Today, Explained - The man behind Russia’s mutiny

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin rose from hot dog seller to top chef to Russia’s leading mercenary. Journalist Paul Wood and Harvard’s Timothy Colton explain why he turned on Vladimir Putin this weekend. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous and Hady Mawajdeh with help from Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd with help from Cristian Ayala, and hosted by Noel King. 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

Russian mercenary Yevgeny Progozhin, who led his forces on a wild and riveting dash toward Moscow this weekend in what seemed like a coup attempt, released a recording today. He said he was not trying to overthrow Vladimir Putin, but to hold people to account for screw-ups in the Ukraine war. Putin, you will recall, started that war, but as Russia's regular army struggled, it started to seem like he expected Progozhin and the mercenaries to finish it. Progozhin today is the face of the war in Ukraine for many Russians. He is a paramilitary leader. He is apparently the creature of the Kremlin, somebody entirely created by Vladimir Putin, who has now turned on his creator.

And I think it's anybody's guess where this goes now, but I have a feeling it's a fight to the finish, whatever temporary agreement they may have reached. Coming up on today, explain Evgeny Prokosian's journey from hot dog seller to top chef to mercenary to mutineer. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever.

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Сегодня и что оно означает? This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Paul Wood. He's a journalist who wrote Abominable Showman for The Economist magazine. It's a very good and very detailed article about the life and times of Yevgeny Progozhin. And we started with Progozhin's mutinous weekend. Progozhin took his mercenary army and marched on the Russian military headquarters for the south of the country in Rostov-on-Don. He warned Russian soldiers against resisting his forces and called on them to join him and his 25,000 strong army.

He then said he was going to keep going to Moscow and certainly telegram channels, social media channels associated with the Wagner group, the mercenary group he leads, said he was going to Moscow. Right now we have crossed the state borders in all directions. The border patrol came out to greet us and to hug our flags. Everybody thought this is a coup. President Vladimir Putin went on television to say Prigozhin had to surrender, all his men had to desert him. Those who organised and prepared the armed mutiny,

those who took up arms against their comrades, have betrayed Russia and will answer for it. There seemed to be absolutely no way out, at least without loss of face for both parties. And in a sense, both men were the losers after this. A deal was cobbled together by the Belarusian president and now Prigozhin has turned his tanks around, has gone to Belarus and a sort of uneasy truce has taken shape.

Now he's been pardoned by President Putin, it's peace and love. Everything forgiven and forgotten, as you were, or is it? It does take someone with something special to kind of march on Vladimir Putin's Moscow, right? So we assume that this man has some amount of bravery. Where did he get his start? Where does this man come from? I think Prigozhin is a man almost entirely formed by his prison experiences. This is a man who went to jail aged 18 for 13 years. In fact, he was let out after nine,

leading some to suspect he may have cut a deal with the authorities. But for 10 years of his life, his late teens and his 20s, he was in Soviet prisons, where the guards and the authorities essentially leave what are called the thieves in law, the thieves according to the code. They leave them to keep discipline and order. And I think we can speculate that Prokhorin had quite a tough time in prison. He'd been sent there for leading a robbery on a woman. Prokhorin is alleged to have choked her until she passed out. Now, his version of events is that he was a tough character who got sent to solitary confinement for a long spell, and in solitary, began reading, reading voraciously, and this brought about a transformation in his character. Others are slightly more sceptical. Either way, he emerged after almost

a decade in the toughest environment imaginable to a Russia that was changing, was about to go through Glasnost and Perestroika. And he was in a place, Leningrad as it then was, it became St. Petersburg. It was the Wild West. And you can imagine that the prison education might have prepared him for that in some way. How did it prepare him exactly? He gets out of prison and he's qualified to do what? Prigozhin's version of events is that he came out to a reformed character and started the first hot dog stand in St. Petersburg, inspired by the American example, and quickly made so much money that he opened fine dining restaurants, places where the city's elite went, including Vladimir Putin. And that's where the Putin-Prigozhin connection is said to have

started, at least in the official version. Now, the unofficial version of events is that Prigozhin went into prison, a small-time gangster, came out of it with those same associations. I spoke, for instance, to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once a billionaire until he challenged Putin very unwisely and was jailed and now leads an opposition group in London. And he feels it's impossible for anybody to run a restaurant in St. Petersburg in the 90s and not be connected to organized crime. But either way, whether he's just re-educated himself in prison or has got all these very useful connections, he does become a very successful restauranteur. And that in St. Petersburg in the 90s was not an easy thing to do. Food was short. Russian cuisine had a

