Today, Explained - Death of a Hot Dog Salesman

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, the caterer-turned-warlord who recently attempted to overthrow Russia’s government, has apparently died in a plane crash. Puck's Julia Ioffe explains why it��s reasonable to suspect foul play. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Jon Ehrens, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solin, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's this sort of chilling interview with Vladimir Putin circulating online right now. The interviewer asks the Russian president if one should be able to forgive others. The Russian president says yes. But not everything. What can't be forgiven? Betrayal. Yevgeny Prigozhin started out as a petty criminal, then he leveled up from hot dog slinger to chef to caterer to none other than Vladimir Putin.

From there, he became a mercenary, and his Wagner Group played a pivotal role in Putin's war in Ukraine, until he turned his tanks in the opposite direction. A longtime Putin ally led his mercenary Wagner Group from the battlefields in Ukraine to seize Russia's military headquarters in Rostov. Betrayal, a crime you can't forgive,

one that's punishable by death. Ahead on Today Explained. bet mgm authorized gaming partner of the nba has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in vegas that's a feeling you can only get with bet mgm and no matter your team your favorite player or your style there's something every nba fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,

a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling Сегодня и что оно означает Today and what it means. On Wednesday afternoon, and basically about an hour ago, we saw people close to Prigozhin start to confirm his death. So, telegram channels connected to Wagner, reporters saying that they were speaking to Wagner employees who were being notified of his death. Everyone was waiting for this to happen. There were jokes going around that, you know, he would fall out of a window and he should maybe strap himself down to his bed at night when he slept or only get rooms on the ground floor. So everybody was speculating when and how it would happen. And Putin outdid us all today.

Russian state media is now claiming that Wagner Group chief Progozhin has been killed in a plane crash in a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Julia is the Washington correspondent for Puck. She spent her career writing about Russia. We asked her what led to Progozhin's betrayal. What led him to march on Mother Russia? He started turning in the winter and spring of this year. His troops had suffered incredible casualties, just unbelievable casualties, in part because they were sent in these waves of attacks, these frontal assaults on Ukrainian positions outside of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. recently

said that Wagner has only 50,000 troops in Ukraine in total, 30,000 casualties, 50,000 people total. And the complaints from inside Wagner are starting to mount. He felt that, A, the Russian military was not supporting him, that they felt threatened by him and as a result were starving him of ammunition while basically waiting for him to take this politically significant city of Bakhmut. And he felt that they were mismanaging the war to begin with. And he reserved most of his ire, not for the Tsar, Vladimir Putin, but for his bad generals. The weird thing about Russia is that as soon as Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, he passed these super harsh military censorship laws that basically criminalized any dissent on the war.

It criminalized calling the special military operation a war. It criminalized defaming Russian soldiers and the Russian military. A TV producer who works at the station jumped behind her holding a white sign. On that sign, it read, no war. Don't believe the propaganda. They're lying to you. Now, she was taken into custody. Lawyers who have been trying to reach her say they can't.

They don't know where she is. But people who were to the right of Putin, who were even more hawkish, who were criticizing the war not for existing, but for the Russian military not going hard enough, not being vicious enough in Ukraine, for criticizing the leadership of the military, that was somehow fine. It was fine for a long time. But Prigozhin crossed a line by rallying his troops and taking 25,000 of his fighters, who were quite vicious and quite loyal, and

declaring that he was going to march on Moscow. In extraordinary scenes, Yevgeny Prigozhin demanded the downfall of Russia's defense minister and its chief of staff, accusing them of mishandling the war on Ukraine. Soon came reports of Wagner troops heading north. He tried to be very clear in saying, this is not a coup. I have no problems with the president.

I just want different leadership at the top of the Russian military. That clearly did not help him because what he did was he embarrassed Putin on the world stage. And it showed that Russia is not that well defended. I mean, he took the city of Rostov, which is a city of over a million people. You know, it is where the war in Ukraine is waged out of and planned out of, and he took it without firing a single shot. Nobody resisted them. They went unimpeded. Where were the law enforcement? Where was Roskvardia? Where was the army? Where was the minister of defense? These are questions that probably Mr. Putin is asking

himself. But the image of a strong tsar, the image of an assailable politician who sorts out anything and everything is now ruined. So people know that in a way the king is naked. If it was so easy, why did he stop? Why did he turn around? That's the million dollar question. I've heard various things from my sources. I've heard that basically he left most of his troops in Rostov and he set out for Moscow with only 5,000 men. And as he got closer to Moscow, he realized it would not be like Rostov, that the bridges were now mined, that there would be tens of thousands of special troops, basically Putin's Varangian Guard, waiting to meet him, and that he would just run into this buzzsaw. And apparently his troops also started getting cold feet. They felt that this was not what they had signed up for. Then Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko,

seemingly at the Kremlin's bidding, intervened, negotiated this strange deal where Grigoryan would go to Belarus and Wagner fighters would either disarm and go home or join the Russian military, and everybody would live happily ever after. Supporters chanted Wagner as fighters drove out of Rostov, giving Prigozhin handshakes as he left in this SUV. The Kremlin says it's dropped charges and Prigozhin will go to Belarus, while promising his fighters contracts with the Russian military. For now, a crisis apparently averted. But it was very clear then, on June 24th, that that was not the final chapter in this story.

