#19 Russia - Prigozhin's March on Moscow

He was a hot-dog seller who became a warlord. A convicted criminal who commanded the world's most feared mercenary army, the Wagner Group. And then he did what no one had dared since the Soviet collapse: he pointed Russian tanks at Moscow and took a swing at the Kremlin.

On this episode, we sit down with Mark Galeotti, a leading expert on Russian security and organised crime, and co-author of Downfall: Putin, Prigozhin, and the Fight for the Future of Russia.

Galeotti, a former academic banned from Russia, takes Putschcast listeners inside Yevgeny Prigozhin's criminal origins, his rise as "Putin's Chef," and the surreal day his Wagner forces seized a city, shot down military aircraft, and drove to within 200 km of Moscow.

Then, out of nowhere, the tanks stopped. The march ground to a halt. And Prigozhin called of his mutiny and just walked away.

Weeks later, his plane dropped out of the sky in a mystery that still has the Kremlin sweating. Galeotti unpacks what really happened, why the rebellion stalled, and whether it could all kick off again.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to yet another Putschcast episode. I'm your host, Oliver Heute, and with me is David Shields. Yes, you might know David from episodes such as the Paris Commune or Thomas Munzer. Correct. So if you want to find out what happened back in the day, he's your man. But today, David, this is probably the most kind of fair topic we've had together.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

It is, apart from uh talking about the uh extrajudicial uh kidnapping of Mr. Maduro in Caracas.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

That was uh that was months ago. The event we're talking about today is about three years ago, and we're talking about the March on Moscow, which got about uh 200k away from the city gates, and the man behind it, the instigator of it all, is Prigozhin. Yevgeny Prigozin, born in 1961. I'm sure you know him. You must have seen his face, you must have heard about him, because he actually went from he doesn't like being called a chef, but he he was in prison during the Soviet era, then sold um hot dogs with his dad.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

He did.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

And uh all of a sudden ended up running a private army that challenged the Kremlin, i.e. Vladimir Putin. Today we call it a mutiny, so his private army rose up on his behalf, challenging the Kremlin. But we also discussed today, we asked our expert, was it perhaps a coup, David?

SPEAKER_02 1:19

And he has some very strong opinions about this.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

It was an unprecedented threat to Vladimir Putin's leadership. Evgeny Prigozin, the longtime ally, turned nemesis of the Russian president, ordered his forces out of Russian-occupied Ukraine, across the border, and on the road to Moscow. But in a dramatic about turn, stopped just 200 kilometers short of the capital.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah, Dave, I remember that very well talking to you on the chat when that went down in 2023. I was for first time in a long time actually glued to the news channel on analog TV, watching how um Russian tanks were rolling towards Moscow. So that's our topic today. It is that mutiny that march on Moscow. For the full disclosure, I don't speak Russian. I know a few words, that's about it. Um I've got some Russian experience in my family. I've got a few Russian friends, and I've got an anecdote. So um a friend of mine in Germany works in a rather large dry dock. I think it's in Hamburg or somewhere up near the coast, and they look after the real big, big boats. All privately owned, and there's a lot of secrecy, and no one really knows whose boat it is, and they're doing stuff up, um, you know, which is like new leather and a bit of maintenance. What they do in dry docks. And my friend is working, he's like as a uh he's a procurement manager, and they work, I think, seven days a week, however, they finish late at night, close off, and then the next shift starts the next morning. And there was a morning when they walked in, and the biggest yacht in a dry dock was missing. It was missing. So, how did someone steal a boat overnight? And the next morning was the 24th of February 2022. Why am I telling you the story? I'm not sure, but I think it really summarizes what today is about. It's about power, it's about corruption, and it's about surprises and um unexpected news events, the ones we just discussed. David, I'm so excited to have Mark Galliotti on the call today. His name sounds Italian, but he's actually not in Italy. He's coming to us live from the UK today. Hey, Mark.

SPEAKER_03 3:34

Hey there, good to talk to you.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

I've just given an intro, um, an anecdote from a friend from a friend of mine that actually happened. I'm not sure if it's Putin's yacht, but it certainly was someone who's very close to the Kremlin who had inside information and who wanted to save an asset that's worth billions and billions of US dollars. And the man who is at the center of today's story, Yevgeny Prigoshin, he's not one of those people. And that's what I've learned from your book, Downfall, where you distinguish between oligarchs, which is I think most people in the West know about now what an oligarch is, and let's face it, we've got more of them in the West as well these days. Um, and the uh minigark. Is that the right term?

SPEAKER_03 4:14

Yeah, I mean look, it's it's just uh an attempt to come up with a term to try to just sort of describe this post-1990s generation of you know, obviously obscenely rich guys, but nonetheless don't have that kind of power that we associate with the old the older school oligarchs.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

And um there's another term, and I think this is where we probably should start. Homo Sovieticus is something I picked up when researching you and your work. And Yevgeny Progoshin is a typical Homo Sovietikus. What is a Homo Sovieticus?

