Pod Save the World - Spain’s #MeToo moment?

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Ben and Tommy talk about the fallout after Spain’s head soccer official kissed star player Jennifer Hermoso, BRICS announcing the addition of six countries, Donald Trump’s musings on the Panama Canal, and a report that the US was aware of Saudi Arabia’s torture and killing of African migrants. They also discuss France’s ban on students wearing the Abaya in schools, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s memoir and defense of Russia, Zimbabwe’s disputed election, far right Israeli politician Ben-Gvir’s racist statement, and India’s lunar landing. Then Ben is joined by Joshua Yaffa, contributing writer for The New Yorker, to discuss his profile of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and what his rise and fall tell us about Russia. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. It's a very August day here. It's hot. It's like straight up hot. Hot and empty. There's nobody here. Yeah, it's only the POTSave the World crew. You've been something of a content machine, Tommy. I'm sick of hearing myself. Every podcast I turn on and I hear you. I got no takes left. You're driving everyone.

They're gone. Just empty out that bank of Tate's again. Then take a couple days off. But we got a great show for you today. We're going to talk about why international soccer is a cesspool. of sexism and just horrible people. What it means that the BRICS organization is expanding, everything you wanted to know about the Panama Canal and more, thanks to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson,

Saudi Arabia's treatment of migrants and what the U.S. knew. France and religion. Former French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, has a bookout, Ben. He's making some waves. Elections in Zabwe, a racist minister in Israel, probably more than one. And India lands a rover on the moon. And then, Ben, you did our interview today.

What are we going to learn about? Yeah, we're staying on the Progoshin story because it's so endlessly fascinating. So we have Joshua Yaffe on today, New Yorker writer, long-time correspondent in Moscow, who recently wrote an amazing piece that we talked about last week about Progosion and Wagner and its history and ideology and characters. So we talk about, you know, Progoshan's legacy, what's likely to happen next with Wagner? He had some pretty interesting insights on that. why Putin made the choice to blow a plane out of the sky when there were less messy ways of

taking care of business and kind of where does this mean for the future of Russian politics? It's great. It was interesting the way to see it unfolded. Like Putin finally talked about Progoshin in the past tense. Yeah. And then a couple days later they finally admitted that he was deceased. And I think he now, Progarsion now is a grave, I believe. Yes, he's buried today.

It's got like 100 yard walls around it. You can't get close to it. Yeah. I said to Joshua, it's like going to be a pilgrimage for, you know, former mercenaries and a weird collection of fascists. Yeah. I also saw, I mean, this is all on Twitter, but like videos allegedly of somebody digging up Wagner Graves,

which is pretty intense. Pretty dark. Just erasing them in history. Yeah, Russia's in a pretty strange place right now. Yeah, not ideal. Well, we got a great show for you today. I can't wait to hear that interview. Real quick, Ben, if you want more World Over.

content. If you want to talk to people who are into the same stuff, you are, if you want to watch debates with people who are as horrified as you are by everything Ron DeSantis says, for example, join the Kyrkid subscription community. We have a blast chat in our Discord server. For those who don't know, Discord is, it's not as scary as it sounds. It's just the chat room. It's easy to install. No classified information on this one. No classified information. Wink. You also get lots of bonus info. Go to Kerkid.com slash friends to learn more. Also, get some Labor Day merch going. Lots of new items. Everything it's 15% off, go to crooked.com slash store. We need some new world though merch.

We haven't had new world though merch in a while. I think it's time. Love it's really the driver of the merch. Yeah, I noticed there's a lot of Lovett-centric merch. But I also noticed you're very on-the-ball coverage of the Trump merch coming out of the mugshot. The Trump, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton mugshot T sounds like a thing. I probably need in my collection. Did you hear how badly I got humiliated?

He got smoked, yeah. Yeah, D.C. who just destroyed me in our little game that Halley put together. But anyway, enough about my humiliation. Let's talk about Spain, Ben, because it's been about over a week since the Spanish women's team won the Women's World Cup. And unfortunately, the thing that's captured the world's attention is a scandal involving the president of the Royal Spanish Federation, who was harassing a top player named Jenny Hermoso. Luis Rubialz is Spain's top soccer official in a complete creep.

There's a video of him out. after the game, kissing Hermoso, when the women's team clinched the title, there's also a video of him grabbing his crotch in close proximity to the Spanish queen and her teenage daughter, which is very classy. By the way, it's a crazy crotch grab, too. Like, is that a thing that people do? Like, um... Are you a pro wrestler? Yeah, it was very weird. Yeah, why would, why would you grab your crotch like that? I've never seen an adult do that. I really haven't. I mean, I didn't know that was a thing that grown up stage. Was it, uh, Baker Mayfield or Johnny Mansell? Somebody did it on a sideline at like a Texas, Oklahoma game. Yeah, probably both those guys.

Actually, probably multiple times. So, very nice. Anyway, enough about what I've been watching on Netflix. The incident, though, sparked an outcry in what many are calling a Me Too moment for Spain. Ramoso described Rubiala's actions as impulse-driven, sexist and out of place, and said she felt like a victim of an aggression. This was very, very clearly not a consensual kiss. Since then, the entire team has said they wouldn't play for Spain if the current managers continue. FIFA has provisionally suspended Rubialas for 90 days.

The Spanish government has sent a complaint to Spain's sports tribunal, and Spanish prosecutors have opened an investigation into whether or not he could be charged with committing an act of sexual aggression. Rubiales refuses to quit. He says the victim of, quote, false feminism and social assassination. There's a couple people out there defending him. They include the Royal Spanish Football Federation, which at one point threatened to sue Hermoso for defamation. And then Rubiales' mom, who said she's going on a hunger strike. In a church or something, I think.

Yeah, yeah. I would say, ma'am, less hunger striking, more parenting a couple decades ago. But anyway, Spain's prime minister and even very conservative political leaders in Spain have criticized Rubialis for what he did. But Ben, if you think sexism and soccer is only a problem in Spain, allow me to read for you a quote from Gianni and Fantino, the president of FIFA. This is from earlier this month. In this quote, this is from the FT. He's offering advice to women soccer players who just want equal treatment. That's all they're asking for.

Equal treatment by FIFA. He says, quote, I say to all the women, and you know I have four daughters, so I have a few at home, that you have the power to change. Pick the right battles. You have, quote, the power to convince us men what we have to do and what we don't have to do. You do it. Just do it. With me, with FIFA, you will find open doors. Just push the doors.

They are open. This is the same asshole, by the way, around the Qatar World Cup who is like, today I am Qatari. Today I am just the biggest idiot ever. It's really, though, like hard to imagine a more tone-deaf, like toxic group of idiots in power. I'm not even sure where you look. I mean, I get a sports take and a world though take on this. I mean, on the sports angle, it's kind of interesting. And, you know, the U.S. is far from perfect, right?

