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- [00:00]
Santi Ruiz
Foreign hi, I'm Santi Ruiz. This is Statecraft. This is John Lechner. John's a writer and a researcher specializing in the politics of Russia, Turkey and several African nations. He's here today to talk about this book, Death Is Our Business, which is out March 4th. Subtitles. Russian mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare John, welcome to Statecraft.
- [00:23]
John Lechner
Thanks for having me.
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Santi Ruiz
Tell us about what went into writing this book.
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John Lechner
A lot of effort and a lot of travel and probably a lot of worry from my family as well. I first started going to the Central African Republic where Wagner began operating in 2018, and I arrived there for the first time in 2019 as basically a freelance journalist. I spoke Russian. I had spent a decent amount of time in Africa, and I was just interested to see how these two different cultures coming together and how they are reacting to each other. So I came in 2019 and I started visiting probably two to three times a year ever since then.
- [01:10]
Santi Ruiz
And just to be clear, you were fully freelance, like you were writing pieces for various outlets, but you did not have a full, like a long term contract, but you just wanted. You wanted to be there.
- [01:17]
John Lechner
I wanted to be there. I became fascinated by and interested in the Central African political economy itself and the local conflict. And I knew back then that I probably wanted to write some sort of book about what was going on in terms of Russia and Africa.
- [01:33]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah.
- [01:34]
John Lechner
And that slowly morphed into a project writing a book about WAGNER around like 2022 or so. And then finally, as we were talking earlier, put pen to paper in. In 2023. But it was initially tough to sell the idea.
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Santi Ruiz
Really, folks.
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John Lechner
Yeah, folks thought it was niche topic. Oh, it's interesting there are these Russian mercenaries in Africa. But it wasn't really until Moscow's full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, where folks were like, oh, okay, this is interesting.
- [02:05]
Santi Ruiz
We do need that book.
- [02:06]
John Lechner
Yeah. One person was interested in the book at Bloomsbury, which was fantastic. And then when Yevgeny Prigozhin mutinied and marched on Moscow, everyone was. At least Bloomsbury was quite happy that they had a book on the subject now. And I had a natural ending too, so that helped.
- [02:24]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah, right. Our mutual friend James Pogue described you to me as the guy who knows more about Wagner than anybody not in the Wagner group.
- [02:31]
John Lechner
Oh, that's. I don't know what to say about that.
- [02:33]
Santi Ruiz
Well, it's not a no. Yeah, it's a great book. I highly recommend it. Death Is Our Business. Aside from the obvious, the foreign relations piece There are all these really interesting questions about how like effective organizations work. Both like, how does Wagner, how does a, how does a private military company work? How does a successful one operate? How does it scale? And how does a state like Russia use a PMC for its own ends? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing that? You saw a bunch of them very clearly when Prigozhin mutinied and you realize you can't entirely control this thing that you've helped create. Before we get into that piece of it, the kind of relationship between the Russian government and the Wagner group. Just will you explain in brief, where the Wagner group comes from and how it's organized internally in its early years?
- [03:20]
John Lechner
Sure. And I think that this is something that comes hopefully throughout the book is that Wagner was never just one thing. What it did and what its purpose was depended on the both time and space, both where, where we were geopolitically at the time and also where Wagner was present. As we know, Wagner's founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was an ex convict, a tough but very ambitious guy. When he got out of prison at the end of the Soviet Union, he found his himself back in St. Petersburg where he eventually opens up a bunch of restaurants to cater to the elite. And he was always ambitious and kind of a, a social climber as well. He was always looking to meet the, the next most important person in the room. And so he managed over time to leverage those connections from his restaurant business into catering contracts for the Russian military in schools. Fast forward to 2013, early 2014. You have the Maidan revolution happening in Ukraine. As a result of that or in response to that, Putin and his inner circle make the decision to annex Crimea. And they turned to a, a number of, or a lot of kind of patriotic Russian volunteers, both affiliated and unaffiliated with the state to secure the peninsula, but also ensure a referendum that would be in their favor. In the context of very fast moving events. That annexation of, of Crimea sparked a chain reaction in Eastern Ukraine, in Donbas, where you had anti Maidan protesters starting to seize administrative buildings and believing that they could also get the support of the Russian state for potential annexation or support for independence.