SPEAKER_03 4:52

I mean, it's a term just simply for those people who weren't just simply born in Soviet times, but in some ways had all their crucial formative experiences in that era. So, you know, well, I was gonna say their early careers, or in Prigozhin's case, his early prison careers, um, but very much have that stamp. And I think it really matters because if you look at Putin, he's 73, most of the people around him are likewise in their 70s. Essentially, what we're seeing at the moment is the kind of the real last gasp of Homo Sovieticus. The next political generation will be taking over. Doesn't necessarily make them that much nicer people, but nonetheless, they are different people. They are people whose experiences have really been shaped by this transition to capitalism and a kind of fake democracy. So, you know, we we are seeing the the the swan song of this often deeply unpleasant and deeply damaged generation.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Uh and talking about Bugojin, he uh his formative years, uh he was part of um was from an uh intelligentsia family, um, parents' doctors, uh, but he fell in with some really uh some some rough company. And um I think one of the most revealing parts uh of the genesis of this man is his movement through the thieves' world and his time in prison. Um, the fact that he uh it demonstrated this uncanny ability to dominate any group that he was part. So there's a again um very interesting part of the first chapters of your text. Um, can you tell us how this shaped the man and what that meant for him uh later on in life as he moved into the worlds of um uh catering and then warlordism?

SPEAKER_03 6:31

Yeah, I mean, look, when you're writing a biography to a degree you are trying to off it's a very uncomfortable experience, put yourself into the skin of the person that that you're you're covering and really doing a certain amount of amateur psychology, and I and I should note, I mean, I I'm only the co-author of this book, my my uh my other author, Anna Rutunian, uh Russian political journalist, and incidentally my wife. Uh, you know, we we were both trying to get a sense of of this guy who, as you say, didn't come from terrible straightened circumstances or whatever, came from a, you know, relatively I wouldn't say affluent because just simply being a doctor wasn't enough to make you affluent in in Soviet times, but certainly sort of, you know, acceptably comfortable life. But nonetheless, it was always not quite enough for him. He always had uh his eyes on something that was just beyond his reach. And that's one of the reasons why he went into crime. And yes, after the first time he ended up being sent to sent to the zone, in other words, the the labour camp system, the prison camp system. But there he thrived. And in the sense that precisely that's where his his particular skills, which were in intimidation, in quickly working out who you need to suck up to and who you can afford to bully, and his deal making. I mean he ended up actually sort of running a whole variety of businesses inside the labour camp system. He actually m chose to move to a tougher a tougher camp, a logging camp, precisely because he s could see better economic opportunities there. So in some ways, this is exactly where he he found himself. The guy who had been a sort of failed student, a failed uh potential sort of Olympic athlete, but now he could be a successful criminal. And he never really went into the Vorovskoy Mir, the thieves world, the kind of real hardcore professional underworld, you know, the guys we know from the movies with all the tattoos and all that kind of thing. Anyway, that's a dying subculture. But nonetheless, he didn't really go into them in there. He was a version of the the new type of criminal who was emerging, particularly in the late 80s and the 1990s, the abtoritiety, the authorities, who were less interested in just kind of macho posturing, and more interested, frankly, in making money. And whether it was through legitimate means or illegitimate means, they just didn't care. It was just about the business. And that was very much Pragoshin. How can you mobilize deal making and intimidation and network building in order to make money?

SPEAKER_02 9:06

This is a man who goes from running a hot dog stand with his father to becoming Putin's chef or a caterer for the world elite, someone who served meals to Jacques Chirac, uh Bill Clinton. It's an amazing journey. And the kinetic energy of this man's life and also your text, I was kind of I'd had to take deep breaths. It was it was exhausting following this man's exploits. Um can you tell us how he mobilized those skills that he honed in the penal camps to uh turn himself into a major player in in Russia?

SPEAKER_03 9:39

Yeah, I mean look, context is all in the late 80s, just as the Soviet Union is collapsing and basically, you know, everything is suddenly up for grabs. And then the 1990s, after it's collapsed, there's this massive transition to the market economy, but no one really understood what the hell the market economy was. And in particular, they always had this sense that capitalism was just simply about buying and selling things to make money. It's it's more complex than that. A proper working capitalist economy depends on trust, on institutions, on checks and balances. But there was none of that there. And essentially, it was possible, if you had the right skill set and the right contacts, and frankly, just the right luck, to, as you say, parley what sounds like a very minor thing, a hot dog stand. Thing is, hot dogs, they were quite literally a taste of the West, a taste of the new world. There was a huge enthusiasm for this kind of thing. If you were willing to work hard and uh presumably cut your overheads and serve the absolute cheapest, grottiest food, and then were able to then move it out so you ended up with a whole series of almost concessionary stands, you could, as Brigodzin did, make a lot of money, and using that money buy into other businesses. You've got to realise that these are this is a time in which actually most Russians, on the one hand, they were very used to the underground economy. If you were a Soviet citizen back in the day, you you automatically you had to play the black market for almost anything that you that you wanted. I mean, unless you really were keen on the complete sets of works of Karl Marx, which I can guarantee you, I remember just from one time as I was travelling there, you would always find these rather forlorn stacks of books in the bookshop, which for some reason no one wanted to actually read. But unless it was something like that, if you wanted something that was Difizitny, in other words, that was there was a shortage, you had to play the black market. But the y you can't jump from that to running a business unless you are particularly capable. And and Prigozin was. And this is it. He you know, he he had that skill of, you know, like these people who are constantly flipping houses, buying a real sort of, you know, cheap grotty thing, building it up nicely, selling that and using that money to buy the next one and the next one and the next one. That was very much kind of Prigojin's business model. But the best thing was this was a time in which if you had an inn to City Hall in what was what was Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, then suddenly all kinds of new opportunities became open to him. And that's something that Prigoshin understood, and he made a point of as early as possible, usually through the kind of his contacts in the weird mix of organized crime slash private security world, two sides of the same coin then. Not of course nowadays, anywhere else. But nonetheless, he used that to get it in into the mayor's office and then parleyed that into getting the contracts that he needed to be able to really go big.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

