The Rest Is Classified - 100. Putin's Secret Army: Fighting With Assad In Syria (Ep 3)

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Prigozhin is now one of America’s most wanted but his star is only just on the rise. Realising Putin’s need for greater geopolitical power and influence, the Russian oligarch forms the Wagner Group, with the help of a neo-Nazi soldier.  Listen as David and Gordon chart the growth of one of the world’s most infamous mercenary groups as Prigozhin embeds himself in the Middle East, helping President Assad of Syria take on the CIA. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026: Buy your tickets HERE to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 31 January.  ------------------- Try Attio for free at https://www.attio.com/tric ------------------- Join The Declassified Club: Start your free trial at ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠⁠ - go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, quarterly livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ⁠ ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Video Editor: Vasco Andrade Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at the Rest is Classified.com. Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little soul. and absolute psychopaths, every last one of them. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

I'm Gordon Carrara. And that, Gordon, is not Giovanni Progoshan. Really? Speaking about his chosen profession of chef. That is a Gordon Ramsey, famed British chef, potential psychopath. I think actually self-admitted psychopath right there in that quote, a nutter. Yeah. And as we were talking earlier, I think in a different context, Gordon Ramsey himself may have become a mercenary warlord.

But he's sort of, he's sort of stunted. Yes, for legal reasons. He was never involved in mercenary activities or large-scale massacres in Africa and around the world. But that is the kind of wildness of this story. Is a guy who starts off as a hot dog salesman stroke chef. restaurateur, high-end restaurants like Gordon Ramsey, and yet also becomes a mercenary warlord? I guess you're leading a coup against the government? I mean, I guess the equivalent in this case, because we're going to talk in this episode about this transition that Progogian makes from, when we left him last time, he was not the hot dog salesman anymore.

He's moved on. He's spent, you know, a lot of the mid-2010s running a large sort of PR. are in disinformation campaign firm called the Internet Research Agency, which is very useful to the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. election. And we're going to see now how the next chapter of the Afghani Progoshan story becomes mercenary warlord. And I guess it's kind of like if at some point after running one of his wonderful restaurants, I should say wonderful restaurants, Gordon Ramsey, if you're listening, Gordon Ramsey, through contacts that he had at 10 Downing Street

decided that he would outfit a military company to help the sort of flailing allied effort in Afghanistan and he was going to go and round up a bunch of very undesirable characters

from his kitchens and still be plausible and give them an offer that they can't and absolutely won't refuse to fight and and die in Afghanistan which sounds like a

bad action movie, which will come to bad action movies later because they are also going to play part of this story. That's right. So how does it happen that Evgeny Pryogosian goes from this businessman to warlord? Spring of 2014, he's introduced to another key character, a 44-year-old called Dimitri Utkin. Now, Utkin is a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian Special Forces. What kind of person was Demetri Utkin? We've got a picture of him, which I think is a, tells you quite a lot. Shaved head, mean eyes. Mean eyes. He has SS tattoos on his shoulders and neck, supposedly a Nazi eagle on his chest, and he's into weird paganism, Slavic rituals,

racial purity with fascist tendencies. What kind of person do we think he is? I mean, I don't know. Sounds like the person that maybe Gordon Ramsey would have had a hard time finding in his kitchens. Yes. But progosian has somehow content. This seems like a guy who, number one, this seems like a guy that progoshin probably gets along with fairly well. Yeah, they're hard men. He was in a penal colony in Soviet Russia. So this guy, he can relate to these kind of people, right?

He knows this guy. So, yeah, so Udkin has fought in the Chechem wars. His career stalled in the military. and it's interesting, partly because he preferred fighting to sitting in headquarters. His wife would say he was never happy unless he was fighting. I mean, you know. And in Russia, if you hit 40 in the military, no sign of advancement, you're out. So he'd left because he kind of wants to fight rather than go up the ranks.

