The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Prigozhin - Trump

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. On this edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard open the show with a discussion of the reports of the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in a fiery plane crash outside Moscow. What does the latest and seemingly last act in the Prigozhin-Putin drama say about elite power in Russia? Is Putin’s position further secured by Prigozhin’s exit or is intra-regime strife entering a new and more dangerous phase? The second half of the program explores a wild week in US conservative politics with the first GOP debate, all-time record-high broadcast audience numbers for Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson, and the arraignment of the former president in Georgia on felony state charges. What does it all say about the state of US politics as the country soon starts the one-year countdown to the 2024 presidential vote? To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the

full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Welcome to this, our regular Friday Focus podcast. This is the program where we dial into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. We do this each and every Friday with Janice Gross Stein,

the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, international around scholar, and author. Janice, what a week. Big news week, Roger, big news. It's as if September is here in August. Certainly feels like it. I want to start with what we've all been. been talking about the last 48 hours or so, which is the death of progosin, the founder, head of

the Wagner mercenary group in a private jet flying from Moscow to St. Petersburg, crashing all lives lost. Seems Janice more than just coincidental. Let's let the media I picked through the kind of factoids to try to put this whole kind of tableau together. I want to talk to you instead about what you think this says about Russia today. How are we to interpret this event, both in terms of Putin's regime and the war in Ukraine? This is a mafia state. It is a state really without institutions at all, unlike China. it is the best introduction to contemporary,

Russia go watch the godfather. And that will tell us virtually everything we need to know. You know, as we've watched the story develop since the march down the highway, there's been a flow of analysis of what this means about Russia. And literally, everybody agreed that it's a. suggest how weak Putin was and how weak he was becoming and a ton of wishful thinking. This is the beginning of the end of Putin and we told you. And here it comes.

As he sits there, cold-blooded, ice water in his veins thug and finds the right moment because regardless of what you call the factoids, this decapitated the way. leadership of the Wagner group. It wasn't only Progosion on those planes. It was the co-founder, their operations chief. He took them all out. And there isn't anybody in Russia today who doesn't get the message. So a couple of questions here. What, you know, progosion is no fool. why two months after his attempted insurrection is he getting on planes to fly from Moscow to St. Petersburg? There's been repeated reports over the past number of weeks of him being in Russia at a summit that Putin convened with African leaders. He was appeared and this was publicly documented.

Why didn't, why wouldn't he have disappeared to the Congo to, you know, some Wagner military base in Niger? I don't know. It, it just strange credulity to think that someone would somehow believe that they were impervious to the risk of assassination, decapitation, which Putin has done again and again and again. It does. It is hard to believe, Rudyard. But let's go back to the way Precaution talked about that. Mutiny, which is the word that best describes what he did. When he captured, when he sent his forces into Rostovondon, which was a major military center for operations against southern Ukraine,

marched up the highway. And by the way, no Russian forces came. out to defend. But in his view, it was none of that. He said over and over, I'm loyal to Putin. This was not anti-Buton. This was to get those two idiots. The Minister of Defense of the Chief of the Russian General Staff out, Shoygoo and Gerasimov, this is not anti-Butin. I'm loyal to him. I'm serving his interests. And he met with Putin in the Kremlin afterwards and walked out alive. And he, this is not the first time that people who drink their own Kool-Aid, he believed that he had a long-lasting relationship with Putin and that his loyalty was unquestionable. And the fact that Putin called him a traitor, which set off every alarm bell in a normal person, he was living in his own world.

Amazing. Now, another question for you, if you're Putin, let's think about this. Why would you undertake this decapitation strike in such a public way? So for people to understand, you know, the space between Moscow and St. Petersburg is, you know, the most dense and travel geography in Russia. The rest of the country, pretty big, pretty sparsely populated. Daytime flight, you know this is going to get caught on video. This is a spectacle. Now, the easy answer would be to say, well, that's exactly what Putin wants. He wants to send a message. But it is also very uncharacteristic.