And and just to give people who have no Soviet or Russian connection, a bit of context. So he was born in 61, right? Very important year in the Cold War. The Berlin War was built, so that gives you an idea. In the early 80s, the regime in Moscow was so old they kept dropping like flies. You know, there was a new leader almost every month. Not months, but almost every year. And uh then in the mid-80s we had the rise of uh Gorbachev, who then came up with the ideas of uh Glasnost and Perestroika, which was um embraced by the West and by people in Russia. However, he then ended up digging the grave of the Soviet Union, which is how he's been perceived by many Russians until this day. But for people like Rigozhin, this was the pioneer days, right? This was the land of opportunity it then truly became in those mid-late 80s.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

Yeah, and remember, he missed in some ways the exciting bits of perestroika, the early years when it was all about the opportunity and you could talk about things that you couldn't, because he was he was in prison. And in some ways he he went into prison in Soviet times and he came out, he did come out in in late Soviet era, but in some ways it by that point it was already sliding towards collapse. And yeah, exactly. You know, he came out into this sort of bonanza time, but one in which all the old certainties had been swept away. Everything was really there to be grabbed.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah. To understand a man, I I just read the um the biography by um Alexei Narvalny, and there's so many parallels as well, but he talks about growing up in the Soviet Union, and they've obviously been very different paths in their careers, but uh he he also even talks about the prison system now and that he was in and how sadism is a big part of it, and it's it's a it's a a prison that we in the West can't imagine in this day and age, and it it probably was even worse in Prigozin's days. So, how would that have impacted his personality? Um, was all sort of moral values out the window after that time in a Soviet prison?

SPEAKER_03 14:29

Yeah, look, I don't want to suggest that every single person who goes through a Soviet prison ends up being some kind of sort of broken, valued lacking, vicious monster. But on the other hand, they're clearly the ones who were. But I think this is it the the prison system, it was not necessarily wantonly sadistic. I mean, someone like Navalny, a dissident, is going to face particular pressures. On the whole, though, it was absolutely, shall I say, uncaring. It was about keeping people behind razor wire, working them while they were there, because you want to kind of offset the costs of your prison system. Remember, this is these are prison camps, not prisons. You know, there's not necessarily buildings. These are areas with lots of sort of low, low barracks, where in some ways what happens in the so-called inner ring is is much less controlled by the authorities. Basically, as long as the prisoners are where they are, are not killing each other too much, and they they they they come out to go and do their work, or someone comes out and do their work, you end up with this almost parallel criminal subculture that dominates the zone. And this is where exactly so Prigozhin could could could fit in because he understood the the rules of the game. And he came out, and I think, yes, he had been acculturated by this idea that you know you do whatever you need to do to get on. But interestingly also, if you go all the way back to to, shall I say, all the way forward rather, to the end of his career, and precisely the march on Moscow, I mean one of the things that I definitely he came out of the zone with was this sort of macho notion that you never back down. If you back down once, then you're spending the rest of your time backing down. So, you know, you always have have to push back. And that stood him in very good stead, right up to the point at the end where it really didn't.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

That is really important to understand. I think that part of his his background. So he he was drawn to crime from day one, but then that sort of gave him the final touch as he could become the man he then was.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

Well, it feels like a a big part of his personality is this he has this entrepreneurial push. He's also an opportunist, as you mentioned in your book. Um interested to um hear how his and Putin's orbit uh intersect, and the fact that, uh, as you write, he never made the crucial jump from servant of the Tsar to friend, which it feels like some this is something, a chip on his shoulder that he was never really able to let go of. So how did these two meet and how did their relationship intertwine over the years before the March on Moscow?