Are women, even as they were, like, crushing international competitions. Well, the men didn't make the tournament. Yeah, well, the men, like, you know, flamed out. They were getting paid less than the men. So, like, I'm not suggesting we're perfect, but like, we do have a, because of Title IX and investments made in equity, you know, 50 years ago, there is at least a more evolved women's sports ecosystem. It's still imperfect. And I think part of what you see is you look at women's soccer and women's sports globally is, like, different countries are, like, summer, like, have really solid programs and they have equity. and then you run into something like this

where this is just like a cesspool of the worst kind of machismo. In a country, by the way, Spain that has kind of two strands. Like on the one hand, they have this kind of deep Catholic, you know, Franco traditional patriarchy. But then they also have incredibly liberal gender equity laws. A lot of their cities have been like hubs for gender policy that empowers women and girls.

So this is definitely tilt. the balance in that direction. The world, though, take I'd make is that, you know, one of the things who was chilling about this is that out of the gate, like Hermoso, like, issued a statement, retracting her initial statement that literally sounded like it had been dictated by some male goon in the front office, you know, and like, yeah, there's a lot of, like, and, you know, autocratic kind of intimidation that you could feel like right behind the curtain and how these women were kind of being compelled to do things. Some coaches, two coaches resigned because they were like forced to sit the front row of this bizarre press conference where he said he wasn't

resigning. And the women, thankfully, banded together an issue to joint statement have really gone on offense. And they, players deserve the credit for kind of pushing this debate. But the point I'd make is that it's interesting. We cover a lot of autocratic governments, how similar, like, the vibe is of these guys. Like, they seem very corrupt. They seem very mafia. So they intimidate and try to get people to self-censor. They act like they, You know, they have impunity. So it is telling how, and we've seen this in sports by way, the IOC, the International Olympic Committee started to take on the kind of the character of a corrupt autocratic government,

you know, and you've seen this in the World Cup politics that you've covered. Like, we need to small de-democratize these institutions because they do matter a lot. Yeah, and small F. fire this guy. Yeah. But I mean, imagine if Rubiala had kissed Lionel Messi. Yeah. It would have been no less unwanted. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Or Roger Goodell comes down. after the Super Bowl and kisses Tom Brady. Nobody wants that. No. You're not dating. Leave the fuck alone. And on camera in front of the world, it was just disgusting.

And whatever sense of supremacy that that guy has in his head to think he could do that and there be no consequence is pretty astounding. Yeah, I hope he gets fired. His mom departs the church, goes and gets some breakfast and rethinks a few things. Okay, so last week then we talked about how the Brick Summit, mostly in the context of how Vladimir Putin had to zoom into the meeting because he was worried about a little international arrest warrant, oops. Today, let's talk about the BRICS organization itself and the summit itself. Brick stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, at least for now. The current members

represent 40% of the world's population and a quarter of global GDP. So on paper, like, you know, they got a lot going on. At the summit, they announced that Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia are set to join in 2024. It's not totally clear to me. It's not totally clear to if that's a done deal. Like the Saudi foreign ministers comment about this was kind of like, yeah, like we got your invite. Maybe let's see if we get our American nuclear program. Yeah, like we'd love to know who else is there before we, you know, RCPES.

But, you know, it would be the first expansion of the organization since 2010 when South Africa joined. And the bricks, you know, led by China are pretty clear now and open about the goals of blunting U.S. influence internationally. That means peeling apart U.S. alliances. It means pushing countries. to move away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. So, Ben, like, again, like, obviously these are some of the biggest countries in the world,

40% of the world's population. If you add a bunch more countries to the organization, it will have even more influence. But it's never been totally clear to me when people sort of worry about the BRIC's influence, how good they are coordinating or how effective they are. Like, what's your take on how much these guys actually throw their weight around? Yeah, I mean, it's strange because it's entirely this kind of artificial construct. I mean, the funny thing about an organization designed to blunt the West is that the brick acronym has its origins in like a Goldman Sachs analyst.

From like two years ago, right? Yeah. So it's kind of a weird creation of Western money that wanted to invest in these places. All that said, I think it's like, it's not like what people need to understand is there's not like a formal coordinating set of mechanisms. This is not NATO where there's like military interoperability and a mutual defense treaty. It's not even quite on the par of like say, you know, the G20 coordinated action around the global economy. It's very ad hoc, right? So it's a bunch of countries that have in common that they're not in the G7 basically. They're not in the Western Club meeting and having different agendas. Now, where they've been able to work together is on some development related issues and some development financing

and it's a form where, you know, if you meet and you develop relationships and habits, like you can do some joint project work. But it's not, you know, that evolved in terms of what is it? What is it doing? And so I think before we think it's like a totally parallel world order, you have to remember that it's kind of, it's basically meetings with some joint projects that they do together. Like once a year. Yeah.

And then if you look internal to the bricks, I think there are different interests for the countries at the table. The Russians and Chinese clearly want to use it to take on the United States. I don't think that's why the Brazilians and Indians and South Africans show up. Yeah, they don't like certain things about the U.S. you don't like sanctions, for instance, and they don't like the U.S. domination of certain institutions. They just like to have another venue.

But I don't think that those countries are like invested in destroying the world order in the same way that the Russians and Chinese are. So there's like some daylight between those countries. And then lastly, these countries coming in. kind of a weird eclectic group that only has in common they're kind of on the right side of the Chinese because they're trending autocratic, you know, like the Egyptians, their economy is in the total shitter, but they've got this like autocrat and CC. The Gulf countries, everybody's kind of courting for their cash. The Ethiopians are in the middle of a civil war.

Argentina's got some economic problems. Argentina's got a little economic problems and they've got a like crazy libertarian about to get elected president. So, I mean, I think what we could take away from this is, that there's a growing number of countries that just want to have alternatives, and if the Chinese and Russians are really intent on trying to build alternatives to the U.S., but I don't think that just, you know, the symbolic announcement of an enlargement of the bricks like augurs some new set of institutions. It just means more countries are going to show up at this meeting regularly and try to coordinate on some stuff. Yeah, this was a 2001 research paper by a Goldman Sachs analyst

named Jim O'Neill. We in the West are so good at psyching ourselves out when these meetings happen. But so the summit itself was... Little did Jim O'Neill know. You can imagine what he was giving birth to. You're just like a golden guy. You crank out like 400 research things a year. Just take a bump of Coke and write a memo, you know, like before hitting the bar, like one in the morning. And everyone's like, that's a great idea. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, usually that's not how it works. You write a horrible screenplay. Yeah. Anyway. So the summit itself, Xi Jinping was the center of the whole thing. He was the only one greeted at the airport by the South African president. Even Indian prime minister and Renver Modi got the deputy. So that's a big deal.

She was also given a state visit. He was inducted into the order of South Africa. some like sort of honor system. She and Modi had a bilateral meeting on the margins of the summit. They agree to de-escalate tensions on their shared border. That is a very good thing

because I remember a couple years ago talking to you about the time when Indian and Chinese soldiers were literally fighting hand-to-hand combat with spiked clubs. Yeah, clubbing each of the death. At 14,000 feet, the Halean Mountains killing each other.