So he joins a mercenary group. Additionally, this is doing stuff like anti-piracy. He then part of another group called... This isn't a normal thing to do when you leave the Russian military at this point, is it? It's not impossible that some of them would be. join some of these mercenary groups. You're seeing some of them emerge, even though technically, and we'll come back to this, mercenary groups are technically illegal in Russia, but there are security firms, and big companies have security arms, some of which look a little bit like

mercenary groups and militias. But at this point, they're kind of taking on a slightly different role. There's one called the Slavonic Corps, and they get sent to Syria. And Oatkin was going to go with them in 2013, supposedly, to protect pipelines. Because this is often how it's kind of phrase, Russia, big international resources, extraction, it's got these big companies like Gazprom, the gas company. You know, they often hire nursery groups to protect some of their facilities abroad. Utkin's going to be part of them, ends up fighting ISIS with kind of crap weapons, they're going to withdraw in failure. He's looking for what to do next. He gets introduced to prognation. And I think it's a fortuitous meeting. It's a kind of romance. You know, no, it's not a

Romance. Bromance. Butkin has got reputation for violence. He would sometimes Greek progoshion with Heil Petrovich using his boss's code name

and supposedly signed some documents with SS symbols. So again, I think you're getting a slight picture and the key thing about it and this is a...

I don't think Russians were super hot on Nazis, Gordon. What with the invasion in the great patriotic war? And I asked someone about this and they said like

It is weird, but there's a kind of bit of hard Slavonic nationalism, which merges with fascism. So they wouldn't think of themselves as German Nazis, but maybe admiring Nazism and wanting a kind of Slavic version of that, I think is the best way to understand it. But here's the crucial thing. Again, back to his kind of Hitler obsession, though, because I think he really does have a Hitler obsession. He had become – Boodkin does. He'd become obsession with Wagner, the composer who was Hitler's favorite. And so his call sign as a mercenary is Wagner. So he is Wagner, you know.

Not Progocia. Not Progocia. And the Wagner group will be, you know, effectively named after Utkin, his group. This is Progian the kind of deal maker, isn't it? You know, we saw last time how he's understood that the Kremlin needed help with social media and we're trolling. And he was going to offer a service there. And he's going to understand now that the Kremlin needs a little bit of help with. with men of violence and mercenary work, and with Utkin and with his people, there's an opportunity there.

So I think it's, again, that moment of possibility that, you know, mercenaries might be in. Now, I think the value of mercuries, as we'll see, is they're kind of useful for a state, they're deniable. They've got lots of benefits. I mean, they've had that through history, haven't they? In a way, it's a business opportunity. Yeah. I will say there's a wonderful book on Wagner and kind of the return of private warfare by John Lechner. It's called Death is Our Business.

And I highly recommend it. I think it's a great read on kind of Wagner in particular, but this dynamic in general. And, you know, one of the points that Leicester makes in the book, which I think is spot on, for those of us who have grown up in a world of the military as a public good. Yeah. And the military is sort of financed and resourced by the state and it's official. That's not usually been the case in history, actually. And we're sort of going back.

to this world of, you know, maybe 400 years ago, where private military companies are a real thing. I mean, I guess you think of in the States, blackwater. You can call it a contractor. Yeah. But it's really a private military company. I think here in the UK executive outcomes. Yeah.

Yeah. Those are the kind of outcomes I want are the executive kind. So Wagner is... And there's a longer tradition, isn't there? If you go back to the kind of the Italian city states, you know, and the 30-year-s war, you'd have mercenary groups fighting... in Europe, hired by a state to do their business. So, yeah, I think Wagner is in a tradition of mercuries, which is quite age old.

But I guess each age has its own mercuries, doesn't it? You know, and each country has its own mercenaries. And I guess Wagner are in the image of the kind of Putin's Russian. And in prognosians' image, I guess, is more to the point, kind of greedy, brutal, nationalistic, and actually quite closely tied to the state, closely aligned to the Kremlin and its priority. And that's what's different. And I guess the immediate value that they'll provide will be in Ukraine where this mixture of deniability relatively cheap when compared to using state resources or sort of the official military, you can see how progosin brings this entrepreneurial streak to violence in what is turning out to be this kind of hybrid gray zone conflict in Ukraine in 2014. Yeah, exactly, because I think the context here is important. We're talking about that meeting between Uckin and Progosin in 2014. This has happened just as a pro-Kremlin government has been removed from power in Ukraine, much to the Kremlin's anger and disappointment following popular protests. The issue of being, how close should Ukraine be to Europe versus Russia? It's moving more towards the European side rather than the Moscow. Kremlin is angry, determined for that not to happen. Famously, Russia kind of seizes