SPEAKER_03 17:03

Well, here's the interesting thing. I mean, obviously, trying to unpick this story is is a complex one, especially when it starts to intersect with Putin's, because there is so much that has been expunged from the record or sanitized in the pursuit of the Putin myth. Technically, according to these sort of official stories, they met precisely at the point when Prigozhin was already a successful entrepreneur running restaurants, and these were intentionally glitzy high-end restaurants for the new Russian elite who wanted to show off that they had money, and Putin was was one of those people in in Leningrad, and also was entertaining people like that, and that's how he met him. Now, actually, as near as we can dig out, this actually happened, the meetings happened earlier. You've got to understand is that at this point Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of what was now St. Petersburg, and he was really the fixer for the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. He arranged all the deals, and that was sometimes with legitimate business, and often it was with organized crime, particularly the so-called Tambovsky group, which is the biggest gang in town there. And one of the things that that Putin, who clearly also had an eye for the main chance, had done was set up a committee that was responsible for handing out licenses for casinos and other gambling ventures, and he himself chaired it. And clearly it's because you know gambling is a very lucrative and often quite dirty profession, and he expected his own rake-off. Prigojin was involved even before his restaurants in in some gambling ventures, and therefore that's actually where they probably met, in that Prigozhin had to get access to Putin and ensure the right inducements in order to get the licenses he needed for this business. But again, that doesn't fit the official Putin myth, so it seems to have been whitewashed out of the record. But certainly by the time Prigozhin's running restaurants, he clearly already has an inn with Putin. But to go back to your point, absolutely, he's he is in some ways the guy who serves Putin his dinner uh throughout his career. And that clearly did bug him, that sense of being excluded. He wasn't quite in that, that fancy set that actually got to, you know, whether it's invited by Putin to go and attend his so-called night hockey matches in which his security guys would face off against someone else's security guys, or or whatever else. He was always this kind of thuggish outsider who was useful, but never actually the sort of person he he would cater to your parties, not actually be invited to them.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Well, in the 90s, uh Prigoshin went from hot dog trader, and again they were a big hit in Moscow because it was from the West in the uh Moscow and and St. Petersburg in the in the early 90s, all the way to running really fancy restaurants. So he has an entrepreneurial phone in him, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Very successful.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Um very successfully.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

And knew the rules of the game and played the game within the parameters, it seemed, very, very effectively. But there was a ceiling which he seemingly he couldn't couldn't breach. And then that's why I'm how did he end up. Yeah, and that that is the connection Mark Running with mercenaries.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Mark needs to make that connection for us exactly now. So the the name that I think everyone who even came close to television the last five years um has been familiar with is the word Wagner Group. Wagner, um, and I looked into that, like what the actual connection was. And I was so disappointed to learn that Prigoshin actually didn't like the music that much. He just liked the image, impressing people with this Wagnerian spirit and Right of the Valkyries is probably all he knew from uh Hollywood movies. Um, unless you you know you know more than I do, Mark, but that's all I've come across. So it was again, it was macho, it was impressing people, but he also was a co-founder, so there was someone else. But can you can you reflect on that step from running restaurants to running a military group? What I also didn't get about this, if I was someone like Putin, I would only hand over power like this, which is literally hands-on power. And this is why we're on Putschcast today, because if someone has their own little army, they have the opportunity eventually to challenge you, which someone who just looks after a casino may not. What's the background there?

SPEAKER_03 21:19

Yeah, well, given that this isn't a four-hour podcast, I won't try and sort of go through all the ins and outs. Look, the simple point is this restaurants make you a lot of money, but if you really want to make a lot of money, you get into government contracting. And that was the next step for Prigoshin. He moved, he set up his organization called Concord Management, which became a great big conglomerate that was involved in all sorts of catering projects for the armed forces, for various regions' schools, and that kind of thing. But then Concord went into all kinds of other areas, including PR, which is where his sort of infamous troll farms um came from, that he sort of was was meant meant to be um messing with the American elections. To management consultancy, to real estate, or whatever. But the central theme was always that he had privileged access to getting government contracts. And in part it was because precisely he was paying off the right people. But it was also he was just seen as the kind of guy you go to to actually if you want to have something arranged and who understands that yes, you're going to expect uh a sweetener yourself if you issue these contracts. So he's making huge amounts of money, but he's making huge amounts of money so long as he is in favour. He depends on being in favour in the Kremlin. And then, you know, if other people know he's in favour of the Kremlin, then they think, oh, well, he's he's safe, he's fine. If he ever loses that, then suddenly his his business comes crumbling down. So when the Russians are thinking, or when the Kremlin is thinking of putting together a mercenary army, and this actually predates the conflicts in Ukraine, 2013 at first, when they're actually, even before Crimea, they're thinking of this. They think, well, look, we've got guys who can do fighting, but if this is meant to be a mercenary army that is also going to basically make its own money, and we can use it sort of deniably to project our power, at this point they're thinking about places like Africa. We need someone who can do business. We need someone who can know how to dig deals. And so they were looking for kind of almost in their kind of their little black book of who have we got who is ruthless, who's entrepreneurial, who essentially is dependent on the Kremlin. And they thought, there's this guy, Prigoshin. Prigoshin didn't want to go into the mercenary business when he was first approached. He clearly was unimpressed. He was, you know, he was already making money hand over fist with much safer, much less controversial stuff. But when it comes down to it, if you're dependent on the Kremlin favour, this was, to coin a phrase, an offer he couldn't refuse. And therefore he became the business manager behind this new mercenary army. But Wagner, I mean, because he wasn't a soldier, he needed someone to actually run the soldiering side of things. And he found this guy, Sergei Utkin, a former Spetsnaz, in other words, Russian Special Forces commander. I I always loved this wonderful sort of phrase that appeared in in one actually in in the Russian press, saying that that he was a fan of the aesthetic of the Third Reich. What that means is this is a sort of guy who has SS runes tattooed on his body. And he was the one who pushed Wagner because it had been his call sign in the special forces. And to be honest, the fact that he was a neo-Nazi was one of the reasons why he wasn't going to rise any further within the Russian military. So from his point of view, he was also very keen to move across. And so, lo and behold, you suddenly have this mercenary army organized in which Prigozhin is, and at first this is very much behind the scenes, but the the business manager, while Utkin is the tactical military guy.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

And this happened uh 13 and then definitely 14. So when we saw the the news footage in 2014 when Crimea was seized, and there were all those unmasked men with no flags or anything, can we assume that most of them were Wagner group or was there other elements there as well?