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Santi Ruiz
And this is second half of 2014.
- [05:24]
John Lechner
Yeah, this is after the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. And so they start drawing these same Russian patriotic volunteers to their cause. Guys like Srelkov, Igor Girkin as well, who may or may not have had a state support for his invasion.
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Santi Ruiz
Right.
- [05:44]
John Lechner
In any respect, these kind of volunteers become a catalyst and they put the Kremlin in a, in a difficult position. They didn't want to annex these territories at the time. But Putin was in the process of trying to co opt the Russian nationalists at home, who in particular, along with liberals and many other Russians were protesting against his return to the presidency in 2012. And so he was between a rock and a hard place. I don't want to go in and risk further sanctions or full scale war and international isolation, but I can't be seen by the public as leaving these pro Russian separatists out to dry.
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Santi Ruiz
Right.
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John Lechner
And so the Kremlin ends up supporting these separatists covertly and also supporting mercenaries or quote, unquote, mercenaries who are really working with the GRU and other Russian military institutions go in. And one of those mercenary groups was sponsored by Yevgeny Prigozhin.
- [06:44]
Santi Ruiz
Will you tell me a little bit about who these young patriotic Russians are who get pulled in to fight for the separatists or end up in, especially in the first few years, fighting for the Wagner group. What are some of the characteristics of these young men?
- [06:57]
John Lechner
Yeah, I think they come from, at least in terms of the volunteers who were flooding to Eastern Ukraine in, in 2014, they came from a number of patriotic organizations, guys who are predisposed to nationalist sentiment. You can think of some of the things that we have as well. I mean, some of these guys were there, there's a Russian version of kind of Boy Scouts. And these guys offer like, it sounds silly, but like military training tactics, little teenagers and stuff. There were people like a guy I know well in the book who actually have their own ideologies, like the leader of the Russian imperial movement who is looking to restore the czarist empire.
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Santi Ruiz
Right.
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John Lechner
There are Cossack organizations who after the fall of Soviet Union sought to refound their relationship with the state, where they're sort of these security enforcers and have rights to land and certain privileges within the state. And then you have, you know, all of these are very overlapping categories. But then you have also the guys who are in Wagner group who at first were largely composed of some men from a previous PMC structure that went to Syria in a disastrous kind of fashion called Slavonic Corps. And these guys were half Cossacks who were recruited. And then these are the types of people that you especially see later on. They tend to be guys who served in the military and when they got out didn't really enjoy being a mall cop or didn't kind of enjoy that same thrill or the camaraderie and had difficulty adjusting to life and then found an opportunity to continue to pursue a similar career through one of these kind of PMC structures.
- [08:50]
Santi Ruiz
For a lot of the guys you talk to, it's fun, it's a blast, right?
- [08:53]
John Lechner
Yeah, I mean, it's a mix. It's always a mix of. And I think that's always something that people ask that's difficult for them to maybe conceptualize that are they fighting for money or are they fighting for great Russia?
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Santi Ruiz
Right. Which is it?
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John Lechner
Which is it? And it's always both, usually first, because our ability to rationalize what we're doing is infinite. It wasn't considered mutually exclusive. We live ourselves in a, a capitalist society where to make money and further the national interest is considered good. Very few of of these guys, I would say are or were pure mercenaries in that they would fight for whoever paid them the most money. Most of them fought for a mix of reasons, one of which they believe that their patriots furthering Russia's great power status and Russian interests, but also because it's a good paycheck as well, relatively speaking.
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Santi Ruiz
I'm curious, especially later, as you see Wagner show up in Central African Republic and in Syria as well, are those folks just as motivated by Russian nationalism, by a sense of their country's interest, or especially as you get further afield, further away, physically, that. Does that belief that you're doing something very important for your country matter less? Or in Libya, say, because not every conflict is as central to the Russian interests as Ukraine is? Obviously.
