The Underworld Podcast - Ex-Con Mercenaries, Wagner, Prigozhin, and the Russian Mafiosos Fighting in Ukraine with Joshua Yaffa

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

The Russian mercenary/state aligned outfit Wagner emerged from the early days of the war in Ukraine, led by an ex-con turned hot dog salesman turned Putin lapdog. In no time, they were operating in the Middle East and Africa, and Yevgeny Prigozhin's stock as a warlord began to rise. When Russia's full scale invasion started to falter, Wagner started trawling Russian prisons like the villain in a Fast and Furious movie. Soon, though, his star rose a little too high and that never ends well in Putin's Russia. We're joined by New Yorker writer and Between Two Fires author Joshua Yaffa, who has covered Wagner's rise and Prigozhin's fall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Send help. Rated R. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. It's the fall of 2022 in a gritty Russian prison. And a man is giving a speech in front of dozens, if not hundreds of convicts, serving long sentences. He's dressed in military green, and he's a face like a Harry Potter villain, and he's saying things that seem like they only happen in double-digit fast and furious sequels.

He's got an offer for these convicts, one that's going to put them on the world stage. Quote, in six months, you'll go home having received a pardon. Those who come with us and on the first day say, I ended up somewhere I shouldn't have, we'll mark a deserter and execute. You have five minutes to decide. That man is the Abgeny Progossian, a former prisoner himself, turned hot dog salesman, turned Putin's caterer, who is now the head of Russia's Wagner group, and he's recruiting for the war, giving the men a chance to leave prison if they fight in Ukraine. And Ukraine's not the only pace Prozhenan has Wagner men stationed. They're in the Middle East, in Libya, in Syria, they're all over Africa.

They're mercenaries, sort of. The truth is, they're not really that far removed from the Russian state. They're just a way for a tiny bit of plausible deniability to exist when they inevitably get caught committing war crimes and exploiting resources, all that sort of stuff. In Progrosian speech, he also says that Wagner wants recruits under the age of 50. But that doesn't stop a couple of middle-aged men from deciding to throw down. And this is from Arwick Toller's piece in Bellington. Three of them include 59-year-old Sergei, 55-year-old Andre, and 55-year-year-old Igor. All three were young, violent mafiosos in Russia's insanely bloody 90s mop wars.

All three of them had managed to avoid being gunned down on the streets of Moscow or sniped by a former Afghan war vet or just shot in the back alley by a dude in a track suit. Take Andre. He had formed a gang in the mid-90s in a backwater city, running it for 20 years after his boss was murdered and he wanted vengeance. In October of 1994, him and a friend shot up a group leaving a sports hall and killed three people. They went after business owners, even attacking a local TV station with a grenade launcher in 2003. He later moved to Moscow, you know, you hit the big time, you leave your local fiefdom and head to the big city.

He got involved in real estate, of course, owned six apartments. But like anyone else, he ends up getting pinched this time in 2013. Sergei, he's serving 25 years. Like a lot of Russians' 90s gangsters, he formed his strongman crew around wrestlers from a sports complex in the city of Penn. They did the usual prostitution, extortion, and murder. In 2003, his crew attacked seven people, including their wives, in a local bar with baseball bats and hunting rifles. They didn't fuck around. They ended up killing four people, attempted hits on a bunch of others, and they operated with a strict hierarchy like the military, before they got brought down in 2011.