Like knocking dudes off mountains. Someday that story will be written. Anyway, the weird part about this event, she skipped the big speech he was going to give. I think he had the commerce minister do it and then offered no explanation why he skipped it. Russia is supposed to assume the BRICs chairmanship next year and host the next summit in Russia. So that will be great. Yeah, that'd be a nice venue to turn up at these days. I mean, but the Russia piece speaks to the attention of this because, you know,

most of these countries, I believe, and in my experience, you know, they're showing up for reasons of economic and development interests or frustration with things that the U.S. does that runs counter to that. Like, China offers something in that space. Like Russia, you know, it looked a lot better when Jim O'Neill was writing memos than today. Like, there's not a lot of, like, like, there's oil, I guess, like, so people want some keep buying Russian oil, but like, it's not like Russia's like where I'd be buying long-term stock in, you know, so these countries that want to join are now going to have to turn up in the middle of a war, probably. and hang out Putin at a big table.

Like, you know, it's kind of a, it's not the... I would be hoping for the meeting in Rio instead of Moscow. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, not my idea of a good time. Okay, let's turn to the Panama Canal from India. Yeah. We don't get to talk about it. It's great content here.

So I'm sure everyone remembers the hilarious week on Twitter when the Suez Canal, very different canal, was blocked by a big ship that ran aground. There were lots of great memes, six days of laughs. But I think it probably cost the global economy. Tens of billions of dollars. I don't know how much more. But there's an even bigger problem brewing in the Panama Canal where 40% of all U.S. container traffic passes through each day. So drought exacerbated by climate change is slowing down ship traffic in the Panama Canal. It's leading to backups. It's leading to reduce cargo volumes for the ships that actually make it through because there's not enough water for them to fully load up. So they have to unload some things to lighten lighten up the ships. This is not a problem that's unique to Panama all over the world. Rivers are drying up and slow. if not stopping shipping routes. Remember last year when big rivers in Germany were like so dry

that there were, you know, Viking ships sticking up out of the ground. But, you know, 90% of global goods travel via ocean shipping. So this is a large and growing problem. But Ben, when it comes to the Panama Canal, one guy has got it figured out. Where do you turn for analysis? Tell me on this. You turn to Donald Trump in his interview with Tucker Carlson. Here's a clip.

We built a thing called the Panama Canal. We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito, you know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building. We lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito. Vicious, they had a build under nets. It was one of the true great wonders of the world, as he said, one of the nine wonders of the now, I was one of the seven, it happened a little while ago, you know. It says nine wonders of the world.

You could make nine wonders. He would have been better off if he stuck with the nine and just said, yeah, I'd think it's nine. But this is one of the true seven wonders of the world. and you take a look at the Panama cannot, it was such an incredible engineering marvel. We sold it under Jimmy Carter. We sold it to Panama for $1. The following day, they quadrupled

the amount of money the chips had to pay to get across. They didn't lose one ship, and now they've made it much bigger, and now they've widened it. We actually cut that down because it went on. It goes on for like a good five minutes. And he comes back to it too. I think he struggles back to it.

Yeah, he's mad about it at the end. But listeners are probably too young to remember that the Panama Canal, the Panama Canal Treaty is incredibly controversial in the 70s and 80s. Ronald Reagan beat the shit out of Jimmy Carter over handing over the Panama Canal. But like, wow, was that incoherent? He sounded drugged? Yeah. I mean, I think he like, you know, took some mushrooms before, you know, Tucker, I guess.

I don't know. Like, I, you know, the long wind end at the 9-7-1-1. and the vicious mosquitoes and the 35,000 dead. That's the part that reminds you that this guy, like, literally, if he said that in a job interview for any job in this entire country other than President of the United States, he couldn't get the job. So that's alarming. To be clear, 35,000, we used a lot of Panamanian labor.

Those guys died. I don't know which 35,000 people he was referring to. but a lot of them were, you know, people from that part of the world, not, you know, coming down from the U.S. I think the one thing that's interesting to me, though, is there is this kind of weird Trumpian foreign policy where that is the kind of thing you would care about. Like, it's like everything that's Trump. There's like a germ of something that is like relatively interesting, which is he kind of supports this very self-interested kind of capitalist version of our interest. It's not like the neocon, you know what I mean? It's not like we need to project military force and have like a defense.

Factor Empire to transform the world in our image. It's like, hey, if we had like a deal on this canal, we shouldn't have given up the deal, even if it was going to be completely untenable for the United States to basically run a colony into the 21st century in the middle of Central America. Like that, just to be clear, like Jimmy Carter was right. But this is like this is Trump's view of the world. It's like a bunch of transactions and all he cares about is like some, some monetary interest separate from anything else, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, I think, I think that Jimmy Carter actually kind of demagogued the issue before supporting handing over ownership of the canal. I think he beat up on Gerald Ford about it.

But anyway, yeah, it's a weird combination of your right. It's just purely like what money can we extract from other countries and also probably somewhere in his addled brain. He remembers this being a thing people talked about on the news back when he was at studio of 54 or whatever. But Ben, we also noticed that Tucker Carlson is back in Budapest doing paid speeches, doing live events. Any favorite moments from Tucker's trip, you know, fascist year abroad? Well, like the thing about Tucker is, you know, he was there hanging out of this buddy Orban, but he also like gives speeches and he met with like Orban's kind of chief political strategist who's this kind of like, you know, 30-something fascistic, like guy.

And the thing that stood up to me about Tucker is how deep like he is insistent on, like there being like a profound ideology behind this movement towards autocracy. Like at the end of the day, Orban's really just about like a bunch of corrupt guys consolidating power and like wrapping some Hungarian identity politics around it. And Tucker goes over there and like articulates this like messianic vision of like Christian strongman democracy that's going to cross the Atlantic to Washington that's been utterly corrupted. But he's just hanging out with a bunch of corrupt oligarchs, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think, look, To be fair, Orban is an idiologue, but like Tucker's like in intense interest in hugging these guys is pretty telling, you know, and everything he says is the opposite.

You know, like the true democracy is hungry. And I mean, if you want an explanation about how Donald Trump can be like literally arrested for trying to overthrow the government and yet be seen as the true Democrat, like Tucker kind of offers the ideological case for that on journeys like this. You're hearing of this a lot from him. He acts like Christians are under attack in a lot of places when they're not. Like he's really seized on the idea that President Zelensky is attacking Christians within Ukraine when in reality what he was doing, I think, was targeting elements of the Russian Orthodox Church that were seen as political allies of Putin. No, you can take issue with that if you want. But the idea that there is some wave of anti-Christian attacks coursing through Ukraine is a little ridiculous. And it does make you wonder if he's only saying that because Zelensky is Jewish.

Yeah. And because Putin uses this line that like the Orthodox church and et cetera is at the center of what he's doing. I mean, the one thing I'd say that Tucker also did is he kept saying that Biden was trying to undermine Hungarian democracy, which is not true. By the way, I actually think Biden should be doing more to try to support actual democracy in Hungary. But at the same time, what he's calling for is the same thing he's criticizing. And he's calling for like the U.S. to pick winners like Orban and back them up. So it's pretty grotesque and it's very fascist adjacent. And I didn't see this for myself, but I think Tucker attacked by name, our former colleague, David Pressman, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Hungary.

So nice of him to go abroad. Yeah, he's attacking America's government, America's ambassador, America's interests in service of like Orban, you know. Very, very, very cool. Great guy. Okay, let's take a quick break. We come back. We are going to talk about Saudi Arabia. With Trex, you get the most of everything, the most wood inspired, the most eco-friendly, the most decking and railing designs, the most trusted.