- [10:16]
John Lechner
That's a good question. It's difficult to say necessarily because so many of the guys I spoke to have done rotations through these different deployments, as they would call them, to Syria, to the Central African Republic, to Libya. And there are a few guys in the book who were in a number of different places and kind of comment on the differences between the conflicts and what they were thinking about them. We could say that Ukraine, especially the hybrid war in Donbas in 2014 and then the full scale invasion in 2022 was definitely something that was considered closer to home, perhaps more of a patriotic initiative. There were a number of guys within Wagner who at the time were stationed in Mali or the Central African Republic, who volunteered to go fight in the full scale invasion when given the option. A lot of them were, or a number of them were from Donbas themselves. And so for them it was something that was personal, as it gets with regards to Syria, I think too there was that sense that we are out here to defeat isis. One of the guys who Talks in the book about his experience in Syria. He. He was originally and is now again with the Russian Imperial movement. And so for him, he saw himself as sort of this Russian Orthodox warrior helping out the Orthodox citizens of Syria, these jihadists.
- [11:39]
Santi Ruiz
Is he the one who talks about, if I remember correctly, the.
- [11:42]
John Lechner
The Roman legions?
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Santi Ruiz
Yeah, the one, yeah. Kind of be on the same roads that. Roman legions.
- [11:46]
John Lechner
Yeah, yeah. He was fantasizing about Roman legions and him going along the same path as protector of the Christian faith. But he was not the majority, for sure. A lot of those guys in Syria believed in fighting ISIS in particular, and were ex military guys who saw this as. This is what they do.
- [12:05]
Santi Ruiz
What does a typical rotation or deployment look like? You were in country, then you go back home to Russia for a few months, recuperate.
- [12:12]
John Lechner
Yeah, the length could vary. I mean, maybe like six months to a year or something like that. And I think what also hopefully comes across in the book is that you'll see that there aren't a lot of people who are permanent employees of Wagner. The people who are the average foot soldier or even a military specialist or in some technical field, they sign up for fixed contracts, six months to a year or so. And so you serve out the fixed contract, you go home, a number of these guys just go off, do something else. Or if this was kind of how you lived and how you. How you put bread on the table, you would call up the guy in Wagner who is sort of the head of recruitment and putting teams together, and you'd say, hey, is there a spot?
- [12:59]
Santi Ruiz
What else do you have for me?
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John Lechner
What else do you have for me? And they'd say, nothing. Call back later. Then you call back, you know, two weeks later, and they're like, all right, come back to the base. You know, you weren't necessarily Wagner for life.
- [13:10]
Santi Ruiz
One thing I didn't realize before reading your book was the amount of recruiting that went on in these third countries. You have Libyan guys who end up fighting in Syria with Wagner or all kinds of other movements that, as Wagner goes around, you end up picking up. You're just looking for bodies to fill slots. Right. There's not like a. You must be Russian to fight for Wagner.
- [13:31]
John Lechner
Yeah. For me, a particularly interesting section to write was the Libya section, as you mentioned, because there was just this crazy moment where Wagner supporting and fighting on behalf of Khalifa Haftar, the ruler of East Libya, who was trying to take Tripoli starting in 2019. He had armed groups from Darfur and Chad fighting for him. He had the Russians coming in through Wagner Group. And then the Wagner group was also recruiting Syrians that it worked with in Assad's territory to go to the front in Tripoli. And then on the opposing side, the government of Tripoli struck a deal with the Turks, who then brought in their own military advisors, their Bayraktar drones and everything, had deployed it to the front. But then the Turks also began recruiting massively from the Syrian territory that they held and deployed Syrian mercenaries on the other side. And so you have these Syrians who are on opposite sides of the battlefield at home in Syria, fighting across the Mediterranean, fighting across the Mediterranean against each other in Libya. I think it spoke to the. Perhaps the direction that we're going where we've already reached. It's kind of the dark underbelly of globalization, right, where you can easily move these men who have no other skill set or economic opportunity other than to. To bear arms, and you can easily whisk them from one conflict zone to another for relatively cheap.