Was it clear the moment he turned around that he essentially had signed his own death sentence? Absolutely. I mean, there's no way you can do that and survive till your next birthday. I mean, this was a crazy challenge to Putin's rule. He took up arms against the government. You cannot do that and not go all the way. He signed his own death warrant. So what did he do in his last two months of life? Well, it seems like he was trying to salvage what was left of Wagner and to get the state to allow him to keep some of it. My sources in Moscow were telling me that it looked like he was going to basically be exiled to Africa. Not Belarus, but Africa,

that he would be allowed to take his fighters and go to Africa, from which he clearly could not march on Moscow again. Earlier this week, he posted a video in full armor, holding a machine gun. Wagner PMC conducts reconnaissance and search actions, makes Russia even greater on all continents and Africa more free. Justice and happiness for the African people. We are making life a nightmare for ISIS. And seems like he's in Africa and he is recruiting quote-unquote strongmen for his cause to serve with him in Africa. And we're seeing reports, you know, as people are still sorting through the burning wreckage of this plane, that it seems like he was on his way back to Moscow to try to perhaps negotiate

being allowed to operate there instead of the GRU and to keep his business alive there. I think a lot of people are wondering how you turn on Putin and then have the guts to board a plane in Russia. To be fair, he's been flying that thing all over Russia for the last two months. Even days after the mutiny, his plane was seen flying back and forth from Moscow to St. Petersburg. And the question people were asking themselves wasn't, why is he on a plane? It was, why is he not in Belarus? Wasn't the whole thing that he was going to Belarus. But here he was flying back and forth between Moscow and St. Petersburg, or his plane was. And then the Kremlin confirmed that he had had a three-hour meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. And again, people asked themselves not why he was on a plane, but why Putin was giving him an audience and for so long. What could he possibly have to discuss with Prigozhin,

whom he called a traitor, on national TV on the morning of June 24th as Prigozhin and his men were marching on Moscow? Actions that split our unity are an abandonment of our people, of our comrades in arms who are now fighting in the front. This is a stab in the back of our country and our people. Putin has been very clear about what happens to traitors and what their rightful place is, which is dead in a ditch. And here's Putin giving him an audience for three hours in the Kremlin. CIA Director William Burns, who is a specialist on Russia,

he was once the U.S. ambassador to Russia, he really knows this place and he gets it. And he observed very correctly that Putin doesn't like to be seen as overreacting. Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold. So he's going to try to settle the situation to the extent he can. But again, in my experience, Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback. I would phrase it a little bit differently. The Putin I've observed doesn't like to act in a way that is expected of him.

He doesn't like to be pressured into things, either overtly or by people's expectations. He wants to act exclusively on his own timeline. And he likes to be the one who is unexpected and unpredictable, because unpredictability is a form of power in and of itself, that the whole world waits for you and reacts to you and not vice versa. Julia returns when we do on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

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Visit connectsontario.ca. So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he's a killer? Mm-hmm. I do. Today Explained is back with Julia Yaffe from Puck. Julia, President Joe Biden has called Vladimir Putin a killer, but has he ever been proven to have killed anyone? Well, you know, was Tony Soprano ever proven to have killed anybody? How many triggers did he actually pull?

Willie Overall. Fabian Petrullio. Tucky. Matthew Bevela. Pussy. Ralph Cifaretto. Tony Blondaro. Christopher.

When you're the head of an operation like this, you give the orders or you imply the orders and you say, huh, you know, this guy, it's a shame he's in the way of where we're trying to go, right? And everybody gets the message. In this case, I imagine he gave the direct orders, and I imagine that people happily fulfilled it because Prigozhin had made a lot of enemies in the secret services, in the Russian military, in the FSB, etc. The wonderful thing about being an autocrat is you don't have to execute anyone yourself. And in this line of work, it's actually very easy to find great help. You don't have to execute anyone on your own. You have legions of people doing it for you.

And remind us who the people he's maybe had killed for him are. There was Alexander Litvinenko, who was an FSB agent, who turned and defected to the West and cooperated with the Western security services. Alexander Litvinenko's death from acute radiation sickness was slow and agonising. He was the one who famously drank polonium-laced tea. It was March 2018 when deadly nerve agent was deployed on the streets of the city. The target, Sergei Skripal. There was Sergei Skripal, who was also a former FSB agent, who also defected to the West,

who also cooperated with Western security services, who was nearly killed. This was the first time we ever heard of Novichok. Novichok, which means newcomer in Russian, is an extremely dangerous poison. It's often deadly. It's part of a family of military-grade nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War.