Trex, performance engineered for your life outdoors. Visit Trex.com today. So in last week, we talked about this horrifying report by Human Rights Watch that documented a policy in Saudi Arabia of indiscriminate murder of Ethiopian migrants by the Saudi border agents. I had alleged that these security officials were firing rockets and mortars that groups of Ethiopian women and children often those who survived those attacks were often detained and tortured. So after this Human Rights Watch research was released, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government was informed about these abuses as far back as last fall and got a full presentation of what was happening by U.N. officials in December. the State Department told the times the United States quickly engaged senior Saudi officials to express our concern and that U.S. officials have continued to regularly raise our concerns with Saudi contacts. So I think like I read that and I was instinctively kind of blinded with rage because I do want the U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia to be more Joe Biden in the campaign than

Joe Biden in the White House, right, where he was calling on MBS for being a priah and being a bloodthirsty killer, etc. I did want to sort of take seriously what I think their response is, which is basically in diplomacy, you have different tools you can use in different situations. You can name and shame, right? You can sanction countries, but sometimes quiet conversations are the best way to get the thing you want done done. I'm not like ascribing to this in this situation, but it was something we experienced in the Arab Spring, right? Like, you know, when we weren't necessarily calling on every leader to go when they were repressing their populations. There were some places where you could pull someone aside and say, hey, we'll punish you in these ways and do it privately and maybe you have some more luck.

I don't know. I'm just wondering what you would make of that response and, you know, the white us saying, look, look at every time we've criticized MBS. He not only doesn't do what we want. He does the opposite of what we want. He sticks his thumb in our eye, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, look, my view of this is MBS has very negative reactions when you criticize him publicly, which I think shows that he cares. Good point. And turns out it's working. And look, it may risk, you know, him, you know, signing the BRICS application faster or something. But at the end of the day, what he's trying to do is create a dynamic in which because,

you know, if he has the leverage of if you criticize me, you're not going to like how I respond. Well, the implicit in that is that you're never allowed to criticize me. So like this is one of the things where the logic of the private diplomacy doesn't seem to yield an outcome. It's not about trying to, it's actually not about trying to achieve a better outcome in terms of, you know, Saudi human rights. It seems more about like just trying to achieve a better outcome in terms of not having MBS to be generous to the Biden team. to not have him like pick up his toys and walk away because he's just tired of us saying these things. And by pick up his boys to walk away, you know, in this case, the other thing that's been floated about the Saudis recently is there's all this talk about the U.S. cutting a deal between the Saudis and Israel or a normalization deal that might include the U.S. providing them with nuclear energy technology. I noticed the thing is the Wall Street Journal the other day floated a story from Saudi officials about how they're also considering Chinese nuclear technology.

Yeah. But look, at the end of the day, they can buy nuclear technology. They have unlimited wealth. I mean, I guess what I'd say is I don't want to be in a partnership where you're only allowed to do what one of your partners says you can do. Like the U.S. is kind of making itself the junior partner in this. When, in fact, the Saudi military is built entirely to kind of plug into American, like, support, when, in fact, like, our economy, they're going to need us.

It's like they can totally abandon the United States economically. like we have leverage here. And clearly we also have reputational leverage that NBS cares a lot about. And so I would use it. And I just, I think that you're basically saying like, you know, well, if we're not going to say anything that MBS isn't like, what's the point of it all? Yeah, what's the point of having a communications office? Yeah, at a time when he's trying to launder the Saudi reputation by buying every soccer player on the planet, it might be good to say publicly, hey, you should stop firing mortars into groups of innocent people. And if that upset you, then I don't know, change the policy.

Yeah. It's infuriating. Okay, let's talk about France, if you don't mind. The French, as you know, can be intense about a few things. The wine, the cheese, they like to burn cities to the ground if you raise a retirement age. And what they call Lesite, I think is how you say it. I don't even know. Anyone have a French speaker in here?

Secularism. Yeah, yeah. They're aggressively secular. They want religion out of the public sphere, and that brings us to a controversial new rule that was announced by the French education minister this weekend, who announced that France is going to ban the abaya in schools. That is a long, sort of flowing garment worn often by Muslim women. Many religious symbols are already banned in French schools and have been since 2004. That includes, you know, big crosses, yarmacas, headscarves. The abaya didn't fall under the previous ban because it was less religious than cultural in terms of significance.

But the French, you know, you made this move over the weekend. French teachers unions say this is just an attempt by President Macron to win points with French right-wing voters. Ben, I'm curious what you made of this one. Like, on the one hand, separation of church and state sounds pretty good to me. Like, I support, you know, pretty severe separations. And I also understand like the history in France, right? This goes back to the French Revolution. But this instance did seem like a bridge too far in that it's you're punishing like a small group of Muslim women for,

wearing a garment that is not overly religious. And everyone seems to agree with that. So I'm just kind of not sure what this does besides further alienate Muslim communities that have not been integrated into the country at all. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I do take seriously this French commitment to secularism. It is like a part of their national identity. Even if I don't agree with it and kind of my more Americanized view of things stresses like the individual making that decision more than the state saying, you know, certain things. Like, it's a real, it's a real interest that they have and it's, it's not invented entirely. That said, this one felt like, number one, this isn't a particularly, you know, exclusively religious garment. You know,

like this is something that's more like people wear this across the Middle East and North Africa. And like, it's not, it's possible you could be just choosing to wear something that, I mean, Some of the best takedowns of this on social media are like there are things that are like a by a adjacent, you know, like, or they banned? Like what's the, you know, exact implementation of this? But the other thing is it felt like, I don't know, whenever these, sometimes when these announcements come out, it doesn't feel like there was some inclusive process of consideration. It feels like this kind of dictate from the French government, you know. It's right of nowhere.

Yeah. And I mean, I guess I ostensely because the school year is coming up, but it didn't feel like they'd done a lot of work with civil society and different groups. And that kind of plays into the, well, is this really about secularism or is this about, you know, trying to like tilt the cultural, you know, dynamic politically to the right a bit? And that's what this feels like to me. Yeah. And there were some Islamic advocacy groups said these are the closed police dictating what women could wear like they do in Afghanistan, Iran, and now France. I thought that was a fair point.

tough category to be put in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody wants to be in that particular company. I will say, again, like, we have to understand that there is a very powerful strain in Europe right now that is like reactionary. And so that's why it's important to cover and watch these things because it's noteworthy to see where it manifests. And what I take from this, too, is that this is the schools, right? And so in the same way that culture wars here have entered our schools, you know, this is a French version of that taking place. I'm sure it probably pulls pretty well in France, too frankly. But, you know, the more and more is these cultural issues and identity issues get into schools, like the more intense the emotions get around them, I think. Yes, absolutely.

Speaking of France, former French president, Nicholas Sarkozy has a memoir coming out. He's doing lots of interviews around it, as one does, to sell his book on his book tour. He is, of course, getting asked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He also wrote about it in the book. Some of his interview answers are raising eyebrows. She's a couple quotes from a roundup in the New York Times. Sarkozy said that reversing Russia's annexation of Crimea was illusory. He ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain neutral

and insisted that Russia and France need each other. He also told Le Figaro, people tell me if Vladimir Putin isn't the same man that I met. I don't find that convincing. I've had tens of conversations with him. He is not irrational. And he talks about how European interests are not aligned with American interests this time. You know, there's probably some points there, right? Like, obviously, they have a much greater natural gas dependency than the United States does.