- [15:04]
Santi Ruiz
I'm interested in the Libya section of this book as well, because you kick off the book basically by talking about an article that General Valeri Gerasimov wrote in 2013. So before the Crimean invasion, Gerasimov was the chief of the General Staff, the Russian armed forces. He's very interested in how the west helped overthrow Gaddafi in Libya without putting Western boots on the ground. He's very interested in this idea of what he calls hybrid warfare. What did the Russians learn or pick up or interpret from Western involvement in Libya in the first part of the 2010s?
- [15:32]
John Lechner
I think it's a fascinating thought exercise because when Gerasimov wrote this article on hybrid warfare, what he was describing was what the Russians perceived as the West's version of hybrid warfare. And from the Russian perspective, how the they viewed it was they were alarmed at what they believed was these Western machinations behind street protests that quickly depose a. A leader, whether it's the Arab Spring or. What was especially concerning to them were the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union. They viewed kind of Western rhetorical and probably other support as basically an effort to topple these regimes and that they used contractors as well to facilitate this.
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Santi Ruiz
What contractors were they looking at in the west when they saw this?
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John Lechner
I don't know specifically. I think that they would have. The Russians were certainly aware of the prevalent use of contractors in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
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Santi Ruiz
You actually point out there's some Russian PMCs that worked with US Americans in Iraq.
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John Lechner
There were.
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Santi Ruiz
Yeah, yeah, there were kind of pure mercenaries. They're just like, yeah, it's a good paycheck to do security.
- [16:50]
John Lechner
It was a different time too, where you had much more openness. There wasn't necessarily. There wasn't that much as much animosity at that time in 2007. And so it was. There was one or two Russian, actual Russian PMCs that. That were working with the west in Iraq. And then I would say even more so were probably the amount of just Russians and Ukrainians too, who were working for just Western PMC companies. Interesting as well.
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Santi Ruiz
You were staffing Blackwater or not sure.
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John Lechner
As much about Blackwater.
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Santi Ruiz
What names should listeners be familiar with?
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John Lechner
RSB Group was a Russian contractor PMC that was working in Iraq at the time and then shows up later in. In Libya and elsewhere in Africa.
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Santi Ruiz
What are some of the paradigmatic Western contractors who are operating for the west in. In Iraq and Afghanistan? What name should.
- [17:45]
John Lechner
I think the ones that the Russians were familiar with and most Americans was Eric Prince's Blackwater for sure. And I think that was eventually. That was a model that stuck to the Russians and was something that I think Prigozhin, in his mind, had an idea of trying to emulate after. After the Minsk 2 ceasefire in Donbas. I think he had the. The idea that he has this sort of mercenary force. There's not really anything to do with them at that time.
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Santi Ruiz
Right.
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John Lechner
And as the Russian intervention in Syria unfolded, I think he. He viewed himself as potentially able to emulate a Western PMC within the Russian system at that time.
- [18:32]
Santi Ruiz
Tell me a little bit about the characteristics of a Western PMC that were easily ported over to the Russian context. What were they seeing in organizations like Blackwater that you could copy and paste?