Because he was poisoned but not killed in 2018 in Salisbury, England. I mention these people because they come from the same organization as Vladimir Putin, the FSB, formerly the KGB, and they swore an oath of loyalty and they betrayed it. They were traitors and this is what happens to traitors. Which is also interesting because Prigozhin also hated traitors and he had a special punishment for them too. And it was called the hammer of retribution. Basically, anybody who tried to defect or desert the ranks of Wagner, who tried to flee to the Ukrainian side, was caught and publicly executed by having a giant sledgehammer brought down on

their head. And often videos of this would be then posted on telegram channels associated with Wagner. So this was clearly a code he himself understood. Both these guys had no problem owning the fact that, you know, they said out loud, if you cross me, I'll kill you. And yet Putin has never publicly owned an assassination. Is that right? Why not, if so? Well, that's not very classy, don't you think? I don't know.

I've never killed anybody. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. Well, because he doesn't have to. Everybody knows. Look, Putin comes from a world that is governed by these things called panyatia. Literally, it means understandings. I asked him, who do these rules apply to? And he says, if you know the rules, they apply to you. The people who need to know the rules know the rules. If you don't know the rules, they're not about you. So when something like this happens, everybody understands exactly what happened. Even if Putin doesn't say, I did it, he doesn't have

to. The whole point is not just to kill the traitor, but to send a message to everybody else that this is what will happen to you if you betray me. All the people for whom this is intended, the people who might be plotting another mutiny, or who might be thinking some other kind of deviant thoughts about Putin, about offing him maybe, or ending the war, or coming out to protest him, or turning on him if they're also a member of the Kremlin elite. This is a very clear message to them, and them only, that this is what will happen if you do that. Basically, one of us will have to die, and most likely it's going to be you. And yet one of Putin's most prominent political rivals isn't dead. Is that just because Putin failed to assassinate him so he's in jail?

Navalny was first barred from running for office. Then he was poisoned with a chemical nerve agent and later imprisoned. To this day, he remains behind bars and faces further charges that could see him locked up for almost three decades. He failed to assassinate him, and now everybody knows what that was. And being in jail is a kind of political death. He cannot organize rallies.

He can't be a politician. He can't lead people. The other thing is, as we've seen with Prigozhin, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't happen. And that is one of the biggest fears of Navalny's family, his colleagues, and his supporters, that he won't make it out of prison alive. And that if he doesn't make it out of prison alive, and that if he doesn't make it out of prison alive, it won't be because of natural causes. It will be because Putin will finish him off there. And when we say Putin will finish him off there, we mean the people Putin has delegated to do this. There are many ways to die, as we just saw, and it can take quite a while.

Here's the thing. Navalny is a different category. He's not a traitor. He was never part of the system. He was never somebody who was loyal to Putin, who then turned on him. He is a critic, and he is somebody who Putin thinks to be very small and irrelevant, who is trying to pick a fight with Putin to elevate his own stature. He is a contender for power. He is not a traitor. And so, in some ways, paying too much attention to him will give him status. It's why Putin refuses to even say Navalny's name, ever. How much of this is a Putin thing and how much of this is a post-Soviet Russia thing? Was Boris Yeltsin knocking off his foes? Was Gorbachev killing people? It's a really good question. And I guess it's a question of how much you buy the essentialist

argument about Russia. If Putin is a foreign body ruling the Russian people, or if he is, as he claims, the personification, the incarnation of the Russian people and their national idea and of their culture. Some of this is, some of this language of banyatia, of this unwritten code of ethics, of how loyalty is rewarded and how betrayal is punished. It does come out of the Soviet and post-Soviet space. The difference is that the people who used to rule Russia, like Gorbachev, like Yeltsin, they did not come from the same sphere that Putin did. They came out of the Communist Party apparatus. They were trained to be politicians in the Soviet sense, not outward facing, but inward facing. They were trained to do,

to kind of do battle in the couloirs of power bureaucratically. Putin came out of the KGB, where he was trained to do this kind of thing. To kill. To kill, to lie, to dissemble. Russia has never been ruled by somebody like this who acts on these kinds of rules the way he does. That's the departure. Do you think Progozhin on some level knew this is how he'd meet his end long before the mutiny in June?

Do you think it was a, you know, live by the sword, die by the sword situation? I honestly don't know. I imagine he knew on June 24th, when he turned around, that he didn't have long to live. I also imagine that in flying his plane back and forth, in being allowed to publicly recruit to continue Wagner's operations in Africa, he maybe got lulled into a sense that the danger had passed, that if they hadn't come for him now, they probably wouldn't, and that the Tsar had in fact forgiven him in his

great benevolence. And perhaps that's why Putin chose to strike now. And that is, I think, part of the method is to show how fully in control you are, even if you might not be. It's to show that you can play with your prey like a cat plays with a mouse. Julia Yaffe of Puck. You can read her at puck.news. Our program today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and John Ahrens. We were edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solon, and engineered by David Herman. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and you're listening to Today Explained. you