Then there's the Afghan, Igor. Like a lot of the 90s shooters, he was an Afghan war event. He's a Tatar and functioned someone. what as a community later, does a bunch of community service stuff for local teens and more vets, all that. His crew actually has a bunch of former vets itself. They did the usual petty stuff, but they also took contract killings. They even killed a couple of construction company directors and get into a brutal gang war with the Broadway gang. He survives an assassination attempt, gets shot a couple times before he's arrested,

and again, given a really long sentence. All three of these men take up Bogosian's offer, and all of them will quickly die on the battlefields of Ukraine, some not even lasting one month. And soon, too, their leader, Yevgeny Progogsian, he ends up dying as well. Not in Ukraine, but because of Wagner's Ukraine campaign that drives a wedge in the warlord factions competing for Putin's approval. This is the Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, the radio program where every week two journalists

who have reported all over the world on all manners of criminal elements, tell you stories, of all manners of criminal elements from all over the world, while showing you just how thin the line is between badass and cautionary tale. I am one of your host, Danny Gold. Your other host, Sean Williams, is not here, but that's okay. He's on a much-needed vacation. If you haven't seen, he published, I think,

three long-form magazine pieces this week, one in the Economist on some fake Cricket League mafia scam involving like a KGB guy in India that hustled English tourists. One on Nepal's wheat industry that we actually did an episode on a little while ago. That's in Harpers. And one on an insane con man that's one of the wildest stories ever. That's going to be in Rolling Stone.

I think it came out by now by the time you're hearing this. Maybe not. But, you know, the boy can write and he needed a break. The good news is that I am joined by Josh Yoffa of the New Yorker, who pretty much wrote the most thorough article out there on all things, Progogian and Wagner. and I want to make sure to another group of people who really have done almost more than anyone

in bringing Wagner to the light is our friends at Bellingat and the opening story like I mentioned is from your pal and mine, Eric Toller who wrote that story. Anyway, as always, bonus episodes on patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast

or on iTunes you can sign up. It's like $5 a month. We put up like three or four a month these days. They're actually pretty good. Like, comment, subscribe. Send us untraceable cash in paper bags or gray area insider trading tips. You know, all that stuff. Anyway, Josh is one of the premier long form writers on Russian topics out there. He wrote a book two between two fires and he's going to walk us through Wagner and Progosion. You know,

Sean and I talked about doing this episode for a while even before the revolt, before he was killed, but you don't really want to miss an opportunity to have someone like Josh kind of walk you through it. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, been a lot of excitement on this beat the last couple of weeks, huh? I guess that's one word for it. Yeah, yeah. Let's start back from the beginning, though. And I will probably mispronounce this name like I mispronounce everything, but

Yvgeny Progogian. You got it. I got it. All right. Not bad. Not bad. Making some progress. But kind of start by telling us where he's born, how does he grow up?

And what kind of happens before he's the sausage king of Moscow? Well, progoshin born in then Leningrad, late Soviet Union or rather grows up, comes of age in the late Soviet Union. A kid of the streets gets into a crowd of hooligans and petty thieves in the 80s ends up being sent to prison for his role in a series of robberies in Leningrad and comes out basically on the eve of the Soviet collapse. having missed the transformation of the country, Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika, and so on, and emerges to a transformed country, a collapsed country, a country in the middle of reinvention,

and Progoshin engages in his own act of reinvention, first by launching a hot dog business that he runs out of his own kitchen, mixing the mustard at home, as he later boasted in an interview. And from there, he turns, this hot dog business into a supermarket business,

opens some restaurants, opens legit, I think, one of the first and in a way important early fine dining restaurants in now post-Soviet St. Petersburg called Old Customs House that tried to bring an air of

European refinement, shall we say, to dining in the city. And that leads further to catering business. And that really is where progosian, by all accounts, though we don't know a lot about his biography, by design, but where he makes the most important

connections, the decisive connections. Specifically, there is a floating restaurant on a boat that goes up and down the Neva River called New Island. It's there that Putin brings a number of foreign dignitaries, including George W. Bush and others. Putin celebrates his own birthday in the early 2000s, already having ascended to the presidency at New Island. And in a system like Russia's where,

first and foremost, proximity to the body is actually the direct Russian translation of the phrase. Dostop Khtielo, access to the body, the body being Putin. The closer you are, the more, pull you have inside the system, the more other people feel like they have to do you favors or do your bidding. And so, progoshin, the caterer, now gets catering contracts of a size and scale that are off the charts and that make him an incredibly rich man, specifically supplying food