Crimea, using undercover special forces, who just pop up in Crimea. These are the famous people called Little Green Men. They've got no visible affiliation to Russia. And they say they're a local self-defense force, but basically they're Russians. And before anyone knows it, before the West can react, Moscow sees Crimea and is going to annex it. But then in the east of Ukraine, there's also violence in the Donbass region, Dernetsk and Luhansk, the source of fighting now. But back then, also an area where there are significant numbers who are pro-Russian against the kind of tilt towards Europe in Kiev in the capital. And so you get separatist forces there who are going to start to fight the new government

in Ukraine. You get militias to protect people. It's a kind of conflict heavy with Russian nationalism. And it's going to draw in Russian nationalists and imperialists from Russia to come and fight in Ukraine. You know, they want that bit of adventure. But they're struggling against the Ukrainian minister. military. And so mercenaries are the obvious answer, aren't they, for Russia? If you want to help

these groups fight, but you don't want to invade at that point, it's 2014, not 2022. You don't want to have your own military go into a war. You don't want the West to then, you know, kind of turn against you at this point. They don't want to do that. They don't want to also lose lots of their own troops, you know, and have the body bags come home. There's a need there. There's a business need. There's a business need. Yeah. And for folks who have just heard of Wagner and maybe heard of Progosian to think he's kind of the commander on the ground. He's not really, right? I mean, he's the guy who can link supply and demand here. Yeah. Right. He's, he's that kind of commercial guy where he knows what the Kremlin wants. He's got the connection to Dimitri Udkin.

And Udkin knows Ukraine well, right? Because he's been brought up there. Yeah. So there's kind of this natural fit and Progosion can source violence. Yeah, exactly. And violent capacity for Putin. Yeah. So it is a little bit unclear how, far Kugosian is talked into kind of backing Uckin and Merceries and how far he's just sensed an opportunity to make money or to be useful to the Kremlin. But I think that, you know, being useful to the Kremlin, you know, as we've seen from his resturanting days all the way through, you know, that's one of the kind of threads because he knows that moves him upwards, closer, I guess, to the inner circle.

Yeah. Closer to more wealth, closer to more power, closer to more status. The other thing is he's already in the world of military contracts because he's just, doing the catering contract. That's right. You know, so you've ready, you know how to navigate the bureaucracy. Yeah, he knows how to do a proposal of the contract. Right.

Which anyone who's ever tried to get a contract from probably any Ministry of Defense, Pentagon would know, there's a particular set of skills that you need to get these contracts. Yeah. It's not, there's a barrier to entry, right? There's real barrier to entry. And he already knows how to do this. Yeah, he's a contract. We laughed, by the way, at that, you know, sort of the food contracts, but it was a

500 million pound is a massive contract that he's gotten. And also it does mean as well that his kind of catering business has logistical and supply lines because he's got to get the food out to all parts of Russia and all kinds of places. So he's also got a kind of logistical network, which also is useful if you're going to smuggle mercenaries, gangs, weapons to mercenaries around. So in a weird way, you start to see how he moves into that space. So he's going to meet with Uckin. Utkin, as I said, Wagner, the group also sometimes called the orchestra, which I love.

And the fighters, musicians, and the battles they engage in are called concerts. I mean, this weird jargon. But it's only 200 people or so at the start when it's in Ukraine. And they're going to turn up in Luhansk, in the Dombas, where local forces are on the back foot to fight against the Ukrainians. They'll open up supply corridors into Russia. Crucially, they down a military transport in June to. 2014, which kills 49 Ukrainian servicemen. So a big deal. The mythology starts to build. Utkin, you know, will claim he was injured in the fight for Luhansk Airport, where his 40 men

take on 400 Ukrainians, taking them by surprise. Ukrainians actually say it was more like 150 of their men. But you can see the beginnings here of this mercenary work. Next, I think interesting fact, though, is that the money for this, a lot of it is coming from the Kremlin, and partly because it's easier to be deniable if it's from the Kremlin. And there's already you start to get the first signs of bits of tension with the Ministry of Defense

in Moscow, which is run by one of Putin's old St. Petersburg Powell, Sergei Shogu. He's a defense minister from 2012. He's kind of pragmatic and low-key, but he's a kind of Putin pal. And already you get the kind of military in Moscow, I think

already starting, these guys are not under our control. There's a tension there. There's going to be some big developments, 2014, MH-17 disaster when a Malaysian airline's passenger jet is shot down by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine, a disaster for the people involved, most of all, and it's going to get investigated, interestingly, by a new group called Bellingat, the open-source investigations. That point is basically unknown.