Putin's normal methods of doing these types of things is you just look at the number of oligarchs that have fallen out of, you know, three-story windows, the last 18 months or the oligarchs that have had massive coronary heart attacks seemingly in good health. This genus just seems so different than the usual repertoire, the kind of toolbox of the assassin that Putin normally deploys. You're right. Roger, it is different.

And so it is interesting to speculate why. There's two possible reasons why. One, you notice that on that flight was Progoshin's bodyguard as well. So he was smart enough. He probably had a food taster with him, as Putin does, right? So the obvious ways were probably not available in a reasonable time frame. But I think there's a second issue here. And I was really struck by that.

This took out the leadership of the Wagner group. It didn't only take out precaution. It took out the leadership. This group is decapitated now. There's all kinds of speculation, Roger. Are they going to reorganize? You know, there's flowers outside of the headquarters of the Wagner group in Petersburg. And it's just the beginning of a social movement,

dedicated to his memory. These are the fantasies of people. That's what we're hearing. So much of the commentary that I hate to criticize my colleagues, but it is fun to do every now and then. They live on wishful fulfillment. He talked out the leadership.

This group is gone. They are leaderless. Will there be isolated acts of violence? Yeah, because these are highly motivated people at the very top. made a ton of money. A ton of money they enriched themselves at the expense

of the Russian state. That's all closed now. So it wasn't only, he didn't only take out the one guy. He took off the head of the whole movement. That was probably worth it. And he's remorseless.

What really struck me, I don't know about you, was the eulogy. You have to have a special kind of quality to be able to get up and eulogize the guy whom you just ordered and taken out. Ranked speculation on my part, but let me run a theory bite. On Progoshans, you know, halted march to Moscow, his mercenaries shot down Russian Air Force helicopters killed

13 pilots 13 Russian servicemen there was no love lost between Shogu and Garissimov and Progoshin in other words and is it just coincidence that the day before

this jet crashes General Armageddon as he was nicknamed the kind of butcher of Syria who was linked to Progosion was officially kind of drummed out of the Russian military. Could this Janus have been a military leadership that went to Putin and said,

this guy has to go? He killed our people. That you may Putin have spent these last eight weeks trying to manage a relationship with progoshion. but this is over. And we are taking him out at this time with this surface-to-air missile system. It's under our command and control.

This is happening. Look, anything's possible, right? I can't say that that is not credible. But let me make just two counterarguments. these two folks, Sergei Shogu, the Minister of Defense and Gerasimov, Valery Gerasimov, all their careers to Putin. They do not have a history of standing up to Vladimir Putin and giving him bad news. We've seen this ever since before the war started when they fed him fat disease,

because that's what we wanted to hear, and since they are not the ones that are are going to stand up against him, and he has protected them. It's inconceivable to me that they would walk in and tell Vladimir Putin what they're going to do. Certainly, nothing like this would happen without Vladimir Putin saying, go for it. I'm fine with this. Thirdly, it's really interesting. We know now that it doesn't appear to be a surfaced air missile because the U.S. intelligence has not been able to pick up the flash. of a missile that was fired.

So likely some sort of explosive that was put on the airplane in the fuel some way, in the way that the plane disintegrated and fell apart. That's not the highest levels of the Air Force doing that. So I think regardless of whether somebody brought Putin this idea and he said, go for it, guys. Or he said, get this done and don't tell me the detail. either of those two are possible. He's right into the center of it all.

He's right at the center. This is Putin's Russia. That's what everybody has to understand. This is Putin's Russia. There's no way of opposing this guy without getting killed. Everybody who believes is, do you remember reading? This is the beginning of the disintegration of Russia. You're smiling.

I'm smiling. What are they smoking, Roger? is all I can say. Yeah, so let's just end on that point because it brings up an element of kind of political theory. We like to talk about theory because it helps us interpret the world around us. And the theory amongst a lot of Western commentators is that there is a ongoing legitimacy crisis in Russia, vis-à-vis Putin and the population in Russia.