SPEAKER_03 25:19

Not most of them. Most of them were actually Russian special forces. They were either naval infantry, marines, or spets. But again, you know, at this point, you're getting into this whole realm of deniability. That's where where Wagner sort of scores. Wagner is actually much more heavily used in the subsequent kind of undeclared conflict that emerges in the Donbass in southeastern Ukraine, where you've got some people sort of saying, Oh, we want to be part of Russia, other people saying, Well, we don't need to be part of Russia, we but we are worried about the new government in Ukraine. You've got people coming in, Russian nationalists and Cossacks and others, and you've got local gangsters basically setting themselves up as warlords. I mean, it's a very confused situation. And Wagner is used firstly to do some bit of sort of stiffening, shall I say, of the pro-Russian side, but also, frankly, for assassinations of local warlords who don't prove to be too loyal to the Moscow line.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

And then he's just lucky, right time, right place, because um foreign policy becomes a lot more aggressive from the moment Wagner gets founded. So doing small jobs here and there, they become a more and more crucial force that I assume the Kremlin was also relying on later on. Um, who are the kind of people that that are drawn to this? Because this is not the French Foreign Legion where the whole world goes to fight, right? These are mainly Russians who are disillusioned with the the conventional armed forces, or do they pay better, or why would they join there where I assume there's no protection of your life whatsoever? If you go on, you're gone, you probably never existed.

SPEAKER_03 26:51

I just imagine it like that. Um it it pays a lot better, is is is the simple answer. Yeah, I mean 95% of these guys are Russians. There's a few Serbs and others in there, but basically it's a Russian recruiting unit. And because it pays better, actually it can, in those early years, you know, before 2022 and the invasion of Ukraine and so forth, it in many ways can recruit amongst some of the best. They're recruiting ex paratroopers, ex-naval infantry, ex-bets naz, that kind of thing. In part, they do it when the Kremlin says so. They end up, you know, for example, doing work in Syria because the Kremlin wants to support the Assad regime. But a lot of the work they're picking up in Africa, it suits the Kremlin because it wants to push its influence further. But frankly, they're doing it for the money. They're getting paid in gold concessions and all sorts of other ways. Again, this is Prigoshin the entrepreneur at heart. Um, that you know, he goes in there, he understands how some of these rather unpleasant authoritarian rate regimes afra in Africa work. He knows who to pay off, he knows who to flatter, and he he makes the deals.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

We have a man uh he's operating uh with um, I suppose you could say, plausible deniability to a point he's got uh an amazing amount of military hardware at his disposal. He also, and I'm quoting from your book, um, has the capacity now with this to indulge in his most dangerous vice, which is revenge. And is it a man it is a man in Ukraine um who is being sanctioned uh as if he was Putin's right-hand man, but in practice he's still being kept under the stairs. So a man with this energy, this desire for status, he has this momentum, but he's still at a point um when it doesn't suit the Kremlin. Um, they are they are almost cutting him loose. And I suppose I was wondering how this um ties into or feeds the what what appeared to be a outlier, almost a suicidal act of um taking this army and moving into the Russian.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

But wasn't and that's the discussion I'd like to have. So if we have a few minutes left, that's really what I would like to explore. And in my research, I have not fully come across an answer to this or understood. Um because we know Putin probably regretted the whole idea of attacking Ukraine. And if he was ever, to be honest, he would probably say I shouldn't have done it or should have prepared differently. Prigozhin was probably in a similar situation, and you told us before, Mark, that you know, that was the mentality that you can't back down. Once you cross the Rubicon, that's it, you gotta charge ahead. Um, June 23-24, it was really just 48 hours and in uh three years ago. What happened? So Rostov was the the the military capital, that's what headquarters were of the Russian army where the war was run from. He happens to be there with his Wagner group. And then what happened? What made him do this act where he knew there's no way back from that?

SPEAKER_03 29:57

Well, the key thing to remember is this was not aimed at Putin. This was not an attempted coup, for example. Are you are you sure? Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

And nothing else. How do you know he didn't just change his PR tactic when he when he found out it's not going to work out? Because he might have thought uh Russian people will rise up and you know follow him and storm the Kremlin. What do you know?