to Russia's defense ministry and also to public schools. These are hundreds of millions, if not billions in state contracts, turning progoshin into an oligarch of sorts. And from there, he becomes the progosion that I think most American readers would begin to recognize. That's the progoshin who, for example, created the internet research agency, otherwise known as the St. Petersburg troll farm, which most notoriously participated in Russia's campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, posing as fake users, even organizing actually real political gatherings and protests in the U.S. Only what wasn't real about them is that the people doing it were using fake avatars,

pretending to be in one case, Black Lives Matter activists when they're really Russian trolls in St. Petersburg. For that, Pergoshin and others at the Internet Research Agency actually featured in the Mueller report, and were indicted in the U.S. Finally, that brings us to the reason we're talking today, and what Progoshin is now and will forever be the most known for and the most tied to, and that is the Wagner group, the mercenary outfit, like Progelsen, himself, with a very murky past, a murky origin story. We don't know exactly who asked who, what.

But in 2014 and 2015, we see a group known as Wagner beginning to operate in Ukraine, where at the time Russia was engaged in, you might say, round one of its invasion on a much smaller scale than what we see today, backing a would-be foe separatist uprising in the Donbos in eastern Ukraine, sending in deniable troops, in some cases,

in some cases, regular Russian troops, but preferring to use quote-unquote volunteers, people for whom the Kremlin had some plausible deniability. And in that environment,

Wagner was born. Damn, that is quite the summary. I have a couple questions. It's almost like you have this contradiction. I think a lot of people who don't know his entire background might view precaution as this kind of like rough neck, grizzled guy,

not someone you would think would be seen even in fancy restaurants. But from all intents and purposes, it really seems like he was a great caterer. And the food was good. It was good enough to impress pudding to kind of get into a circle. I mean, is that accurate? I don't know how good the food was per se.

I mean, let's take old customs sales specifically for a moment that was just by virtue of the lack of other places like it, a kind of St. Petersburg institution, but by the time we're talking about Concord, the name of Progoshan's catering company, catering Kremlin Functions,

the inauguration party, for example, for Dimitri Medvedev, 2012, when Medvedev briefly took over the presidency nominally from Putin. I don't think those were tenders made on the quality of food service, look, right? I think at a certain point, relations and this Byzantine unofficial power structure and hierarchy, which is always much more important in Russia than the formal org chart,

that Progoshan had carved out a niche or carved out a place for himself in that informal power hierarchy, a hierarchy where winks and understandings matter more than what's written on paper, that he became someone who was too entrenched in the system to remove. And then in terms of his prison sentence, we've done some stories on Russian mafia and organized crime that came out of the Russian prisons. Is there anything known about what he was like in prison or maybe who he was with?

It just seems like it's a real education in Russian prisons in terms of learning how to interact, how to get ahead, how to sort of do exactly what he did. Do we know anything about that or has that kind of been kept under wraps? We don't know a whole lot about, really very little at all about his specific prison experience. Rogosian has referenced it later. He referenced it, for example, to fast forward a whole lot to last summer when Wagner,

specifically Progosh, was going around to Russian prisons and recruiting inmates to fight essentially as cannon fodder in Ukraine. he carried himself as someone who knew the inside of prison walls and spoke this prison language, the vernacular of a Russian prison, and came off in a way as one of their own to the prisoners. And I know that that resonated with some that helped build Progosian's image as this kind of rough and gruff to truth teller, a persona that you mentioned a few moments ago. So he definitely has the marks of someone who received at least part of his life's education,

if you can say, in that environment, even if we don't know a whole lot of the details. And then, of course, as you detail in the article for the New Yorker, hostile work environment at those catering companies and restaurants, not a very nice boss. Yeah, Progotion was known to be authoritative, mean, demanding. I reference

one scene in the piece that was told to me by someone in the St. Petersburg restaurant scene who heard about how Progoshan once tied a chef to a radiator in the kitchen. So I think that gives you a sense of his motivational methods.