And then events like the progosian mutiny or this very public assassin, nation, these things for those more liberal, smaller liberal analysts would be signs of internal stress fractures in the kind of governing consensus, whatever that would be in Russia. Other theorists say, hey, wait a second, guys and gals, you are extrapolating your kind of Western-based theories of legitimacy that, you know, function in your societies around you know, populations and their leaders and governments. And Russia is fundamentally different. It's what some theorists call a power vertical.

So maybe you can explain what that term means and where do you come down on this debate, Janice, between is all of this stuff actually symptomatic of some crisis of legitimacy or is, are we just being way too occidental here and applying thought categories, which are to some extent alien to the Russian situation? I'm definitely in a second group, right there that as Westerners, we look at Russia and we superimpose on Russia the categories that we use to think of what would make our own governments illegitimate. But it is true that even the most ruthless dictator needs some legitimacy to govern.

You govern it through fear, but there has to be at least of a near of legitimacy. And that's why what Progogian did was so dangerous for Putin because he said, he didn't said, he did one thing and said one thing. What he said was this war was a terrible mistake. Nobody close to the leadership has dared to say that in Russia. And then he engaged in behavior, which, as Putin put it delicately, was a serious mistake from a loyal man in his description. So you have to ask yourself, what would really, because personalist dictatorships who have these power verticals where they centralize power

around, they fall at some point. But when does that happen? When is it, does it crack really matter when the implicit bargain that these dictators make? with the broad public gets broken. So Putin's deal, you'll make money, leave the rest of me, you'll have personal security, and life will be more orderly. It's a version of the old trains will run on time argument,

added to you'll make money. That's getting harder for him to maintain that end of the bargain because we have a Russian economy that's beginning to suffer. And more important, Rudyard, the big thing to watch here, does he have to do one more big mobilization? Because that's when it really hits home.

When you start pulling men out of the economy off the streets and into the army and send them to get killed. He's maneuvered thus far. He's extended the age of the draft up to 37, so he hasn't had to do that. That's the one that I would really watch because at some point

he ends, this ends, but it can be decades and Western fantasies about cracks in the Godfather's rule. I guess the best way of asking this, Richard, how long did the mafia families rule in New York.

There were generational changes. There were gang wars if they stepped on each other's turf. But boy, the mafia, reading about the mafia is a great way to understand the kind of leadership we've got here. This is ruled by fear. Yeah. Yeah, my final contribution is, I think history would say that the moment where the legitimacy crisis for these types of autocrisy regimes occurs is that faithful, faithful decision where they have to decide whether or not to turn their security

services on their own publics. And some regimes, horrible regimes like Iran, North Korea, cross that Rubicon. And once they're on the other side of it, it truly becomes something different than Russia and China. It becomes not simply authoritarianism. It becomes theocracy in Iran, totalitarianism in North Korea. So I think for the Chinas and the Russia's, you know, that usually is the moment of crisis.

And who knows? I don't know where that would go in Russia. My sense is that Russia will not and is not a totalitarian. authoritarian regime in the same way it was in the 20th century. And you're making a very interesting point, right, dude, because that leads to the question, when does the public stop being afraid? Because to set the scene for whether these personalists... When they have nothing to lose.

When do they take to the streets? Because they do, at some point, it does happen. They do take to the streets, but you have to overcome fear. And that's why this was such a critical two-month period. If he didn't go after prognosion, I was done that it took two months, frankly. I thought it was going to be sooner than it was. That's when people say, oh, wow, right? There's space here to do something. Because you're putting your life at risk when you take to the streets.

People know that. And that's what he took care of in the last couple of days. don't do this, you'll end up dead. Yeah, the power vertical is intact. Well, look, let's take a quick break. Say goodbye to our free monk members, convene our donors, monk donors on the other side of this short intermission.

And we'll pick up the other big news of the week, a certain interview that got over 200 million views, the most watched broadcast interview in history. What the heck is going on here? We'll get into it right after. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program,

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