SPEAKER_03 30:20

Because what this comes out of is his feud with the defense minister. I mean, again, you know, ins and outs of the war, but you know, he had sent his Wagner group in, he'd recruited, if nothing else, he'd recruited huge numbers of ex-cons or prisoners from from from the labour camps and such like, and seen them die in their droads in battles like the one for Bakhmut. And from his point of view, he wasn't getting the credit, I mean though he'd had gone public by this point, and the support. And his main rival was the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, who thought he was a dangerous, well, quite literally, loose canon. And it was this struggle that Putin, frankly, failed to deal with. Putin's strength in the past had always been he's very good at playing off the elite against each other and at arbitrating disputes, one of his only real skills. But nonetheless, for whatever reason, he didn't realise this was going to be as dangerous as it was. Again, I think it's a sign that he's no longer quite on the, shall I say, top of his game. The feud got worse and worse, and the problem was up to this point, Prigojin basically had won every time he'd been in some kind of real serious knock-down, drag out struggle with with a business or other rival. Prigozin, though, could not take on Shoigo. Shoigu was, first of all, he was actually a mate of Putin's. He was in that charm circle. More to the point, Shoigu was and still is, an incredibly effective behind the scenes operator. Um, and you know, Prigoshin, using his old his usual tactics of trying to bully, trying to spread some salacious gossip about Shoigu's family, trying to just basically sort of you know talk him down or whatever. None of that was working. And Putin was really on the verge of go siding with Shoigu, who essentially wanted to make Wagner part of the Defence Ministry's sort of empire. So all these mercenaries would have to sign contracts with with the defence ministry, which basically would have frozen Prigozin out. So I think again, he could have just backed away at this point. He could have thought, look, okay, I'll accept that I've lost this one, I'm still vastly rich, there will still be a place for me within the system. But for whatever reason, he just could not let it go. And again, I think this is where we go back to the zone and that sense that you can't back down. And therefore, he did one desperate throw of the dice. And what he was doing was something that we'd regard as extraordinary. But if you were in the Renaissance or sort of late medieval Europe, you would regard it as entirely normal, which is what a mercenary army turns on its employers essentially to try and just simply renegotiate his contract, more or less say, actually, come to think of it, you need us more than what you thought. Now we're going to demand more pay or whatever. So I think he he wanted to show that he was more useful than Choigu. He thought he was going to be able to actually see Shoigu and his chief of the general staff get Asimov, because they were meant to be visiting Rostov. But unfortunately, because the plot came to light, Prigozin had to move quicker than he'd planned, so he wasn't able to do that. But it's very much demonstrative. He took Rostov, and again it's it is fascinating that essentially he could do it bloodlessly. No one really wanted to fight against Wagner. They just simply thought, well, let's just see what happens. And then he sends a couple of thousand troops heading up the motorway towards Moscow. Yeah. And again, that's performative. Two thousand guys are not going to be able to take a huge metropolis like Moscow. I mean, two thousand guys are going to be heavily outgunned by the Moscow police force, let alone anything else. Anyway, by that point Putin was no doubt had been evacuated. You know, you you just because you take Moscow doesn't mean you take the country, just ask Napoleon. Instead, I think it was just that sense of, look, look what I can do. You see, this is why we we and Wagner are so important. The point at which Putin, who tends to sit on the fence as long as he possibly can, actually came out and openly called this treachery and so forth. That's the point when Prigorski knew the jig was up. And at that point he was trying to negotiate an exit. So his guys were still heading towards Moscow, but meanwhile he was burning up the phone lines, trying to actually arrange some kind of way in which he could back down. So this is where it it it it was, yeah, I mean it was incredibly um problematic for Putin and undermine him, but wasn't specifically intended to bring Putin down. It was intended to try and get Putin to back him against Choigu.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Okay, thanks thanks for that context, because I was always speculating, I love my little conspiracy theories, that it might have been a failed coup, and just a few hours into it he realized, you know what, this is not gonna fly, people are not storming the Kremlin now, how can I get out of this now? This is um what I thought, but you really made sense there. So it was a weird way of negotiating it.

SPEAKER_03 35:06

No one no one wanted no one wanted Prigojin over Putin. I mean, I think this is the thing. It's whatever else one could say about Prigozhin's way of life, his way of dealing with other human beings and his business model, it was not designed to make friends. And actually, you know, from this context, you know, although it again it was striking, as I say, how how little resistance there was directly, I mean, some some parts of the Air Force tried to intercept the that convoy and got shot down and so forth, though they were then beginning building sort of a defensive line south of Moscow. But on the other hand, even members of the elite who have their problems with Putin, none of them were thinking, oh, but Prigozin, he's the guy we want.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

How popular was he? Because he was a he was a media gun. Like he was way ahead of his competitors in the Kremlin, the way he used social media, the way he communicated to the masses. And we know that Putin can't shut it all down, right? So Putin, YouTube is still up, and while he cracked down on the conventional media, social media, there are pockets there where there's still freedom of speech and where people can get messages out. And um, yeah, Navalny did that really successfully, but also the Prigoshin, who just put picked up the phone, talked to it, talked to the people. And in this day and age, it's really hard to guess how much it resonates with the people and um and what it will actually cause. I mean, we think of you know Arab Spring and so many uprisings were these days caused on social media or had a big contribution. So um, do you think he was not popular at all with the with the Russian people who might have a lot of people?