Yeah, a little harsher than the bear in other chef stories that I think we've heard. Definitely not a nice guy. I think also the first I really focused or heard about Wagner because I hadn't spent much time reporting or looking into Ukraine back in 2014, 2015 was their efforts in Syria. Can you go into that a little bit, what they were doing there and sort of how that came about? Sure. Wagner really was an obvious, if not inevitable, part of the Russian campaign in Syria from the very beginning. because Putin sold that campaign first and foremost to the Russian public domestically as a cost-free exercise in rebuilding or extending Russia's geopolitical footprint.

There wasn't a whole lot of enthusiasm inside Russia for any real losses coming out of that campaign, first and foremost, in terms of Russian soldiers being injured and killed. in a far-off place that few Russians understood, it felt kind of good to the Russian warplanes streaking through the skies or to hear on TV about Russia defeating ISIS. That all worked for Putin domestically, but the Kremlin was quite clear-eyed about knowing

that seeing Russians come home in body bags would be the thing that would really turn Russian public opinion, not just against the Syria campaign, but perhaps against Putin himself. And so another solution was needed because you can't actually, for example, take territory without ground troops. This is not a Russian problem alone, but a truism of military conflict. And so Wagner, these deniable and therefore expendable mercenaries really suited the bill. and they were the largest contingent of Russian ground forces in Syria. There were some Russian special forces operating,

but just in terms of sheer numbers, people really doing the fighting, moving across the desert, taking territory, including indeed, for example, taking Palmyra, the ancient city from ISIS. Afterwards, Russia Kremlin put on a classical musical concert in the old Roman theater, in Palmyra, a real PR and propaganda coup for the Kremlin, but it was Wagner troops who did the fighting on the ground to make that possible. And for years after, Wagner was played this important

role in terms of the Russian military footprint in Syria. Well, also, for example, finding themselves quite convincingly accused of the most grievous human rights violations, like, for example, a video that surfaced, showing apparent Fogner fighters, beating a Syrian detainee, mocking him. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Own it all. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the World premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and

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must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. You know, one of the things I think that that people really start to pay attention to Wagner, at least watching in the Middle East, was this story of the sledgehammer. That kind of went around, and as opposed to denying it or hiding from it, Wagner celebrated it. It became like a logo almost in a way.

Can you tell us about that a little bit? Sure. This video you're referring to shows a captured Syrian fighter detained by Vyatian fighter, detained by Wagner soldiers. They're beating him, kicking him. They're trying at one point to cut off his head with a knife. Ultimately, they decapitate him with a shovel and burn his dead body on camera. It's a really gruesome, horrific video that has been convincingly linked to Wagner soldiers operating in Syria at the time. And this sort of extreme grievous brutality became another part of the Wagner brand identity and brand myth. You know, one of the other things, too, that I think was

remarkable about your article was you actually caught up with multiple members of Wagner. I think that I've joined various times. What were the people who, what were the soldiers of Wagner like in the early days? Like 2014, 2015. It seems like. they were almost a little bit more, well, a lot more, as opposed to the convicts, sort of elite. They had military experience. They weren't like sort of, you know, drug addicts, older military guys, not military, but like prisoners who had just joined to get out of prison with the Ukraine push in the last couple years. Yeah, at the beginning, at the very beginning, Wagner was drawing from relatively elite units or the veterans of relatively elite units, paratroopers, special forces,

and so on with time as Wagner operations grew, so did the need for fighters. And so therefore, inevitably, the recruitment process expanded and you had people coming in, not necessarily from elite units, but just with general military experience. Finally, all the way, as you pointed out,

to the Ukraine war, when Wagner adopted the strategy of trying to take territory through sheer numbers alone, like kind of throwback to the most gruesome fighting of World War II or even before in terms of just throwing men into the fire and hoping to advance purely by overwhelming the opponent with quantity alone. Well, then you couldn't have elite fighters. That would be a waste. There certainly aren't enough of them on the one hand.