reputation as somewhat abysmal. And yet he opens these fantastic restaurants and then becomes the caterer of choice for the Kremlin. And suddenly you find President Putin inviting George W. Bush to eat at one of Prigozhin's places, and Prigozhin sort of hovering over them like the world's most highly paid wine waiter. And this is not a trivial thing. This is a regime that likes to manage appearances, and those appearances are extremely important at these banquets. And then, of course, Prigozhin literally became the personal caterer to President Putin, who occupied a position knowing full well that many of his predecessors had been poisoned or feared poisoning.

So the important thing here is that he emerges into a position of trust. He's absolutely trusted by President Putin, and that opens up a lot of new avenues for him, including the mercenary business. So this man moves from Putin's chef, caterer, chef, trusted person, to the head of the Wagner or Wagner mercenary group. How does that transition happen? Well, it's a bit of a mystery. Remember that for many years, Prigozhin disavowed any connection to Wagner,

and he sued journalists who said that he did. It's only since, I think, last September or October that he emerged out into the open as the person running Wagner. I remember, too, that private military companies, PMCs as they're known, are still illegal in Russia. So all of this was done in the shadows. I think the best theory I've heard was that arms needed to be smuggled out of Russia and into Syria. And Progozhin had a big logistics operation because he took his chefing or his restaurant business and his catering business and turned it into catering for the entire Russian army, almost the entire Russian prison system.

That's what happens when you are favored by Vladimir Putin. So he had all this ability to do logistics. He started moving weapons and then started recruiting people for the mercenary group that became Wagner. But even that isn't known for certain. It's all shrouded in mystery. What's not a mystery is when it all emerged out into the open. So I've read and heard from various sources that Wagner mercenaries are most likely active again in Ukraine and that there are sabotage groups. There is a suspicion that President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko and a whole series of female and other politicians are their assassination targets.

Well, right at the beginning, everybody, including me, assumed that Wagner would be the tip of the spear and then they were somehow absent. This was a bit strange. The explanation I've had from people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who runs essentially his own intelligence operation, is that Wagner were tasked with assassinating Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, but failed. This is something I've heard from another source, a retired Russian mafia man who I've known for many years. And essentially, the allegation is that Prigozhin's enemies within the FSB, that's the successor to the KGB, tipped off the Ukrainians, something which sounds incredible

on the face of it. But absolutely, if you know Russian power politics and Kremlin infighting, does sound quite credible. I'm still alive and that's why it's me talking to you. It's not any kind of technology that has been used. I'm very glad not to be talking to a hologram of Zelensky. Anyway, they were supposed to have botched the assassination and were then sidelined until, of course, the Ukrainians fought back much harder than Putin expected. This was supposed to be a shock and awe type campaign to make the Ukrainian government collapse in 10 days, but they didn't. And so some months later, there's a desperate need for bodies at the front and

enter Prokosin. Enter Proigozhin and what happens from there? Prigozhin brings his mercenaries toward the front and then how do they do? The first bunch of mercenaries are a lot of quite professional ex-soldiers and he burns through them at an incredible rate. But then Putin, and this can only I think have been Putin's personal order, then Putin allows Prigozhin to go into the prisons to recruit. And Prokhorin is very good at this. He knows how to talk to these people. He's an ex-prisoner himself. In fact, that's his pitch. He says, look at me. I was once in solitary confinement and now holding up his medals. He holds up the medals personally presented to him by President Putin.

And he has an almost impossible-to-resist offer for the prisoners. And some of these people are murderers and rapists in there for another couple of decades. He says, God and Allah can get you out of here in a pine box. I can get you out of here tomorrow. There's no guarantees after that, but I promise you, you are never going back to prison. And tens of thousands of people, 40 or 50,000 of them, we think, did join up. And that gave Progozhin a central role in the war, just as the army was faltering. Now, he may have done this for self-serving reasons. And I spoke to one of his former senior commanders. There's almost no sources in Wagner, but I spoke to a

man called Marat Gabidulin, who left Wagner. He thinks this was always about a political future for Progozhin. He had to get one victory. And that's why when you come to what Wagner actually did in Ukraine, which is expend 20,000 lives for a little town called Bakhmut of almost no strategic significance, you have to understand it in terms of Prokosy's personal ambitions, at least as people close to him have described them to me. Yeah, we've covered Bakhmut on the show. And one thing that everyone told us repeatedly was this place is not strategically very important in the slightest. Why did Yevgeny Prokhorin do what he did this weekend? He marches toward Moscow and then eventually strikes some sort of deal with Putin.