Yeah, unknown. Elliot Higgins in his bedroom investigated this, and they're going to start doing open-source investigations. This is where you also see the kind of merging of Progoshans' different things because then Progosians' media trolls will A. Unleash on Bellingham, but also try and muddy the waters about who was behind MH17. So you see

the launch of kind of trolls to say, oh no, it was someone else who did it. No, it was the Ukrainians who did it. You know, trying to muddy the waters about the events. So again, you see the kind of value to the Moscow and to the Kremlin of Progosian's media machine. And it's kind of merging with security. work and what's going on in Ukraine. So the mercenaries are on the ground in Ukraine and Putin is

kind of engaging them more and more. They come under the deputy head of the GRU, a general Vladimir Alexaev. He's in charge of the kind of dirty work for the GRU, Russian military intelligence, sabotage, intimidation, assassination. He's going to oversee some of the Wagner connections. They've got a training base at Morkino next to a special forces base, which tells you how close they are. And also, Wagner also at this time, it looks like, as well as doing some fighting, they do a lot of dirty work to the Kremlin. I'm shocked. You're shorted. These bunch of fellow separatist leaders, so technically pro-Moscow leaders, get assassinated.

And it's always claimed it's the Ukrainians, but it looks like it's Wagner. And it looks like what Moscow is doing is basically getting rid of anyone who they can't control, you know, and who won't agree. with their strategy for what's to happen. And Wagner and, you know, Utkin's team are doing this and they get known as the cleaners for that work. So you can see that they're already more than just fighters and mercenaries. They're kind of involved in the darker side of things. And they're growing by 2014 to about 500 and then maybe 1,000.

But then you get the Minsk agreements, which are going to kind of freeze the conflict, stop it being quite so full-on and more of a kind of low-level conflict for the following years, which I guess in a way means it's over for Wagner. Their need seems to have passed at that moment. Well, Gordon, though, an enterprising and psychopathic chef, of course, is going to find new markets, isn't he? And, I mean, maybe there with the Russians beginning to turn their attention elsewhere, to new hotspots around the world. Let's take a break.

And we come back. We'll see how Wagner goes global. This episode is brought to you by Atio, the CRM for the AI era. Now, David, people think that SpyCraft is just car chases and secret codes, but an awful lot of it is just idling around, waiting for the action. It's a bit like starting your own business. You think it's going to be as easy as creating and selling a product, but the reality is business owners spend far too long trying to get their CRM to fit a system not built for them.

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So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. You may have heard of the sex cult nexium, and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack, But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like, this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talk to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member.

How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma at other people? I don't even know how to answer that question. Allison After Nexium from CBC's Uncover is available now on Spotify. Welcome back. It's September of 2015. And a new, I think we could say a new business opportunity is beginning to emerge for Yivgeny Prokosian and the Wagner Group. And it's not in Ukraine. No. It's in Syria. Yeah. Most restauranteurs would be like, where can I open my new restaurant? We're here with our Gordon Ramsey of the Russian warlord going, new market. You know, Syria looks good for some, for an opening. I also like how essentially a map of. the other parts of the world where Wagner will expand is essentially inversely related to how well off that part of the world happens to be doing at any point in time. Yeah, because normally if you're a restaurateur, you'd be like, where's a nice place where lots of rich people are going to pay lots of money for my fancy food?

Here he's thinking, where is their death and destruction chaos disorder and a desire for mercenaries? So it is slightly opposite. And we should, I will say, and this will probably be the only time in the series. that I defend Yevgeny Progoshin. But you put on your mercenary hat. Yeah.

Yeah. The whole value he's provided is, you know, essentially as an antidote to that, he's going to provide the security quarter

that's so horribly lacking. Yeah, in some of these countries. In eastern Syria and then order Central African Republic. Yeah.