But The Guardian also got a copy of the book where he refers to both sides of the conflict sparked by the Russian invasion as belligerence, which is surprising since one side invaded the other. It criticizes U.S. and EU support of Ukraine. he wants Russia to renounce on military action against its neighbors, Ukraine to pledge to remain neutral, and NATO basically respect Russia's fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbors. So some of Sarkozy's former aides have criticized these comments and pointed out that Sarkozy seems to think that he prevented World War III back in 2008 when the French and the Germans blocked Georgia and Ukraine from entering NATO. but he also doesn't take any responsibility for the fact that Georgia was invaded about four months after that happened.

But what did you make of this? Like, why do you think he's sounding off on these things now? Well, I think the reason this is an interesting story, too, is that he, I think he was paid something like $3 million by some Russian insurance company, too. So there's a bunch of different things happening here. You know, like part of it is that I think there's like just some basic corruption of the European political stuff. establishment by the Russians. Like for, you know, the most obvious example is Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, the former Chancellor of Germany, who was on the, literally the board of Gazprom and basically advocating Russian interests. But in Italy, you see some politicians that have,

you know, a lot of financial links into Russia. Obviously, in like central and eastern Europe, there's like full-scale kind of corrupt business relationships between Russians and Russian oligarchs. And so the first point is, you know, the Russians have invested. for a long time in kind of, you know, financial leverage or relationships with political leaders and some that is paying dividends. I think also embedded in Sarkozy's Commons, this is the guy used to be seen as like the pro-American French leader. Like there's pretty deep-seated sympathy for the Russian argument that the Americans kind of pushed us into this war and NATO expansion caused it and, you know, kind of Ukraine has some flaws too. And I think that, again,

is going to be an important trend if people want to continue to support Ukraine, that's going to get more powerful, I think. So those two things kind of come together in Sarkozy, corruption and kind of this vein of Russian thinking that is infected parts of Europe. You know, when we were trying to get sanctions on Russia in 2015 and 16 after the annexation Crimea and the first move into the Dombos, the French were one of the hardest countries to get fully on board because they're always trying to carve out, you know, exceptions for the sectors where they're doing a bunch of business and stuff. And, you know, Olawn, who now positions, who is the president of France at that time,

positions himself as his hawk. I mean, we had to pull that guy into sanctions. So it's just a reminder of, like, this is an up-up climb, and the support we felt for Ukraine in the first six months of the invasion, that support was probably the high watermark, and it's just trying to keep it from slipping, you know. Yeah, there's some, some analysts. think that the more the counteroffensive is seen is struggling, the more free people will feel

to just be sort of overly critical, which is, of course, they're right. I mean, there's a lot of things to be concerned about it in this war, but it is interesting that he's doing it now, especially after getting $3 million. Then the book is 560 pages long, which I guess, you know, two former Obama staffers probably shouldn't criticize long memoirs, but I don't know that anybody wants 560 pages about Sarko Z. Yeah. Seems like a lot. Colorful guy at the time. My favorite Sarkozy story was he had this interpreter who was a young woman

not like Sarkozy and she would not just interpret she would completely mimic his body movements and he was very performative he would like puff out his chest and kind of pull his lapels and pound on the table and there'd be this young like attractive woman next to him doing the exact same thing

was like watching an actor. Weird. It was always like, I was like, that's a weird thing to, clearly he asked for that. And I don't know how to read it. I'm just putting it out there. Strange vibes. I used to read all the Obama Sarko transcripts, which was very entertaining. He always, like, talk shit about our buddy in Israel, Mr. Bibi Netanyahu.

Oh, he loved talking to Shrodeni. And his wife was Carla Bruni. And he, like, tried to put her on the phone or something. Yeah. Yeah. Obama is described as, quote, quite cold, introverted, and only marginally interested in those around him. which probably tracks for a meeting of sarcose. I'm sure that that is probably inaccurate portrayal of,

he could be amused by Sarcozy at times. I'd say that. Yeah, there's a lot to be amused by, but weird dude. Also, seemingly in a lot of trouble. Someday we'll get to the bottom of his intense interest in bombing Libya. Yeah, yeah, that's not great. Let's turn to Zimbaboy Ben, because they recently had a presidential election

that election observers are calling a fraud. President Emerson, Managawa, from the Zanupf Party, was declared the winner, with 52% of the vote, but the opposition says that the results were completely legitimate. Their supporters were intimidated. Polling places and opposition strongholds were opened late, hours late, and then closed early. But the government, instead of hearing out workers from these election monitoring groups who are crying foul, they arrested them instead. The police arrested 41 of them

and seized their computers. So for 37 years, Zimbabwe was ruled by a dictator named Robert Mugabe. he was finally ousted in a military coup in 2017 by one of his former allies. The 2023 election was only the second election since the Mugabe era. Both this election in 2023 and the 2018 election had allegations of widespread fraud. So this last election, though, has been criticized by the African Union and the European Union. So maybe there will be some international pressure to do something about it. I don't know. But it certainly threatens Zimbabwe's ability to fix it.

its economy, clear away, international debt, billions of debt, by the way. So basically just a really unfortunate situation here. Yeah. I mean, this is like, I mean, what I'm always struck by when something like this happens is that they only got 52% of the vote. I mean, that means they probably lost by about 30 points, you know, like these guys are totally corrupt. You know, there's vote buying, there's vote rigging, there's intimidation, threats and all the rest of it. And they still only got 52% of the vote. So in a weird way, I think that, is a sign of the strength and vitality of the Zimbabwe opposition. There are a lot of talented people in that opposition.

And just the frustration of the people of Zimbabwe with this. I mean, the guys in charge now is like 84, I think, totally correct. Like, somehow corruption has gotten worse since we've got in. His nickname is the crocodile. That's not. These are not the right group of people to be running in country. So my hope is that the Zimbabwe and opposition can continue to build momentum. And it attacks very closely to like, we had Bobby Wine on a couple weeks ago, who's back.

doing really courageous rallies in Uganda as we speak. And, you know, there you've got Museveni also in his 80s, also corrupt. I mean, Uganda and Zimbabwe are two countries, one with pretty friendly relations with the United States and Uganda, the other than Zimbabwe where they're under sanction. But, like, if we, that's a place where I would hope, you know, if the pendulum can swing in the direction of democracy, that would open up a lot of space and opportunity for people

that have put up a lot of crap. More in Zimbabwe, even than Uganda, to be fair. Bobby Wine is a really heroic, heroic guy. By the way, in Uganda, we talked a while back about these laws that were passed where you can get the death penalty for being gay for, quote unquote, aggravated homosexuality. Unfortunately, a 20-year-old was the first person to be prosecuted for the offense under these new laws and could be killed. It's pretty horrific. A bunch of monsters, yeah. Absolutely horrific.