SPEAKER_03 36:37

For ordinary people, there was actually a lot of of support for precaution because again, you know, he seemed to be a tough guy. He was actually winning victories in Ukraine when others weren't. He reached out to them. And even with the controls, it's worth noting, I mean, almost half of all Russians use VPNs precisely to bypass the Kremlin's attempt to control the internet space. And yeah, you know, he he he would do um all sorts of little videos from the front line and again presenting himself being a lot more macho than he really was. And we saw this in in in Rostov on Don. You know, they had just seized the city, and citizens are coming out and getting selfies with the Wagner mercenaries, with Prigozhin himself. I remember that and so forth. But again, I think there's a difference between that kind of sympathy with who seems to be the underdog, who seems to be the sort of the successful man of the people, doesn't necessarily translate into do you actually want this guy to run your country? And in any case, as I say, I mean it it was the elite that still had the overwhelming majority of the guns. Yeah, that's when it comes down to it. I mean, Wagner, exactly, it was astonishing what they did, but they did it because they could do it without real resistance. I mean, for example, on that crucial day, the Saturday, uh, in which you've got these forces spearing up towards Moscow, General Zolotov, head of the National Guard, the main security force, he's trying desperately to get in touch with his local commanders along the route of March to get them to do something. They're trying desperately to make sure they're not contactable on the phone. So that they can avoid being given orders that they either have to obey or openly disobey. So there's a difference. This I'm not willing to fight this is very different from, yeah, this is the guy we want to have running the country.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

We need to talk about how he pulled a pin. I think that's a real crucial moment because again, planes were shot down, Russian soldiers were killed, the the Moscow side, they tore up freeways and stuff, so they were genuinely concerned to stop Wagner from uh from moving towards Moscow. Apparently he forgot, Prigozhin forgot to evacuate his wife and family from St. Petersburg, and something happened to them within those 24 hours that made him change his mind. Is there any truth to that story?

SPEAKER_03 38:47

To be honest, I don't think that that's actually what what made made the difference. Firstly, because I don't know if Prigozin is as sentimental as all that. But secondly, look, I mean it it was pretty clear, as I said, the point at which Putin came out openly and denounced this, that he was not going to be swayed, that he was not, you know, really Prigoshin depended on changing Putin's mind before Putin went public. And it is clear that as soon as Putin went public, that's the point at which Prigoshin opened negotiations. That seems to have have been that sort of crucial sort of tilt moment. And then it's just simply a question about trying to um basically settle terms to ensure well, not for long, but nonetheless to ensure Pragoshin's survival.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

I remember texting you, David, uh, while this all was happening, when this came to a close. How can he get out of that? There is no way this will have a peaceful ending for him. But he was he naive or to to to to agree to a deal like this with with the Kremlin? Like and can you, for our listeners and viewers, can you just summarize again how or what deal he struck to get out of this temporarily?

SPEAKER_03 39:57

It was uh an incredibly surprisingly and indeed excessively generous deal, whereby precisely he agreed that Wagner forces inside Russia would indeed become part of the Defense Ministry, but those who didn't want to do that, he would continue to run in places like Africa, and they would move to Belarus, the neighboring Allied country as their base of operations, and that he essentially he would carry on doing whatever the Kremlin needed doing. And I think that I mean yes, it it was i it was ridiculously generous, but uh you know Prygozin didn't really have a choice. And I think he thought he had been given just this little window of opportunity to to demonstrate his continued utility to the Kremlin. The thing was that look, Putin gave this incredibly generous deal because Putin, who is not he's pretty risk-averse despite all the kind of the macho posturing. Oh yeah. And he just wanted this problem to go away as quickly as possible. But once he'd done this deal, that's when people around him were saying, you know, Vladimir Vladimirovich, come on, you look weak. Prigojin had to take whatever deal he was offered and fought and seemed to believe that he'd got a well, literal stare of execution.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

And um in the concluding section of your text, you talk about him uh well initially he was sort of exiled to Belarus, but then he's his confidence seemed to return. He f he he was um flying back and forth, and it it seemed like the fear that had been put into him initially was starting to um, I suppose, fall away. But what did Putin take out of this? I think you you talk about this this sense of weakness, and from an international perspective, just as a casual observer, it was crazy that it that this could actually happen. And the fact that someone would shake the tree. We thought, okay, if if this man is capable of doing it, is this person who's seemed invincible actually invincible? And what message does it send to the others?

SPEAKER_03 41:57

Yeah, I mean, Putin is much less uh a magnificent creature of superhuman capacity, as the Russian propaganda would would like to portray. And this is the trouble. You can't let the feet of clay be demonstrating. And this is one of the reasons why ultimately Prygozhin had to be killed, and clearly his his plane was blown up by a bomb that was placed there by the Russians.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Do you have any evidence for that? Like we're sharing the news here that the world is watching. Is there evidence of that? Or I mean we assume there haven't been there hasn't been an investigation, but what do we know about his actual death?

