distracted, morale issues, that this is probably not good for the Russian military war in Ukraine. Yeah, agreed with that. Well, I mean, I think that's it for today. We have been, for a long time, actually, have been producing and thinking about doing

longer segment on the Wagner group with cricket contributor Max Fisher and we'll get into, you know, sort of all the things they're doing in Africa and what the impact could be on, you know, those efforts there and, you know, the way that Russia has used the Wagner group to screw with other countries all over the globe. But we just want to say, you know, thanks to everybody for listening to this and thanks to the friends of the pod, Discord community, for sending in really great questions and being fun to goof around with in these times on Discord. So if you want to join cricket.com slash friends. Ben, I don't know if you have any concluding thoughts.

First of all, the Discord channel is great. I don't know if we don't have any leakers on there, to be clear. Get us some documents, guys. No, no, no, no. We can't ask for that. I mean, wait, that was sarcasm, sarcasm. I guess the one thing I'd say is, you know, it's easy when these things are playing out on, like, Twitter, you know, and I was all, I've been off Twitter for most of the last few months. But last night, you know, everybody's like watching everything they can get.

it's easy to play armchair, genius historian, and I'm not trying to do that here because it's important to note that, like, we don't know a lot. These are personality dynamics. Like you said, they're all liars. They're all corrupt. They're no good guys here. I guess the one historical point that is worth making and that just kind of lurks in the background of all this is that things have happened in Russia in the past pretty fast you know so the Soviet Union collapsed pretty quickly and there was a coup a bunch of strong men tried to ask Gorbachev to hold on to power that only lasted like a bunch of days and then those guys were out Yeltsin standing on the tank whole thing like the one of the strongest empires in this year world just like implodes relatively quickly

at 1917 the Bolsheviks Lenin Trotsky all those guys uh they weren't that much stronger than Wagner Group. You know, they didn't, like, control a lot of forces. They came to power pretty fast because the Tsar had fought like a shitty war in World War I and was losing and nobody liked him. And it all kind of came down like a house of cards, right? So things, you know, I'm not trying to sound, you know, like I know everything that's going on in the world. But like, it is worth bearing in mind that part of what we saw the last 24 hours, even though the most dramatic outcome didn't happen, is that, you know, is that. we don't know what's going to happen and things can change very fast. And that Vladimir Putin, just because he's been the strongman for 20 years, doesn't mean that, you know, he's going to be around for that much longer or that he's somehow immune to the kind of forces that have toppled dictators before. When you're flailing about and losing in a war, and he's certainly not winning

in the war and the Russians are suffering huge gains, the vulnerability for this kind of thing goes up. And so the lesson I take away from this is whatever happens, however this plane lands, whatever plays out in the next few days, I don't think we've seen the last one of these. I think that Russian internal stability is now a part of the war in Ukraine. And on the one end, that seems like a good thing because we want the Ukrainians to get their territory back. But in the other hand, raises a whole bunch of other questions about Russia's stability, about Russia's nuclear weapons, all the rest of it.

So, you know, stay tuned. You know, this will play out over a period of months, probably years. But, you know, it's not just Ukraine's internal dynamic and borders and territory and stability that's at stake here. The question of what the future of Russia is is a part of this war in Ukraine. And I think that's what we just saw. Yeah, I keep thinking about those civilians applauding Wagner forces who just occupied their town and how little we know about public opinion in Russia.

and how quickly public opinion can change. And we know Putin fear is nothing more than a color revolution. Well, you know, a war that's going really badly is the kind of thing that could lead to one. And as we saw in the year of spring, those things move quickly. So yeah, pretty monumental a couple days here, even if it ended with a bit of a fizzle. What color do you think progosian is using? Oh, you know, he's so pale. He kind of looks like that like famous bat boy.

tabloid cover, you know? He's like a scarily compelling guy to stare at in like all these crazy videos he puts out, you know? He's, yeah, he's a truly horrible person. He celebrates the fact that his guys kill deserters by hitting them in the head with sledgehammers. So that's just, no, that's the kind of person we're talking about. And he's the guy who kind of raised his hand to go into Syria and just massacre people. So this is, this is a bad fucking dude. So is Putin.

the worst of the worst. They deserve each other. Well, on that hopeful note, you will be back recording on Tuesday for a pod on Wednesday. So thanks for tuning into this. Ben, good to see you. And talk soon. See you. Potsave the World is a cricket media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mazua. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Segglin, Charlotte Landis, and DeSilius Futopoulos are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, D.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week

and check out the Potsave the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.