What do we think he wanted? To scare Putin? My own belief is that he was backed into a corner a couple of weeks ago. The army had this long-running feud with the chief of the general staff and the defense minister. They backed him into a corner by getting Putin to endorse an order for all Wagner group volunteers to resign their contracts and join the regular forces. That would have been the end of Wagner as an independent army and perhaps the end of Prigozhin himself. So he may have been driven to this, but there are many other theories. One theory is that he had or expected the backing of a significant section of the security forces. Otherwise, to me, it's kind of crazy that he would embark on this. How on earth did he think

he could win unless he thought that some element of the security forces were going to come in on his side? And that's what my Russian mafia contact says was supposed to happen, but didn't. But there's also the psychological explanation. This is a man schooled in sort of prison ethics, and you don't back down and you don't betray people. His personality is bombastic. It's emotional, he reacts instinctively. Maybe there's a simple psychological explanation for this, although I don't think you last for as long as he's lasted in Putin's Russia by acting impetuously. I think he backed himself into a corner from which he saw no way out and had to make this desperate gamble. There is a question mark over the extent for me to which Prokofiev has independent, because the wages of his men are paid from the Kremlin. He's always been a Kremlin cipher. It'll be

interesting to see how much independent loyalty he can command now. And if he does come into a tussle with Putin, whether people are going to put their lives on the line, having seen him turn around once. Putin still has all the cards here. He has hundreds of thousands of the security forces. But it's Russia, You know, anything could happen. That was journalist Paul Wood. His piece, Abominable Showman, is in The Economist magazine. It's very good. Coming up, what does this all mean for Vladimir Putin? And a hint to keep you with us, it is very bad indeed. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. We're back with Timothy Colton, professor at Harvard, watcher of Russia, answerer of the 64,000 ruble question, where is Vladimir Putin today? Well, he's in Moscow, but we don't know exactly where. That's not information they would normally share. Common sense suggests that when you've had an earthquake like this, the leader of the country should be reassuring his countrymen and informing them and the world what is going on.

And he has just not been up to that. So the last time he appeared was Saturday morning, Moscow time, which is two days ago. And all of these developments have unfolded with no direct word from him. So yes, it's very unusual. As this coup attempt or whatever it was, was unfolding, was Putin speaking to Russians at all? Was he talking from the Kremlin? Do we know where he was as this was all happening? Well, no, we don't know exactly where he was. Like I said, that tends to be treated as a state secret in Russia. He resides kind of a 15 or 20 minute drive from the

Kremlin and does a lot of his business there. So he probably was there. But we know that he has duplicate offices and studios for, you know, telecommunications. So he could have been almost anywhere, but clearly he was in the capital city area. As for your question about what did he have to say to the people of Russia, no, he made a single appearance, which was on Saturday morning. So the trouble, and I don't think it was really a coup attempt, it was something a little short of that, but call it the mutiny, breaks out on Friday evening, and he is invisible overnight, which is already interesting. He then appears on Russian television, probably in a recording, but you can't tell, at roughly 10 a.m., I believe it was, early morning on Saturday, two days ago.

Any actions that split us is a betrayal of your people, betrayal of the comrades that are fighting on the front line and knife in the back of our people. And that was the last time we saw him. The Kremlin press service did say today that he had had a telephone or a remote conversation with the ruler of, I think it was Qatar, one of the Gulf states today, Moscow time.

But that hardly seems to be what he should be spending his time doing. Not every country is shunning Russia. The leader of the United Arab Emirates met today with Russian President Vladimir Putin to foster economic ties. So there's definitely an air of mystery about his whereabouts, about why he's not appearing in public. Are things exactly what they seem to be? It's not clear. What kind of condition is he in? As Vladimir Putin was watching Yevgeny Prigozhin march toward Moscow this weekend, what do you think he might have been thinking? Well, the march occurs after Putin has already denounced Prigozhin as a traitor. So that is his broadcast to the Russian people on Saturday morning. The march occurs after Putin has already denounced Prigozhin as a traitor.