- [18:42]
John Lechner
I'm not sure that they actually understood, like, how Blackwater worked particularly well. I think that they saw this as. As an economic opportunity to outsource. And in this respect, and we talk about it in the book, there were slightly different processes. I think Blackwater and the other big contracting firms in Iraq came out of a specific moment where, under the Bush administration especially, you saw a great belief in the merits of privatization and small government. Kind of very typical, I think, kind of Republican line of thinking. Donald Rumsfeld himself said, we want to be operating like a venture capital firm. Right. In this intervention. And so there. There was a lot of opportunity within that administration for private companies to. To get contracts for the kind of rebuilding Iraq at the time and offering security. There was also a need for that because ultimately the war on terror could not have been fought in the way that it was if it was not for contractors. Earlier. Everything that was tied to the military in a war was done by the military chefs guarding convoys, all of these types of things. When we moved away from the draft, all of a sudden you don't have the numbers anymore, the raw capacity. You have the raw capacity to do it. And so you have to outsource a lot of that activity. In Russia we saw in the 2000s and particularly after the very brief war with Georgia, a desire to move towards a more Western model of militaries. You're moving away from the mandatory two year service which they, they had at the time in Russia and more towards a professional military like in the US where people sign up for contract and they're not draftees. And so again for them as well to move in that direction, they also had an issue of like how do we handle the supply? And all of that. Prigozhin was able to take advantage of to a certain extent a similar sort of trend overall in outsourcing. But then, I mean, as we saw very quickly Wagner started to be used in a very different way than Blackwater or your traditional Western PMCs where they're.
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Santi Ruiz
Not joined at the hip to the formal military, but they're doing things that the formal military does not want to be seen doing or wants to be at arm's length for the most.
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John Lechner
Blackwater for the most part. And those Western PMCs were in the business of providing security for individuals, maybe convoys or like they didn't have a mandate to hey, there's a, there's an ISIS cell over here, go take it out. That was not there. If they're under attack, they obviously have the ability to defend themselves and defend what they're mandated to protect.
- [21:41]
Santi Ruiz
It's a more passive, but it was.
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John Lechner
On an offensive sort of pmc. And we can go into the difference between them where Blackwater as well is very. And others were very much embedding themselves within the national security infrastructure and really working with one government at that time, the U.S. government.
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Santi Ruiz
Sure.
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John Lechner
It ensures kind of more contracts, turnover, assured revenue and they're not involved in kind of offensive operations. Prior to the war on terror and Blackwater in the early 90s or throughout the 90s, the main player was a company called Executive Outcomes. That was South African group founded by even Barlow. And they didn't have the luxury of being able to contract with their host government. Many of them were officers formerly under white rule in South Africa and in the post apartheid environment there's no home for them. And so they contracted with local governments themselves to then protect, defend, or even go after rebel groups. And they provided the full military kit.
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Santi Ruiz
The full offensive stuff, as well as the.
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John Lechner
And then you get to the Wagner group, which becomes somehow a mixture of these two.
- [22:59]
Santi Ruiz
One thing that you talk about in the book that's, I think, really striking, especially to people who have not followed Wagner, is that it's not just the securing assets, and it's not even just the frontline fighting. Wagner operates diplomatically in the case of the cartoon accords. They bring the rebel groups together from the Central African Republic and they broker a deal. And they do, like, commodity mineral extraction, all kinds of other heavy industry work, basically. It's not what you picture when you picture, you know, Blackwater guys and Humvees in the green zones. Completely different set of tasks.
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John Lechner
Yes, for sure. I think. And hopefully what comes across it in the book is to what extent Prigozhin himself is an incredibly ambitious, entrepreneurial, vicious, cutthroat guy. I think he was someone who was more motivated by the deal. I think he loved money and power. But I think it was really the deal, it was like, what comes next that motivated him. He was always someone who was going a million miles a minute, and he would expand into whatever he thought was a good business opportunity with his businesses back home in Russia. He had the restaurants and then he had that contract and catering business. And he also saw an opportunity to get involved in kind of these troll farms. And originally it started out as trying to give favors to guys in the elite, to Putin going after Russian liberals in opposition, targeting them on social media, or just advertising for his company and trying to make sure that no one like talking shit about him. When he's all of a sudden going to another place like the Central African Republic, he's bringing those guys with him and then saying, oh, here we are. We're offering training, but also, if you're interested, we can do. Got a whole range of services for you. The minerals and in the mining, I think those were something that. I think he caught the gold bug. He thought that he could make a lot of money in gold and diamonds. It turns out that it was much more difficult for them.
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Santi Ruiz
Why is that?