Order peace instability. Because here, we've talked about he's worked in Ukraine, but there's been a peace deal. But now Syria. country, you know well. The civil war, I guess, has been raging. President Assad is struggling in Syria against the opposition forces, rebels and ISIS. At this point, September 2015,

it's reached a critical juncture. And of course, Russia has a lot of interest, doesn't it, in Syria? I guess at the face of it, you think, well, why in the world would that be? So, I mean, Syria at that point, has got maybe 20 million people from a oil and gas standpoint. It really has no impact on the international market. Those will see, there are resources there. no nuclear weapons. It's just why. And I think a couple of reasons. One is that the timing matters. We're at a period in 2015 where much of the Arab world is in sort of turmoil. I mean, you have real sort of protest movements, insurgencies, civil wars that have grown out of the Arab awakening in 2010 and 2011. Yeah, I think from the mindset of Vladimir Putin and the Russian sort of leadership, there's a sense that, The U.S., and in particular in places like Libya, the U.S. has sort of attempted to intervene or intervened to suit its own geopolitical lens. And so I think there's a sense here that the Russian state to project power and influence in the region, to be a global power. To be a global power, needs to intervene to prop up its own sort of friends and allies in the region in the same way that the U.S. has done.

I mean, more tactically, I guess, the Russians have a naval base at Tartouz. on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. They've had that since, they've had that concession, I think, since the 67 war. There's an opportunity, in Putin's mind, to sort of extend Russian influence in the Mediterranean. And as we'll see over the course of the Civil War, that naval base is hugely expanded and modernized. There's an airfield at Hamam in the northwest of Syria that gets built, Russian airfield. So there's a lot of Russian linkages in that dimension, of course, that the Russians have been, you know, a massive arm supplier. to the Assad regime going back into the days of the Cold War.

So there's a lot of connection there. And at this point in 2015, we would have thought that Assad had probably lost control of maybe three quarters of the country. And I think there was a feeling in Moscow that in the fall of 15, Assad's days are maybe numbered. And so Putin, there's a whole bunch of reasons that coincide to get the Russians involved. Yeah. And of course, Moscow wants to support Assad, but a bit like Western governments, it doesn't want to do the full-scale intervention. It doesn't want to put, you know, boots on the ground, does it? So I guess what it's going to do is use air power to bomb the rebels and then give some support on the ground through mercenaries, you know, through Wagner and others. Now, there eventually will be a Russian military intervention. That's pretty extensive. But why use Russian, you know, special forces? troops, soldiers, you know, when you can use mercenaries.

By 2016, you're going to have about 2.5,000 Wagner mercaries stationed in Syria. Interesting enough, directed to some extent by the GRU, by Russian military intelligence. You can see that they're kind of, you know, they're not out there on their own, and they get loads of equipment from the Russian military. I think this is really interesting. You've got T90 tanks, helicopters, anti-aircraft batteries, howitzers, artillery, you know, all from the Russian military, which is going to kind of. kind of help them. And technically, it's training and equipment. It's going to get flown on

military transport. Interesting enough, the salary for a mercenary then? It's about $4,000 to $5,000 a month. Pretty good. It's not bad. Nearly four times what a normal Russian soldier earns. So Wagner's now got some kind of, tends to be experienced commanders, you know, your Uckins and his people who are kind of running the show. And then you get all of these recruits who are coming in to kind of be the guys on the ground doing it basically for the money. You know, often only for six months or so. Sometimes they're people who are ex-soldiers themselves, but you read about them.

And they're sometimes like taxi drivers, you know, or mechanics who are just like, it's good money, it's good money. I'll do this for six months, big payday, then go back home. It's hard to go back a little bit in the chronology, but I think it's an important point because it speaks to the nature of progosin.

We're talking about the sort of official wrapping of this intervention. And it is true that Wagner has, you know, connections, deep connections, and in some cases, I think, is being subordinated to the GRU and Russian intelligence in the military. But Progosian, the entrepreneur, as soon as he sees sort of, you know, the Russian state tilting towards Syria, you know, he starts interacting with Syrians, senior Syrians. In the government or something, there's a couple of Al-Awe's close to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, known as the Jabber brothers.