So, Ben, speaking of terrible people in government. So in previous shows, we've talked about a far-right Israeli politician named Itmark Ben-Gavir. He was once ostracized from the political world. He was considered too extreme because of minor things like having on the wall in his house a photo of a terrorist who shot and murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers and injured over 100 more. But thanks to Bibi Netanyahu, Ben-Givir now serves as national security minister in the current coalition government. Ben Gavir went viral recently for saying the following on Israel's version of Meet the Press. Here's a quote. My right, the right of my wife and my children to move around Judea and Samaria, is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.

My right to life comes before freedom of movement. Sorry, Muhammad, but that's the reality. That last part he's addressing it to a journalist named Muhammad on this panel with him. He's talking about driving around the West Bank, basically. The U.S. State Department condemned his comments. He called it racist rhetoric. Like, BB Netanyahu kind of like sort of tried to clean it up. He sort of seemed to suggest the tone was wrong, which led Ben Gavir to log onto Twitter a day

later and say, not only do I not regret what I said, I'll say it again and then repeat himself. So the thing I just want to highlight here, Ben, is that you're seeing lots of groups and politicians condemn his language, like the issue was like the tone or the rhetoric. But I think that misses the point. We're like, sorry Muhammad. Yeah. Yeah, but like what he's describing, what Ben Gavir is describing, his current policy. You know, Palestinians live under military control. They're forced to travel on

separate roads and infrastructure. They're separate legal systems. Like, that's the reality on the ground. And this guy is just the asshole describing it plainly. Yeah. I mean, the thing about Ben-Gavir is his utility is, he says out loud, what are the Israeli government's policies, you know? And first of all, there's a lot in that little, you know, clip. Judaism, Samaria. That's him signaling that his belief in greater Israel, that Israel, like, controls all the land, including the should control the entire West Bank, should be part of Israel. Like, and then he's describing in policy the outcome of that belief, which is I should be able to do wherever the fuck I want there. And what he's describing is apartheid.

It's not, like, I, you know. There's always a debate over the use of this word. Don't at me on this. If that's not the definition of apartheid, then what is? If me saying like, I'm sorry, I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want. And if that means there's no rights for these other people, it doesn't matter. Like, okay, like figure out, you know, A-PAC, the clever way to say that's what, you know. And so, yeah, I think, you know, Ben Gavir continues to remind us, hey, this is actually what this is really government is right now. Yeah, yeah.

And he wasn't fired. He wasn't like, oh, he wasn't pushed out. He was barely rebuked. And he probably wanted the attention he got. and, you know, it's, and to your point, like, people always get upset with, like, he shouldn't have said it that way or, or they get upset about the judicial forms in Israel. Like, there are Palestinians, there are millions of Palestinians that live in the West Bank that are being regularly dehumanized, not just by rhetoric like that, but by actions.

Yeah, and also we're at a time when there's more violence between Israeli and Palestinian communities than ever before. There's horrible settler violence. There has been terrorism against innocent Israeli communities. Like, everything's getting worse. and rhetoric like this absolutely contributes to it. That's right. I mean, that's a really important point because that kind of rhetoric is a bit of a dog whistle,

or not even a dog whistle to the people have been engaged in things like settler violence or intimidation of Palestinians, be like, yeah, like I'm the government minister for national security telling you that that's what, you know, that kind of vigilanteism is fine. It's cool. Your life matters more. Do what you got to do. That's what it says. Finally, even last week we talked about Russia's failed effort to land lunar probe on the southern pole of the moon.

but since that recording, India has succeeded in the same task. Their space rover is now searching for evidence of frozen water that might help support future missions or life on the moon. India is only the fourth country to land on the moon after the United States, which was obviously fake, the Soviet Union and China. Amazingly, the mission costs just $75 million, which CNN pointed out, is less than half the budget of the movie Interstellar. How is that possible? Huh. That's interesting, stat. Yeah. I mean, does this mean that they have to change acronyms from bricks to burks?

Who's the Burke? B.I. India? Oh, you're going to swap them around? I just made the nerdy's joke. It's ever been made at the 50-minute mark of Pots of the World, but I think it's a place. I think it plays. Is it travel? Okay. I think, you look, it was a tough, it's been a tough week for Putin. It has. His rover crashes. He's got to zoom into the conference call. You know, he's got the progos and funeral to manage, you know. I mean, they find

this water, you know, does this mean they get a gone first dibs on the colony? I mean, that's the thing you wonder over time. Yeah, that part I don't get. I did read that India is now launching a solar probe. So they're really getting into the space game. I mean, you know, they have a pretty intense, advanced, like scientific base. Like, it's a reminder that countries like India are going to start doing the kind of stuff that superpowers do. Yeah, and they got a lot of missiles. Superpowers do as superpowers do. repurposed. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, from the alternative point of view, like, there's a lot of poverty in India. So there's kind of like, remember that famous song, Whitey on the Moon by Gil Scott Heron?

No. It's basically about like, you know, while things are shitty down here in the U.S., like, you know, Whitey's on the moon. But like it captures the sentiment of like, why are we spending all this money to go to the moon when we have these problems down here. Like, you know, I guess what's interesting about Modi to be serious. for a second is he's managed to like turn that into the pride that people feel in any nationalism gives him a lot of space to do this kind of stuff even though there's a lot of poverty that he has to deal with in India.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting how that nationalism able to distract from almost everything. Okay, we're going to take a quick break when we come back. You will hear Ben's interview with Joshua Yaffa from the New Yorker about the progosian murder and all things Russia. So stick around for that. Okay, so it has been a week since a private jet crashed in Russia killing all. 10 passengers. The Russian government has now confirmed that Wagner chief Yivni Progoshin and his number two, Dmitri Udkin, were on board. They did this in a very Russian way. They didn't name the men.

They just said that the DNA matched the passenger list. Progoshin was laid to rest today, buried in heavy security in St. Petersburg at a site that will no doubt become a strange pilgrimage site to mercenaries and far-right Russian fascist for some time to come. But obviously, lots of of implications to this. So joining me today to discuss Progosian's rise in fall is Joshua Yaffa, who wrote an in-depth profile of the Russian Warlord for The New Yorker, which everybody should read. It's really fantastic a few weeks ago. And is also the author of The Great Book Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia. Joshua, thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me.

Okay, so let's start with Progossin's legacy. You spent a bunch of time, obviously, for that recent Yorker piece looking at him. You have a great line in this that was flagged for me by our producer, and I remember seeing this at the time and thinking it was awesome. Progosian's rise and fall contains a certain gangland banality, a killer on the make hired by other more powerful killers to commit more of the same at larger scale, is ultimately off by those same killers. This is a story in which all the parts are played by bad guys, which is definitely how it feels. What do you think Progosion's legacy is, and what does it tell us about kind of what's happened to Russia as someone who's been following this for some

time. There's this term initially created by the great Russia watcher Mark Galeati, who referred to Putin's Russia, especially this kind of late stage, Putin's Russia, where we've arrived as an ad hocracy with kind of ad hoc, symbolizing the kind of by design, not so much chaos of the system, though sometimes that's the right word for it, but in the way to which official position matters less than the role that someone is performing for the system or for Putin personally, and that where someone is on the technical kind of government org chart matters less than, you know, where are they actually in terms of the real relationships of power and relevance and also functionality to the Putin state, right? Just because someone

has a certain job title doesn't mean they're actually performing the real function for the Putin system. It could be someone from outside the system technically or formally who does that. And Progosion, I think, really epitomizes in its most macabre form, this ad hocracy in which someone who was a restaurateur and caterer ends up being the boss and figurehead of Russia's largest mercenary outfit that ends up taking on this outsized role in the invasion of Ukraine. I mean, it's all so ridiculous, but also deeply emblematic, I think, of the way the Putin's system functions. And Procotions' legacy, I think, is to both prove this thesis, but also test its limits, test how far the Putin system itself can tolerate this sort of adhocry, because the problem is,

when you allow your loose cannon seemingly sadistic of questionable mental, I think, kind of sanity, at times, you know, buddy, it now seems from St. Petersburg after Progoshan's death, Putin said that, in fact, he was familiar with Progoshan since the 90s. When you allow someone like that to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners from jail, put guns in their hands and send them to fight and die on Ukraine. Like, how is that not going to end badly, right? In your respect. Yeah, yeah.