SPEAKER_03 42:32

Well, what we know is look, I mean, he had he had his private plane, and you know, there was considerable degree of security around it, but it was on the ground in Moscow when mysteriously, essentially everyone else had to clear out of the of the plane for for a certain length of time. This isn't when he's on a on an airport which is controlled by the by the the the Russian state authorities. And then shortly thereafter he takes off, and certainly the profile of what happens to his plane does not suggest any kind of mechanical issue, but it suggests a single sudden devastating explosion, which actually blows off one of the wings and so forth. I mean, that you you you had the government claiming that uh it may be that actually Prigozhin and his guys were drunk or on drugs. It's worth noting Prigozhin actually, for example, banned alcohol on his private jet because he regarded the flights as an opportunity to do business, or even that in fact that they were juggling with live hand grenades. Now, if you really think that your main excuse is surely these guys were juggling with hand grenades, you're not even pretending to put out a convincing line. And in front, that's the point. Sometimes implausible deniability is a good thing. You want to be able to say, you know, no, it's not to do with us, but with a nod and a knowing wink that says, you know it was us. And if you mess with us in the future, who knows what's going to happen to you? So I mean I think in that respect, you know, Putin had to do that to try and claw back some degree of authority. But in terms of otherwise the lessons learned, I mean David, you went you made the point earlier about why would Putin give someone a private army? Again, I think at the time Putin just thought that surely this guy is just a kind of a creature of mine. And it is noteworthy that no one else has a private army now. Wagner's operations in Africa have been hived off to a new structure called rather sort of historically tone-deaf name, the Africa Corps. But it's very tightly controlled by Russian military intelligence. Um, with one of the deputy defense ministers, Yunusbek Yevkurov, in charge. So, you know, we're not seeing some new businessman emerging as as a a warlord. But you know, that's one thing that we do know that Putin has learned.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

There's a clear Third Reich um reference there again with Africa Korb and Wagner. I seem to stick to the theme, but uh the Kremlin has learned a lesson to not give that much power to a single person. What was the famous Russian Secret Service doing during the uprising? How come they didn't see this coming? Why was he so underestimated and not captured on the spot or shot dead with a bullet from the back?

SPEAKER_03 45:09

I mean, this is just one more blunder of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, which is the Russian domestic security agency. I mean, it's what's called DVKR, which is its military counterintelligence directorate. The title seems to suggest that it's there to protect the military from insidious foreign spies, which it kind of does, but actually more than anything else, it's there to watch the soldiers. But again, they hadn't really thought about the mercenary armies. So they didn't really have the same kind of network of agents and informants within Wagner as they did within the regular military. Now, in fairness to them, they did actually turn up um evidence ahead ahead of time of the plot, but only just, and that's what triggered Krigoshin's move to actually sort of, you know, uh rather sort of ahead of schedule, take Rostovov Don. So, you know, they they kind of discovered it, but again, look, there's been such a litany of blunders by the FSB, ranging from the fact that they were the guys who were the most assiduous in persuading Putin that the Ukrainians were ready and delight would be delighted by Russian invasion, all the way through to their incapacity to prevent various Russian generals being assassinated by Ukrainian agents um in and around Moscow during the war. But the point is the FSB is the service that Putin used to run. They clearly have, in some ways, a certain degree of plot immunity. Um and you know, despite their blunders, they never seem to be uh hauled over the cold as a result.

SPEAKER_01 46:39

Yeah. We have to come to a close. Um this has been way too short for us, Mark. We hopefully will speak again. There's so many topics that are very relevant uh to Putschkast, where you could give us uh advice on. Just quickly on your book Downfall, um what else can people take away from it that we haven't seen on the news? Is that one key message for the reader?

SPEAKER_03 47:00

Yeah, I mean, in a way, looking at Prigojin, it it's a case study and how the Putin system works. We have a tendency to think of him as the all-powerful autocrat who dis disposes of the whole country's resources. In practice, Russia is a system in which you've got all kind of political entrepreneurs, businessmen, secret police chiefs, generals, officials, you name it, all of them building their own careers and trying to pitch ideas to the boss. That's how you get anything done. So I think it's that actually we have to understand that Putinism is a lot more complex than is often assumed.

SPEAKER_01 47:37

Wonderful. Thanks again. And um, David? Any last question from you, Avet MyGo?

SPEAKER_02 47:44

No, I think that's it. You've covered it. Uh the mentioning the ad hocracy, I love that term you use to talk about um the way it the way it works and uh how the the underlings vie for the uh yeah, vie for the favor of the chief. So I'm looking and wondering what will happen as as Putin ages, if uh it'll be interesting to track some of the up-and-comers and to see how um that continues or or fractures or um yeah, if if a new system kind of comes out of it.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

That's a whole nother episode coming up, but it's not too far off because he's not a young man anymore, as we all know. Mark, thank you for your time again. And uh were you anyone watching us, listening to us, there's a link to your book already on our website.

SPEAKER_02 48:24

Um an excellent read.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

Yes, and uh there's also an audiobook for the lazy ones like me who uh can find that on Spotify. So it's good to discover that book there. And also good to find out that the co-author is your wife. I didn't know that bit. So what a passionate marriage you must have, Mark. Um, is that all you talk about at home, Russian politics?

SPEAKER_03 48:43

Well, I mean, certainly if you if you believe my stepdaughter, yes, alas so. Wonderful. Thank you so much.