and progosin cuts a deal with them initially. And these guys ran these kind of pro-regime militias in Syria. So you can kind of see how pro-Gosian, he gets himself almost ingratiated or woven into these situations to create facts on the ground that then the Russian state has to kind of respond to. Making himself useful. Yeah, Wagner are going to kind of train alongside and work alongside some of the Syrian – soldiers. But there's going to be tension, I think, with the Syrian military, as you'd expect both sides, you know, think the other's a bit inept. There's all these reports that at times Vargna try and get Syrian troops to join a battle by shooting at their feet to try and get the

moving. And at other times, the Syrians shoot at the back sides of the Vargnom end. But I think one of the other things that comes to that is the reputation for brutality really starts to emerge here in Syria. And there's one particular set of videos which come out in June. 2017, which I think we should say, if you're listening to this with your kids, shame on you. Shame on you. You've opened up a six-part podcast series on a mercenary warlord with your young children. Yeah. But if you have, if they've made this life decision, you may want to skip just the next couple

minutes. Yeah. Because these videos, June 2017, which emerge, there's some of a man being beaten with a sledgehammer. of a body being set alight there's a beheading. There are people kicking the guy's head around who's been beheaded and these videos start to circulate amongst

Russian military veterans and you can hear someone, it's clearly in the desert, so it looks like Syria, someone speaking Russian in the video and it gets geolocated to a gas facility in Syria and this is a kind of big moment actually in Bargner in its story

because it's going to cement this idea that Wagner are a kind of nasty bunch, capable of brutality, but also create a kind of cult around them amongst people who kind of like that in Russia, I think, which is a bit wild. I like to now I think you could picture as kind of your mental model for this. If Gordon Ramsey was running Gastown in the Mad Max movies, you know, out in the desert, he's kind of, you know, he's wearing like a medieval dungeon. master outfit, there's sort of an apocalyptic, you know, there's gas flares going off, guys driving around in gigantic trucks, you know, with skulls mounted on the front. This is what's going on in East Street Syria right now.

Yeah, so the man who's kind of getting sledgehammered, it was supposedly a deserter from the Syrian army who'd been captured by Wagner. There's an investigation by Wagner's internal security, not into killing the man, but how the film got out of killing the man. I love that. You know, and it turned out had been shared and it kind of creates this weird, dark fan culture online as it goes viral, part of the kind of brand. And Progoshim will say, and there's no such thing as bad publicity. But it's going to help recruitment. That's what's kind of crazy, particularly amongst military veterans, nationalists and others, who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer.

Who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer. Yeah. Because the sledgehammer is going to be become associated as the kind of unofficial logo brand thing of the Vargda group. So that's the kind of brutality. Also important for later in the story that Progogsion will get to know the new Russian military commander on the ground, a brutal general called General Suravikin, who was known as General Armageddon because of his preference... It's a bit on the nose, isn't it? Yeah.

His preference for flattening cities from the air. The two will become allies, and the general, interestingly enough, becomes an honorary member of Wagner. Wagner plays a role in the Palmyra operations, 2016, then the Syrian forces. This is a fight against the Islamic State. Yeah, exactly. And this central, there's a city in central Syria, Palmyra, ancient set of ruins, actually, lovely, beautiful place I visited. It had been a kind of hotbed of Islamic State activity during the Civil War. When Wagner wins some battles there, who gets the credit?

it. Defense minister, Sergei Shogu, tells Putin we took Palmyra, and then Progoshin says, no, no, no, we did. And Shogu reportedly stated that the Gopniks cannot go down in history. Now, Gopnik is like a low-level crypt. It's a thug. Thug. Or also have the kind of connotation of being trashy, working class. It says something already about the way in which Wagner is seen as these kind of rough guys. The military are like, can't let them have credit. There's also this kind of view of some of the elite, which is Prokotian is getting a little bit above his station. He's a bit of a thug. The other thing, which is going to be important for Prokotian, I think, is that he starts to see, doesn't he, that how do you make money?

And one of the answers is in Palmyra, I think there's some oil and gas. Yeah. And he's going to work out. Gas town. It's a gas town. Yeah. There's a way of funding this through the resources which are on the ground. Which would suggest to me that these contracts that he's on are lucrative but not, you know, staggeringly so.

From the military, yeah, from Kremlin, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it makes a ton of sense that if you're going to provide security to a regime, a great way to ensure that you're paid well is to get access to some amount of the cash flow that comes out of an asset, right? and it could be a mine, could be a gas plant, right? It's a change to his business model here inside Wagner, which is, you know, you can sign a contract with the Syrian government saying, if we bring a gas facility back under Syria control, we get a quarter of the profits.