And on the other hand, that would be a very inefficient use of highly trained. professionals. So they went with Russian prisoners, as you suggested. This is when Progoshan launched his now infamous recruitment campaign inside Russian prisons, flying around by helicopter landing in prison yards. I have someone in the peace, a former Russian inmate who then was recruited into Wagner, went to fight in Ukraine, told me of Pergousin's helicopter landing in the middle

of the prison yard. And then Pergelsen getting out and giving a really salty, crude, profane speech offering either freedom or death, really. That was the deal. You either die fighting in Ukraine and Progoshan was not soft or didn't obscure this fact or the likelihood of these recruits dying, but if they managed to survive after six months, they would be free. And many, tens of thousands found that to be a compelling offer. I mean, it's really something like out of a bad Netflix action movie. You know, it's just, he really is something that, that, I mean, it just kind of shocks me that that is a real thing that happened. He seems like the bad guy in a movie that did not have a high budget. But yeah,

I mean, it worked, right? They got a lot of recruits for Syria and they sent those waves and they were able to do some damage. Before that, too, I think one of the things too in Syria that that stands out as you also detail in the article, but you know, that was known by by folks watching that sort of region when they were budding up against the SDF and sort of, you know, the U.S. soldiers, that way they're supporting them, was this battle

that happened. And it's kind of funny, I think is the wrong word, but you had a lot of people, you know, the sort of pro-Russian Westerners who were talking about, you know, what would happen if Wagner met the woke U.S. troops and all that, but we actually do have an example of Wagner coming up

against the U.S. Can you kind of tell us a little bit about what happened there? Sure. In 2018, in an area of Syria named Darazor, it's an oil-rich region. At the time, U.S. forces were embedded with Kurdish militias in the region, specifically at an oil refinery. And Wagner got the orders to storm the facility. exactly at what level those orders were made, who knew what still shrouded in some mystery. But according to one former Wagner fighter who I did speak to for the peace and who was present at this battle in Darazor, this mission was approved and signed off by Progoshin himself, who in a characteristic, as we would later come to see, bout of hubris, thought that he could pull it off, thought that he had the necessary approval. and relationships, whether inside the Russian military or with Arab or Kurdish militias,

that his troops would be able to take this oil refinery and essentially profit from it, because that's another important aspect of Wagner's business model, which is to combine commerce with war fighting. And in Syria, there is a paper trail that shows deals between the Syrian government and relevant ministries dealing with oil extraction, processing export, and progoshan-linked front companies that show that they would get a percentage of revenue

for oil and energy facilities that they seized and essentially returned to the Assad state, and they would get a cut, for lack of a better word. So there are all sorts of motives Russia's political motives, geopolitics. This is Putin's big high-profile campaign at the time, but also Wagner itself has this more mercantile

interest. The operation did not go at all according to plan, to the extent there was a plan. And as this former Wagner fighter relayed to me, and I have quite a detailed description of this battle in the piece for the New Yorker, it was, for lack of a better word,

of bloodbath. U.S. Special Forces called in air power, artillery strikes, AC130 gunships circled overhead, firing on anything moving down below. It was a route. Anything from 100 to 200 or more Wagner fighters were killed. The Kremlin was not eager to make this into a big incident. And this is an important moment where you see the Kremlin almost disavowing Wagner. Because actually, Maybe this is the most relevant or salient for later events detail of this whole story, is that U.S. Army officials or U.S. military officials in Syria called their Russian counterparts on what was then known as a deconfliction line.