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John Lechner
For any number of reasons. But at the end of the day, in a country that's at civil war, in an incredibly isolated and undeveloped place, it's actually a real pain to get diamonds out of the ground, get them washed in, like, Dubai, and then be able to use that cash to then pay for your counterinsurgency. It's a total cash flow Nightmare. So he wasn't always, like, the smartest guy either, but he was incredibly ambitious.
- [25:36]
Santi Ruiz
Right. That's very entrepreneurial. You throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, and if it doesn't work, you.
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John Lechner
And that's what he was always doing. It worked as like a Putin's regime in miniature. Right. And I think that if you are framing what you're doing as furthering Putin's goals and Russia's great power status, you actually have a pretty decent amount of, like, freedom to go out there and just like, throw things at the wall.
- [25:59]
Santi Ruiz
One thread that runs through the book is the way that in conditions of great power competition, there are all these incredible market opportunities for actors like Prigozhin and the Wagner group and a bunch of the other PMCs that spring up Russia over the last 10 years, where because there's this great power conflict, there's tremendous amounts of money to be made, basically.
- [26:19]
John Lechner
Yeah, of course. And there will be. There will be going forward.
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Santi Ruiz
Say more on that.
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John Lechner
I'm always interested in narrative and greater narratives and how. How folks kind of position themselves vis a vis these narratives in a way to further their status or profit or move up in the ranks. And over the past decade now, I think we're slowly seeing that shift from the war on terror and where kind of the greatest threat is international jihadism and these jihadist groups and, and terrorism, to great power competition between the us, China, to a lesser degree, Russia. And so you can see it here in D.C. right. Everyone, everyone both contributes to, but doesn't control the greater narrative. Right. But they position themselves in a way to make sure that you're profiting from it either. Not always monetarily, but also just discursively. And so, you know, look at the number of NGOs who are now looking to kind of change. Oh, this project that, you know, it used to be important to prevent the threat of terrorism or jihadist groups. Now it's important to counter China or something along those lines. And so it's a very natural thing. And there are security entrepreneurs as well who look to position their services and their potential interventions that align with the threat that you want to counter. We are transitioning to that environment where people are now starting to reposition themselves. And when they reposition themselves, they further reify the threat narrative. Right. And that's how it. I think it comes about. I take a very constructivist approach to.
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Santi Ruiz
You do.
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John Lechner
To how Wagner operated and where Prigozhin was most. Most talented. And one of his associates says it in the book is he was very good at selling back to the Kremlin a dream of planting a flag in these various places. And he framed what he did as furthering Russia's great power status.
- [28:24]
Santi Ruiz
Will you say a little bit about what that dream looked like in places like the Central African Republic? Because I think people who are maybe more foreign policy realists like myself can obviously see the Russian interest in Ukraine, in Syria to a certain degree. But what's the vision that's being sold of Russian influence in the Central African Republic? Say? I guess it's not as obvious to the outsider.
- [28:44]
John Lechner
It's not as obvious because it's not there. And so I make the argument in the book that Prigozhin was able to expand into all sorts of different enterprises in the Central African Republic. I mean, like we said, they were engaged in diplomacy when they first arrived, bringing together successful. Successful diplomacy. Yeah, yeah. Bringing together the government and 14 armed group to an internationally recognized UN approved and applauded peace deal. They. They were involved in diamonds. They were involved in gold mining. They were political consultants. They owned brewery at some point, still own a brewery.
- [29:25]
Santi Ruiz
Where's the brewery?
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John Lechner
A vodka company in Bengay.
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Santi Ruiz
Okay.