And it's kind of good business for both sides, isn't it? Because you create an incentive for yourself to get it back. And for the Syrians, yeah, we have to give up a quarter of the profits, but if these guys can take back some of these facilities, from ISIS, then it kind of you get 75% of something we had nothing of before. I think what's interesting as well is you start to get the

ambiguity of, is he doing this for the Russian state? Is he doing it for himself? It feels like much more for himself. You know, the overall policy of help the Syrians is for the Russian state. But the, I'm going to do a deal to get this gas facility is about enriching himself and bargaining, basically

in funding their activities. Here you could say, he might not be doing this at the exact direction. of the Russian state, but he's operating with overall sort of protection and cover from the big boss. So he knows there's a set of rules and there's sort of some guardrails to his behavior and I'm sure how much he can take and how much needs to be kicked up the chain money-wise to the powers that be. So I think he knows the rules. He's doing this because, you know, Putin and the people above him in the Kremlin, they want this to happen. Yeah. That also explains this one

absolutely fascinating story, which we'll just look into. So this incident happens in February 2018 in Derazoor, am I? Derizor. Largest city in eastern Syria. At this point, it's a really complicated place because we have a small contingent, as we'll see, of U.S. troops on the ground. We have the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces that are there. We have, of course, the Russians operating in Syria. And the Russians have been really on the ground in force in Syria since 2015. So three years at this point, the U.S. and the Russians are trying desperately to avoid accidents killing each other. There's a deconfliction mechanism that's been set up to make sure that we don't get into a shooting war with the Russians. And now we've got Wagner out there.

Yeah. And Wagner forces at this point in February 2018 are going to, along with civil Syrians, it's a bit unclear which Syrians, you know, militia or government, and even how many Syrians there are. But Vargna forces are heading for a particular gas facility, the Conoco Gas Facility. Gas Town. Gas Town, yeah. Which had, you know, traded hands a number of times in the Civil War. It's a kind of pretty valuable gas facility in the country, potentially offering hundreds of millions of dollars a year revenue. But it is right over that deconfliction line, you know, with the other forces, just on the other side.

side of it. And right next to the Conoco Gas facility is a small observation post containing about 30 US special forces, you know, Delta Force Rangers and some Kurdish allies. Now, they watch a kind of build-up of these Wagner forces, you know, maybe with some Syrian forces, near their base over a period of days, and then they see them getting closer and closer. They cross the Euphrates River, they cross what would normally be the line of separation. The Americans have a support base about 20 miles away, which is looking at drone feeds, and they can see what looks like a force assembling to take the plant. So at about 3pm one afternoon, they see the forces including, which is about 500 troops, nearly 30 vehicles edging towards the plant. And of course,

at the plant is this outpost, you know, of US Special Forces and Kurtz. By early evening, they're getting very close to the base. And this gets escalated upwards, as you'd expect, to the kind of U.S. Air operations base in Qatar, base in Kuwait, and to the Pentagon. It's going all the way up. Aircraft are placed on alert. Everyone's watching drone feeds.

You know, at 8.30 p.m., three Russian T-72 tanks are moving within a mile of the plant. The mission support base 20 miles away. The Green Berets and Marines are thinking we might have to go and fight. And as you said, there's this contact, isn't there, for Russian and U.S. forces to communicate and deconflict. So as you'd expect, the Americans are on the phone, you know, and kind of every day they're talking to each other.

And the Americans ask the Russians, are the troops approaching the base yours? And the Russian High Command says, no, they're not ours. Now, that's what is later testified, you know, by the Secretary of Defense to Senate Committee. And yet the people on the ground are listening to radio transmissions with the people speaking Russian. You can see how it would not be immediately believable that you don't know who they are. And yet,

go to the Russian side of this, it's easy to see why the Russian military may have thought that'd be kind of great if the US killed these guys. Yeah. Because there's no love lost between the military and Wagner. So in the outpost, you know, by the gas facility,

they see the tanks. These T-72 tanks turn out of a kind of neighbourhood and then they start to fire and they're firing tank artillery mortar rounds at the base. The Americans dive into foxholes for another 15 minutes