This was a line set up to directly connect Russian and U.S. militaries so that they could discuss operations really with the idea of avoiding direct military conflict or contact of the type that could bring these two massive armies, two superpowers, nuclear-armist powers, to some form of escalation and maybe outright conflict. No one wanted that. So they had this line where they could call each other and deconflict their operations. So Americans call the Russians and say, we see this column of troops and armor marching on such and such position.

Are they yours? are they Russian? And the answer apparently that came back from the Russian side, from Russian military generals was no. And seeing as the answer was no, American military officials and troops on the ground saw no reason to hold back, hold their fire. And they obliterated this contingent of Wagner troops who were also with some Syrian fighters. And that's really interesting, the fact that given the opportunity to own them and essentially protect them

or disown them and leave them to slaughter, the Russian military chose the letter. Yeah, it almost reinforces these sort of arguments that we saw Progoshan having with other members of the, well, I don't know if you call them

the member of the military, but with high-ranking members of Russia's military, when he kind of thought that they were treating Wagner troops like disposable, you know? I guess that's kind of like the the first or a major example of that. But before we get there, I just want to actually bring up to,

you mentioned the business interests, right? We also see them operating in Africa all over, right? I think it's Libya, the Central African Republic, where I probably spent some time before they actually got there. Was Mali one of them, the Sudan? You know, what are they up to in Africa? How would you describe what they're doing there? Africa is the place where the business business.

model of Wagner really reached its culmination, especially in Carr, in Central African Republic, where Wagner supplies troops that not only guard the president and other top officials and carry out military training of the army, of a type that, according to many experts and military analysts, means that Wagner has a kind of de facto control over car armed forces. But beyond that, they effectively control the diamond. mining industry in car, gold, timber, even the customs service. And as one U.S. official put it to me for this piece in the New Yorker, it's effectively as if Wagner has carried out something akin to state capture in car. That is, Wagner has superseded or become the state. It runs

car for all intents and purposes. And that is good, you might say, good in scare quotes for Russia's geopolitical footprint in Africa, the big Russian return to Africa coming back to the African continent like the Soviet Union was present there as a geopolitical player and Russia was absent for decades. Russia's coming back.

Well, look at how Russia's coming back. It almost runs whole states. But that's also really good for Progoshin's bottom line. And that seems to be the model in Africa. Where can they provide security? Not even so much security for the state, or let alone for the citizens, but security for the regime. Wagner works best, or the business model is most compelling, where there is, say, a military junta that has taken power after a military coup. They want to preserve their own position because it's not just power for them,

but they have their own corrupt income streams. It's also lucrative to stay in power. They need someone to help them do that. Wagner can and at the same time make something for themselves on the side by getting involved in these local industries. So fast forward at 2022, we have the full scale invasion of Ukraine, breaks out, Russia sends troops in, where is Wagner in this and what are they doing? How do they get involved? What's sort of like the central narrative on Wagner in Ukraine post the major invasion, I guess you would say? Well, at the very beginning, Wagner wasn't included at all. And that's because the special military

operation, as Putin and others called it, was meant to be this three-day march to the capital, quickly decapitate the Zelensky government, install a Russian puppet. And what did you need an army of mercenaries for if you were going to pull off this quick, easy, dirty

victory? And so it was only some weeks later, early into the conflict, but not right away. That's the point I'm making. Wagner shows up in eastern Ukraine, in the Luhansk region, in a part of Ukraine where it had been active some years before in 2014 and 15, and it begins its slow, bloody march across the Donbos. A slow march is really the operative word here. If you think about the cost-benefit ratio, how slowly Wagner is moving. They are advancing,

eventually taking a city Saladar in the winter, ultimately reaching Bahmoud, the big prize, at least as Pergousin tried to present it of Wagner's campaign. But they're advancing a few meters a day at an extraordinary cost in terms of human lives. These expendable convict stormtroopers who are sent into battle oftentimes only to draw fire. That's the reason that they're sent to storm Ukrainian position, not even because anyone thinks they'll succeed, but simply they want to see where the Ukrainians are firing from. And with those sorts of