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John Lechner
They were involved in timber. I mean, every. I mean, again, this is, you know, they expand into wherever they think that they can. And they try, they'll try everything. But the, the reason they were able to do that, especially in the Central African Republic and operate like the British East India Company in a way, was because Central African Republic wasn't important to Russia's other security institutions. So if, if you look at Ukraine in, in 2014, Prigozhin is one of many actors who are there. Right. The GRU is there, the FSB is there. The presidential administration, like, has people coming through over there. In Syria, Wagner wasn't there for, like, plausible deniability because the Russian military was openly overtly intervening in the conflict. The Russian MOD was there, everyone else was there. And so these other institutions also provided like a check on Prigozhin's activities. But when you get to the Central African Republic, it's all you. Yeah, the. I mean, the embassy is like nothing. There's not, you know, there's a couple guys, there's. And so he's able to just expand freely into whatever he wants to. I mean, he still is. And Wagner very much wasn't able to do and still isn't able to do everything that they wanted to do in car because they're still operating in a conflictual environment with local power brokers. And society provides checks as well on what they're able to do. But the competition from other Russians was very light. And so he basically became the Russian state in car.
- [31:06]
Santi Ruiz
For listeners who are. Who do not have a good map in their heads or a good chart of the different Russian military institutions, will you give us, like, the 90 second breakdown of the FSB and MOD, who's who in the Russian defense apparatus?
- [31:20]
John Lechner
Sure. You have the fsb, which is the descendant of the kgb, but they are largely focused on, like, domestic threats and regime protection, these types of things. And they are separate from the Russian military, the Ministry of Defense. Within the Ministry of Defense, you have military intelligence, which is the gru. And so they are geared towards operating abroad. They will engage in assassinations abroad. They also just do normal things like training foreign forces. And that was sort of the group that Wagner worked probably most closely with. You also have the svr, which is just the actual kind of spying operation abroad, and then any number of border forces and things along those lines as well that fall into it.
- [32:21]
Santi Ruiz
One thing you track in this book is how the leash that the Wagner group is on from the Russian government gets longer or shorter in different ways, at different times, in different places. Who are the actors who are reeling Wagner back in or pulling them more closely into the government at different times?
- [32:38]
John Lechner
That's difficult to say because, I mean, we still don't know.
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Santi Ruiz
Some of these questions are black boxes.
- [32:44]
John Lechner
Some of these questions are black boxes in terms of who was Prigozhin dealing with internally at all times and the kind of exact nature. I think, like you said, more broadly speaking, we can say that Wagner was working closely with the Russian state in areas that were of clear Russian national interest. And by kind of clear national interest, you can. It's evidenced by the presence of other Russian institutions there. Right. Kind of as an easy barometer. Right. Like, okay, like if the gru, the FSB and the MOD are all in Syria, it's probably pretty important to the Russians. Right. And Ukraine as well, and Libya as well, was important, but not on the same level of Syria or certainly not Ukraine. But once you're getting into Sub Saharan Africa, that interest really drops off. And there's a lot more room for an entrepreneur like Prigozhin to position himself as the Russian state. And I think this is also kind of. He presented himself differently to different people.
- [33:52]
Santi Ruiz
Right. There's a mystique that he was very happy to let build up.
- [33:55]
John Lechner
He knew how to take advantage of the ambiguity of his group. Right. And so if he was meeting with the President of the Central African Republic. He was certainly representing himself as the Russian state, even if he might not have had as much backing of the Russian state or he was operating on his own, as we saw, with the Khartoum agreement where he was bringing all these groups together. A lot of that was he was operating a lot of times, especially in Africa, out of his own pocket in the hopes that he could then draw the Russian state in afterwards with subsidies and other support. It's very difficult to sort of kind of pin down at any given moment. But the other thing that I try to tell folks as well, I mean, we're recording this here in Washington, D.C. this is the capital of public private partnerships too. Lockheed Martin is a profit driven enterprise. They'll never tell that to a US government official. Right. It's, it'll be all about how can we further America's security. But they're undeniably profit driven as well. Lockheed Martin or others would certainly want to hire people from the US government for their connections in order to ensure future contracts and be able to continue business with the U.S. government. We have something that's called the revolving door. There is a version of that that is happening in Russia, but it's also. They transitioned from a state planned economy 30 years ago to this oligarchic system. And so what kind of. Often individuals are representative of institutions too. Right. Wagner and Prigozhin was a network of individuals that I think crossed both private and public lines and, and blurred them in a way that is more blurred in the US than we tend to think. We tend to think of these things as discrete categories, but in practice there's often a little bit more kind of, of a blurry relationship. But in Russia, it's probably even, even more so.