There's not a whole lot of surprise, perhaps, that this didn't turn out, like, great for anybody. And so it's convenient in a way to let these people with unofficial titles or no title at all do your dirty work. You get deniability. You get a certain flexibility. You get to manage things based on personal relationships. which we know Putin prefers to managing things through a kind of formal hierarchical process.

But there's a cost to it. And so the progosian story is a story about all of that, you know, what running a country this way can offer you if you're an autocrat bent on invading another country like Putin is, but also how it's not cost-free, even from the kind of, you know, to borrow another book title, like The Dictator's Handbook, it might not always be in the end so efficacious or advantageous to let your caterer end up running a private military company. Yeah, clearly Putin arrived at that decision after some time, given that that plane fell a sky. And that's, I want to ask you, obviously, we're purely speculating

whenever it comes to things like this in Russian politics. But presuming that this plane was shot down, or blown up or taken down in some way by Putin or on Putin's behalf. That is a pretty dramatic way to take the guy out. There could have been any other, you know, he could have been poisoned like Navalny was or he could have fallen off a balcony like a bunch of other people have. Or to your point, like he was just, and he took multiple trips to Africa where Vagmira has a huge presence in different African countries, Central Africa, Republic, Mali, elsewhere.

And he was just in Africa days before he returned to Russia and then died in this. plane crash. Like, there are many ways you could off someone in Africa and make it look just kind of mysterious and weird and unsolvable. And, like, you know, it happened, say, somewhere, like, uh, in the bush in Central African Republic, like, you'll never, even if it's still suspected that Putin did it, like, you'll never really get to the bottom of it. Like, it's a choice to blow someone out of the sky as they're flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Yeah. It's a hell of a choice. And that's what I wanted to ask you because essentially there are a couple of different ways of looking at that. One is that, you know, there was a militarized aspect to it, you know,

like progosan shot down Russian military helicopters, so he comes down in a plane. Then there's also the fact that he was with some of his chief deputies, including Utkin, who you spend some great time on in your piece. So it kind of has this flavor of decapitating Wagner. I mean, why do you think this was such a dramatic event rather than just him, you know, yeah, disappearing in the bush or falling off the balcony? I think a bit of all of the above, but ultimately the drama has to be part of the point. And here I'm just kind of working backwards in a way, like seeing as the Kremlin Putin will never really know, but someone or some combination of people in that high-level brain trust around Putin chose this form of assassination effectively over others.

So there has to have been some intent or purpose there. And I can only then deduce that the drama, the in-your-facedness of it, had to have been part of the plan. And that, yeah, like you mount a mutiny against us. You're not just going to like disappear in some like weird never quite solved sort of way. Like no, we're going to blow you out of the sky. And I'm sure from reporting here I'm mainly going off what I've read others report in the past few days. Though I have some my own context still in Moscow as well who say like message received. I'm talking about hear people.

Yeah. Not so much the every the elite. Every man or woman on the street, but the elites. And I think this assassination was designed, well, maybe first and foremost, to get rid of progoshin and this high-level Wagner leadership around him. It solves a certain problem for Putin, but also the demonstration aspect, I think, is as important. And in terms of making a demonstration to others in or around the elite, I think this drives the point home in ways that other more squishy,

deniable forms of getting rid of progosin wouldn't have been quite emphatic, wouldn't have made the point quite as emphatically. Yeah, yeah. And you and I have talked about the Boris Demsoff assassination, you know, right in front of the Kremlin, basically. So they like a demonstration effect. On Wagner itself, one of the really interesting things in your piece, was how you drew out, you know, some of these guys, like Udkin, for instance, you know,

were real ideologues of the far right. You know, Wagner is Hitler's favorite composer, not subtle. And I'm wondering, as you step back and look at Wagner without prognosion, and we'll get in a minute to kind of like, you know, what's going to happen in Africa. But just looking at the organization itself, when you were looking at it and reporting on it, how much did you think there was an ideology to the kind of core of Wagner guys? Like, they believe in some form of extreme Russian nationalism or something, versus how much of it was totally just kind of guns for hire, people looking to get paid, versus people truly loyal to progosion. I mean, like, how do you make up the motivations in your reporting of the Wagner

membership? I think that there are different answers for different segments of Wagner. Let's start with, for example, at least by the end of Wagner's operations in Ukraine, the most numerically dominant, these prisoners, by all estimations, tens of thousand, 40, 50,000 convicts recruited from Russian prisons and sent as cannon fodder, really, to Ukraine, largely to fight and die, as nearly half of them did, in the battle for Bachmute. These are people who acted out of desperation. I don't mean to minimize or remove responsibility from them. they chose to go fight in Ukraine for Wagner.

Of course, they're all elements of kind of pressure, manipulation and so on put on them. And plus, they were just in a terrible situation. In being held for years in Russian prison is not exactly a nice experience or one you could imagine having a high degree of desperation to escape. And I think that that word desperation describes that contingent of Wagner the most. I spoke to a handful of convict fighters who were recruited into Wagner for the long piece that was published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. And they all spoke about exactly the sense of hopelessness, convinced that they would die in Russian prisons.

So why not roll the dice and maybe die in Ukraine? They were quite clear-eyed about the chances of that. But perhaps as Per Ghosian promised, they would fight, survive for, for six months and then be granted their freedom. So those are people who are not necessarily fighting for like the greater Russian cause, not particularly ideological, not even that devoted to Putin or Progosian himself, just acting out of personal desperation. On the other end of the spectrum, you have this upper echelon of top Progosian commanders,

people who were effectively running Wagner's military operations in Ukraine, Africa, and elsewhere, a number of whom were killed on this plane crash, or rather plain explosion, but not all of them. And those are people who historically were quite loyal to Progoshan himself, who would not have had access to that kind of wealth, power, stature, any of it if it wasn't for Wagner and if it wasn't for Proggeon personally sort of granting them that power. Interestingly, we've seen some of them, I don't know if it would be fair to say turn against progosian or turn against Wagner, but allow themselves to be recruited out of Wagner to join other upstart private military companies that the Kremlin or other elements of the Russian

state are now trying to put forward as kind of Wagner replacement. So there's been some splintering of Wagner and that shows that loyalties didn't run that deep. It's a mercenary outfit, right? people joined it initially back in 2014, 15 and onwards because they got paid. They got paid a lot more than they did in the regular Russian armed forces. I think first and foremost, that was always the selling point of Wagner. So then that raises the question of what happens to Wagner's operations beyond Ukraine.