tactics, Wagner begins its push both to try and take territory as its contribution to the Russian war effort, so Progoshin can further curry favor with Putin, but to also prove

how capable Wagner is at a time when the regular Russian military had completely stalled and wasn't advancing at all. And then we have this situation in Bachmout where it seems like Wagner was successful earned this reputation, but it also seems like the kind of beginning of the end for Progosion. You know, he gets really pissed off. There is this factionalism that we see in the Russian military efforts. Can you summarize sort of, you know, that push for Bachmout, how that established them, their reputation somewhat? And then why that led to conflict between Progosion and other military

officials? Well, progoshin set out, as we talked about, not only to use Wagner to further Russia or Putin's war aims, but to also further his own aims. And that meant denigrating, if not humiliating, Russia's official military leadership, people like Sergei Shagu, the defense minister, Valeri Garasimov, the head of the general staff, to present them as totally incompetent, totally corrupt, totally bereft of any ability to lead this military campaign, that he's the only, one capable of mounting any sort of serious

offensive. Yes, it's ugly. Yes, it's at a high cost. Progoshin doesn't hide that. And that's also part of his image and the way he contrasts himself with political and military leaders in Russia who are uncomfortable or refuse to talk about losses, at least in their true scale. Progoshin almost leans into them.

makes videos of himself standing in a field of bodies or at a morgue showing dead Wagner fighters. This is who is fighting and dying. That helped in the one hand, in a kind of macabre way, build progozsche's image as this, in a way, speaking truth to power kind of figure. It helps, at least as Pergousin saw it in his campaign, to denigrate other Russian military leaders. But they themselves are playing their own game, right? It's not Progoshin alone who's able to carry out this kind of slow building, although in plain sight, conspiracy against them. They have their own plans for him.

And those culminate in an order that was issued in June that would call for all quote unquote volunteer units. That's a euphemism for private military companies like Wagner, to sign contracts and effectively be subsumed by the Russian Defense Ministry. That would be the end of Progossan's autonomy, and as he feared, perhaps the end of Progotion himself, that looked like an existential deadline, this July 1st deadline, to sign these contracts. And that's where the conflict between Progosion and the armed forces reaches its... I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you value. The Can Beer Hotels got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or Even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com.

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with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. Climactic point. Yeah, so, I mean, what was he thinking? Is this the only hand that he had to play? Was he actually thinking that they were going to march to Moscow? Like, what's obviously, I mean, it's hard to know what's in his head,

but what do you assume was going on there? I think that he thought, in hindsight, this is a rather crazy thing to think, but that he could essentially grab Putin's attention and force a conversation with Putin about Wagner's status, its autonomy, relations with the Ministry of Defense, what it would be allowed, and so on, why it was all important. Progoshner was having a hard time in the late spring and early summer, getting to Putin directly, trying to present his case. And this was a kind of last ditch cry for attention. He thought, if he,

did this thing go into Rostov, capture the military headquarters, that he could force a conversation with Putin, that the boss would listen to him. But instead, of course, the boss took Progoshan's actions as an act of treachery and saw Progosian and his fighters as enemies, traitors, really. And, you know, as soon as this happens, it's pretty much a pretty easy guess he's about to get killed afterwards, yeah? I mean, was there any doubt in your mind that that's where this was headed? Well, there wasn't immediately a dilemma for Putin. First and foremost, he doesn't like to make decisions when it looks like or when he feels like he's being forced into a corner.