they're trying to call the Russians and tell them to stop. You know, nothing back. The US fire warning shot still advancing. Now, having been told the Russians denied all knowledge, the Secretary of Defence directs, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,

for the force to be annihilated, the attacking force. So the US launches this, staggeringly, overwhelmingly ferocious attack on the forces attacking the outpost. I love the just alphabets soup of weapons platforms that were brought to bear. F-15 fighters, MQ9 Reaper drones, fire a call fire missiles, AC-130, attack aircraft. AC-130, that's a weapon system that's a friend of the pot. If you remember back to our early Afghanistan episodes, they get called up. They were called up to absolutely wreck.

Al-Qaeda prisoners during that prison rebellion. A.H. 64 Apache attack helicopters, B-52 strategic bombers. It's just everybody's, everybody's in the game. I wonder what the U.S. taxpayer paid for this. It's pretty big. It's pretty significant. It's overkill. I mean, it's literally overkill. And then you also have the kind of special forces team from the kind of support base kind

of arrives and they get there about 1130. They've dark. They've driven 20 miles using thermal imaging cameras. And they actually have to stop because there's just so much kind of fire going into this. And eventually they engage the fighters as well with machine guns from the roof of their vehicles. So now there's about 40 Americans on site. The Russians don't seem to have night vision, which I think is also a disadvantage. And so there's just this massive wave of air power, which goes on for, you know, about an hour.

And it's kind of total annihilation. You have getting progation like that Homer Simpson meme where he's just slowly backing into the hedge after this happens. That didn't go very well. We're retreat, I think, is the call. So at the end, there's no US casualties. One Syrian ally to the US is wounded. How many of the attackers are killed? I mean, the truth is no one knows.

I mean, dozens best guess, around 80. Some people thought 200, 300. It's a kind of crazy story. Because as you said, what is going on? Progoshan will say this was an authorized operation. I had permission. You know, I discussed it with the head of the military. Others, though, will suggest that this was Progogian freelancing.

That also, I have to say, seems entirely plausible to me. And then the question is, why does the Russian military say he's not ours and kind of, you know, go for it? I mean, it has a lot of just sort of progosion maybe pushing the limits of what's acceptable and finding, you know, sort of he's seeing what's possible. And he found the limit. Yeah. And he might have thought, or he might have thought he had agreement from the, you know, Ministry of Defense. or he might have thought that if we really get into it, we'll get some backup, and it didn't happen. So I'm not sure if it's some elaborate, you know, Ministry of Defense or Russian military setup of Progosion.

It could be more that he thought he would get some help and he didn't get it. Progotion will claim that the Russian Ministry of Defense never passed on the warnings that, you know, the Americans would attack to him. That seems entirely believable, which also seems kind of believable. it's possible the Russian military thought at first, yeah, let him take that. And then when they see the Americans pile in, they're like, oh, actually, we don't want to start a war. We're not going to go defend Wagner. So let's pretend it's all Wagner's fault. But, you know, it's very ambiguous.

But I guess the crucial point is it leaves Progosham furious with the Russian Ministry of Defense. And so, you know, there's been a bit of tension before, but this is already the start of a kind of story which will plot, not with the Kremlin, but with the Ministry. of Defense in Moscow. Sergei Shogu, the defense minister, you know, General Gerasimov, who's the kind of professional head of the military. General Armageddon. Yeah, General Armageddon, who is Suravikin. Oh, so that's Suravikin.

Oh, dear. You've got your generals mixed up. I've got my generals all messed up. I got Gordon Ramsey on the brain. And he feels betrayed and angry progression. He's kind of on his own path, to some extent now, still allied to the Kremlin. just eight days after this big, big battle is the moment he gets indicted publicly by the US in 2018 for election interference for the 2016 election. So he's now, I guess you have a picture of a guy who's growing in power, but who's also getting more angry and more high profile, but who's also got a kind of business model, which he thinks works.

I think there with the business model working, Progosian extremely angry with the Ministry of Defense and with some other terrible places in the world where he can expand that business model. Let's end it and we come back. We will see how he moves out from the Syrian foothold into Africa. But if you don't want to wait, you don't have to. If you want to see how Yivgeny Progosian marches around the world. join the Declassified Club. Go to the Rest is Classified.com.

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