So that is his broadcast to the Russian people on Saturday morning. He said this is unacceptable. This is opening the door to terrible events for Russia, including, he even mentioned, a civil war. So I imagine that kind of talk was floating around in his head. I would imagine he felt Prigozhin was ungrateful, you know, that Putin had given him an opportunity to make his mark and Prigozhin had betrayed his trust. So, I mean, that sort of thing. I would also imagine he wondered why his army was not doing more to prevent these people from moving north. What's the matter with them? So one of Rogozhin's demands was that Putin fire the Minister of Defense and the Chief of General Staff.

When Putin addressed the nation on Saturday morning, he didn't mention either of these gentlemen. They also disappeared from view, although the minister, Shoigu, reappeared today. So my guess would be that his anger would have been directed at the whole lot of them. They've all let me down, and that Bogushin would be tops on the list, but the others hardly come out looking well either. You know, he would have had a little bit of time, I'm sure, to consult with Russia's multiple security agencies about what to do if these fighters had actually reached Moscow. And, you know, they were only a few hours' drive away. But we heard today that the total number of soldiers involved in this operation was probably

something between 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 men, not, as previously stated, 25,000, let alone 50,000. And even in its current state of disarray, I think the Russian military and these many security services could have dealt with what is really a relatively small force. Did Prigozhin actually pose a threat to Putin this weekend, or was it overblown? Oh, no, I think the whole thing poses a threat because, first of all, it makes it abundantly clear that Putin has screwed up again. So he's made the second colossal error in the last year and a half. First of all, starting the war in Ukraine,

and secondly, now this. I don't think that Prigozhin posed a physical threat. I don't think it was ever really possible that Prigozhin's forces were going to pierce central Moscow or occupy the Kremlin or anything like that. It's more the threat to Putin's authority. You know, he's been running the country for a quarter of a century. He is kind of an elected monarch, and he's been made to look rather foolish by this whole matter. So I think that that is bound to have lasting effects, and Putin must be deeply, deeply concerned about them because he is an elected leader, and he's had a lot of support from the population.

But, you know, these things can implode at moments of crisis. Tell me about this agreement that Putin struck with Prokosin. Russian state media is quoting Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who is saying that the criminal case against Evgeny Progozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group for armed rebellion, is going to be dropped. And in exchange, Progozhin is going to agree to go into some kind of exile in Belarus. Well, one of the crazy things is that Putin himself has not commented on the agreement. He did not. He's not the one who announced it.

It was his press secretary, Peskov, on Saturday evening. So again, a 10-hour gap, 10-hour gap overnight when Putin seems to be paralyzed, doesn't know what to do. Then he makes the announcement that Prigozhin is a traitor. And 10 hours later, his press secretary says, never mind, Prigozhin will be allowed to relocate in Belarus next door. Putin has said zero about it. He'll have to eventually. But so far, not a peep.

So, you know, it's a very awkward moment for him. How do you explain that in 10 hours the situation goes from black to white? How do you explain the fact that the leader of a neighboring state in Belarus is the one who supposedly brokered this deal? So this is the leader of a country of 9 million people mediating a political conflict in a country of 147 million people. There's something simply topsy-turvy to this. And so part of his silence may be figuring out a story or a narrative that's plausible and that deals with puzzlement, I'm sure, on the part of ordinary people, but clearly in the elite as well. So the Russian media today are full of references to things that even a week ago could

not be discussed publicly. I'll just give you one example. A well-known editor named Remchukov, who is the editor of a major newspaper, which is under government influence but it's not owned by the state, but he's always been very careful in what he says about Putin and generally supportive and all that sort of thing. He gave an interview to the New York Times, I think it's in this morning's version, where he says, you know, for the first time, we're starting to talk, we members of the elite, about, you know, a different approach to governing Russia. And he said, I think it's now possible that members of this higher stratum are going to go to Putin and tell him they don't think he should run for president for his next term.

So that would be a peaceful, evolutionary response to the problem. But nonetheless, to say that it's time for the leader to go, time for him to be eased out, is something that Remchikov would certainly not have dared to say a week or two ago. But here we go. That was Professor Timothy Colton of Harvard. Today's episode was produced by Siona Petros and Hadi Mouagdi with an assist from Avishai Artsy. Our editor is Matthew Collette. Our fact checker is Laura Bullard.

Patrick Boyd and Christian Ayala engineered today's show. And I'm Noelle King. and it's Today Explained. Thank you.