So no matter what sort of fate awaited Progouzhen, it wasn't going to happen in the hours and days after the mutiny. Putin likes to take this dramatic pause. Beyond that, progoshin does have a degree had of credibility, even popularity, in certain circles in Russia, but especially in these ultra-patriotic, right-wing, ultra-militaristic circles. The kinds of circles that Putin really needs to wage this war in Ukraine, he can't risk killing off their hero, at least not right away, at least not too conspicuously. considering Wagner's extensive operations in the Middle East, but mainly Africa, it's complicated

to unwind them. What do you do? Who are these fighters actually loyal to? That takes time to understand to also try and recruit them away or to understand their loyalties. Will they continue on under Wagner under new leadership or under a new structure? So in hindsight, it looks like those two months were needed, one, for Putin to take this dramatic pause he likes, but two, for the Kremlin to kind of get its ducks in a row to understand what Wagner can be and where Wagner finals

will go in the case that Progotion is removed from the scene as he was last month. And so what happens now? Is Wagner basically folding? Is it just going to be renamed? Is it going to be repurposed? Because they're still active, no,

in all over Africa, right? That's right. And so I don't know if the Kremlin fully solved that question of what happens to Wagner. I think that's still very much an active process that could end any number of ways. What is happening is that Wagner is effectively being sold for parts,

you might say. Some of it and some of its fighters are being absorbed by the defense ministry. There are all these other PMCs, private military companies in Russia, run by other oligarchs, other state corporations. There's been a flowering of these PMCs. in a way Wagner delivered a proof of concept and other people wanted to get into the game.

So some of the Wagner fighters and commanders will go to these PMCs, some will go to the military, some just might leave the business entirely. In some places, Wagner might continue as a brand, even though I think it won't have all that much familiar or similar to the old brand in terms of who it's really answering to in its internal culture. In other cases, as in other countries, Wagner might be swapped out for another PMC. From the Kremlin's perspective, that's just fine. What they care about is Russian influence in these places.

And I don't really know how much African governments and militaries will care. Are they going to recoil and tear up a contract if they're told, okay, you're not getting security for yourself, as in the president and your close circle. You're not, your palace guard is not going to be Wagner, but something else. My guess is most of those clients will say, okay. And so there'll be some complications, but I'm not anticipating too messy of a transition. Yeah, progosent, you know, he burned bright and then just burned out, quick and quick and ugly. But yeah, to our listeners, if you want to read, I think probably the best thing written on Wagner that's out there.

Josh's article is in The New Yorker one, a month ago, two months ago? Gosh, yeah. Hard to keep track of time in the context of the Wagner Progoshan Ark as you said. But no, the piece came out in late July after the Wagner Mutiny and before Progoshan seeming. assassination. Yeah, and you generally cover, I mean, I've read a number of your articles. You cover Russia and I guess former Soviet places for the New Yorker. Where else can people see you? And I think you had a book come out a couple years ago, right? That's right. I write for the New Yorker about Russian Ukraine. As you mentioned, you can find all my articles on the New Yorker website.

I also wrote a book about Putin era, Russia, called Between Two Fires, which is the story of a number of characters, real people inside Russia, dealing with the question of compromise, specifically, and how they navigate their own fraught relations with the Putin system. Yeah, kind of nailed it on the head there with Pergogian. Is he in the book, or was he just, I mean, that article seems like it could be straight out of a story like that?

Yeah, progoshan actually, say what you will about him, feel like he was not so much a man of compromise. He lived, you know, loud, and short. And his downfall in a way was that he wasn't fit to make compromises of the kind that people who are much savier, the real survivors

of the Putin system know very well how to do. And we can say in this grim coda, progoshin was literally not a survivor of the Putin system. And his inability

not to pursue his own advantage as he saw in the most at times grotesque way could only ramp up aggression, conflict, all of it that inside the rules, more the informal rules than the written rules of the Putin system, that led to his downfall. He miscalculated. I think it's fair to say.

Had a nice rise, but he just couldn't hold on. Yeah, that book, if you guys want to get it, definitely look it up. It's called Between Two Fires, Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin's Russia, Amazon, everywhere else. The article is Inside the Wagner Group's Armed Uprising at The New Yorker. Josh, thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Some follow the noise.

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