And obviously we've talked a lot on this podcast about their operations in Central African Republic. or kind of the coup belt of Burkina Faso and Mali or in Sudan. They've also been active in Syria. They've got guys there. What happens to that? Like, is this a situation where you could on the one end have the Russian state try to swallow some of that up, but that kind of denies them this, you know, separate entity that is not the Russian government operating in all these countries?

Or I was interested in what you just said. Is it going to be like Wagner under different leadership or maybe it's going to be a different new version of a private mercenary group that just is the same thing, but it's called a different name and has a different, you know, org chart. I mean, what do you think happens to Wagner in Africa in the Middle East? A bit of all of that. I think Wagner essentially maybe the right metaphor. I could be wrong about this, but my guess is that it'll be effectively sold for parts, that there's a lot of other interests in and around the Russian state, whether it's the military, intelligence services, other oligarchs who already have gotten into the private military company game.

Ghanady Timchinko, someone whose name, I'm sure, has come up periodically on this podcast as a long-time Putin crony and billionaire who made his money trading Russian oil. For many years has had a private military company that also long before any of this, before the invasion of Ukraine, had been operating in Syria alongside Wagner. And they were already getting into some conflicts and rivalries. in Syria. So I think that that sort of thing is just going to blossom even further and that there will be not three or five, but 10 or 15 Russian private military companies. They'll all be competing for the resources and remnants of Wagner. Wagner itself in some form might also survive, but it'll

certainly be a diminished form because I'm certain that much of its leadership and fighters will be siphoned away for some of these other projects, but there might still be a core Wagner that obviously will have to report to new masters, who those masters will be remains undetermined. But you're right about one of the conundrums that the Kremlin faces, which is, I think it's now fair to say, kind of retrospectively, we could say Putin came to regret not having more control over Wagner and that prognosion, this loose cannon was allowed to, you know, turn Wagner's troops and firepower against the Russian state. Clearly a red line. for Putin, something he regrets having happened. So the answer to that is you try and bring these

groups more into the so-called vertical of power as the Putin-era political hierarchy is known. But the downside, as you identified, is then you have less deniability. Then you really own those operations in a way you didn't when you had this ostensibly private company running around. If you remember some years ago, Putin famously compared progosin to George Soros in suggesting You have people like, you have private interests, you know, who have a role in American civic life like George Soros. We have our Yvgeny Progogian. And so last question here. I mean, you described just now, I think, like a, you know, this kind of mafia government, right?

Different guys and fiefdoms, you know, with their different capabilities all under the boss of Putin. And so it's kind of evolved into this mafia kleptocracy wrapped in a, you know, Russian nationalist ideology. But what is, what, does this change anything about Russia's internal politics? What are you, what are you going to be looking for in the next six months to a year in terms of how Russian internal politics, either among the elite or among the public, is, is impacted by this? Or what's the next, you know, chapter in the drama, knowing it's impossible to predict, but just what are you going to be watching? I think short term, this does achieve Putin's desired effect in terms of sending a signal to the elite,

getting people in line, showing the cost of disobedience of acting against the state. Anyone who thinks they were going to try and pull off mutiny 2.0 or some version of it got a pretty clear signal of what awaits them. And it definitely heightens the prisoner dilemma, say, complications of trying to mount any sort of whether it be coup or any sort of effort to undermine

or let alone overthrow Putin from within the elite the calculations of who wants to be the first mover, the first act. Yeah. Just went up a lot

in terms of people being aware of the cost of that. Another reminder of better not to stick my neck out and if no one wants to be the first one to stick their neck out well then no one will at all. But in the longer term,

though I'm wary of entering into this, you know, but in the longer term, the Putin system is, of course, weakened analysis. Because while I do believe it, Putin 23 years and counting into power, I feel like it's a bit, you know, we're the ones who begin to look a bit foolish, prognosinating about, you know, Putin's impending at indeterminate time scale demise. And, you know, to borrow the famous cliche from economics, like in the long run, we're all dead. Putin's reign will end at some point. And eventually we'll be right when Putin finally leaves office, even if it's from natural causes. But yet again, as a result of this progoshin seeming assassination, like I said in the short term, I think the system and Putin personally is strengthened.

In the long term, of course, this leads to a slow term fracturing destabilization, whatever you want to call it, of the regime. because it basically shows that there's no exit, you know, there's no possibility for kind of soft change. There's no possibility to make a deal even with the Kremlin. If you recall, in the days after the mutiny, after Progoshin ended it or agreed to end it, Putin and especially Putin's spokesman,

Dmitri Peskov, went out and said, essentially all is forgiven. Criminal charges will be dropped. progoshin can go to Belarus. Two months later, his plane is blown out of the sky. So while those elites in the short term are going to be frightened, in the long term, they're also thinking, well, we can't really trust Putin or the system that acts in his name. And also, and most potentially one day, who knows, in the distant future or medium future,

decisive is an idea that actually circulated I came across in a Wagner-affiliated telegram channel in the hours after the Progoshan plane was shot down, you know, the real lesson of this whole episode is always go to the end. And that suggests, you know, that Progoshan made two mistakes, you could say. The first was thinking that he could pull off the mutiny in the first place. But the second mistake was having launched the mutiny that he agreed to end it. And that that, in hindsight, was his perhaps fatal mistake. And if and when there is a person or group of people thinking about another round of something like that,

they're not going to be stopping to negotiate with the Kremlin. They're going to realize the only way to stay alive, frankly, maybe is to go to the end, as it were. Yeah, you go to the king. You best not miss. All right. Well, look, thanks so much. Everybody should check out your book Between Two Fires. but also this article in New Yorker is just an amazing resource and also an enjoyable read

because progosion, if nothing else, was good content, but a horrific human being at that. So Joshua, thanks so much, good talking to you. Yeah, always happy to be here. Thanks. Thanks again to Joshua Yaffa for joining the show. What else we got? Fire that guy in Spain. That's all I can. Yeah.

And the Panama Canal is. top three canals. I just want more Trump canal content. There's got to be some other canals, Erie Canal, or maybe we can go back to the Suez. Just get him, keep him on Tucker's show. There's something about that show where he just, because Tucker just let him go,

that always makes for the most revelatory Trump interviews because he just starts rambling in ways that give you a sense of like the internal monologue in Donald Trump. and it's funny because Tucker's like did Epstein kill himself and all of a sudden you're talking about the Panama Canal you can tell Tucker's so frustrated

he just wants like some like incitement kind of content. Yeah, don't they want to kill you he kept asking Trump and then Trump's taking into the Panama County. He's like nah but back the Panama Canal anyway the mosquitoes do. Yeah, vicious. Vicious mosquito, 35,000 dead. That's it for us but talk to you guys next week.

To you. POTSafe the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes and Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, audio support by Kyle Seaglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, and Phoebe Bradford, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com slash Pod Save the World. Thanks to Saul Rubin and Rebecca Rottenberg for production support. Our intern is Naomi Beerenbaum.