- [35:53]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah. Post Prigozhin's mutiny and later, I'm gonna say assassination, though. That's not.
- [36:01]
John Lechner
You said it, not me.
- [36:03]
Santi Ruiz
You know, it's something of a black box, but I feel pretty confident throwing that term out there. What's the status of PMCs in Russia?
- [36:11]
John Lechner
I mean, Wagner always pushed the definition of pmc, right? Because as we said, Prigozhin was, what he was engaged in was always a mixture of both private and public enterprise. What we see now is kind of these groups that are labeled as PMCs, but in, in reality they're, they're subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. But interestingly, and I think this shows a little bit of the political economy of how Putin's system operated and the one in which Prigozhin was operating there's still this room for private individuals and oligarchs to like sponsor a pmc. And this is like what Prigozhin was doing at the very beginning in 2014 when Wagner was born. The, the Russian government still operates with a lot of capacity restraints and a lot of funding restraints as well. Right.
- [37:04]
Santi Ruiz
And you and oligarch can fill in some of those.
- [37:06]
John Lechner
You can, you can, exactly. And it's a form of virtue signaling. Right. It's showing to the state, hey, look at me. I've got some skin in the game here. Right. Think of me the next time that the contract, the food, you know, catering. Exactly. Comes up. Hey, you know, look at what a good, what a good kind of servant to the state I am.
- [37:26]
Santi Ruiz
And it's very, very feudal. It's very kind of this Neo.
- [37:29]
John Lechner
Yeah, I mean it definitely has that aspect to it. I don't want to like over exoticize it too, because there are other kind of forms of virtue signaling that other countries do, but it is futile in a way.
- [37:40]
Santi Ruiz
And just this dynamic of the state actually can't do all the things it would like to do without relying on private or semi private actors. Right. Like groups like the Wagner group in some cases are necessary. Not all the time, but not all the time. Really?
- [37:54]
John Lechner
Really. As, as we. As you see too, did the state really feel the need to go into the Central African Republic? No.
- [38:01]
Santi Ruiz
So they take on these own. Their own dynamics or their own. Yeah.
- [38:03]
John Lechner
And, and individuals have agency and they have the ability to kind of lobby for something that they think they could get something out of. And guys like Prigozhin had a lot of agency and a lot of freedom to pursue these initiatives. The risk for them was they're putting up their own money. So if it doesn't go bad, it's their loss. But if it is successful, then as Prigozhin was constantly frustrated by, there's a risk that the Kremlin just takes credit for what you're doing.
- [38:33]
Santi Ruiz
It's very frustrating.
- [38:34]
John Lechner
It's very frustrating. It results in you going sometimes in mutiny. There's also that instance in the book in Libya where the guy from RSB had that mining contract in Benghazi. And then guys in the GRU show up and they say, oh nice, nice demining business you have here. We'd like to buy you out. That, that does happen. If you're smart, you can kind of operate a little bit like a startup company that expects to be buy. Bought out by a competitor later. Like the head of RSB in that instance. He got paid a pretty fair price, but he also didn't have a choice. So they're operating in that environment as well.
- [39:08]
Santi Ruiz
There's something fascinating about simultaneously, this very intelligent mercenary in the small M version of it mode of operation. And a lot of these guys are the same guys who are drinking themselves to death on, you know, disinfectant, alcohol, for instance. Like, you have this. And committing all kinds of war crimes and atrocities. You have this. Really these rational actors who are very effective freelancing for themselves and are also often off the chain and uncontrolled in these environments.
- [39:35]
John Lechner
Yeah, yeah. I tried to really focus on individuals and get their individual stories to give a little bit of a sense of a whole, because as you see, all sorts of people ended up working for Wagner or for Prigozhin, geologists, academics who come in and just do a consulting thing. You get guys like Murat, who's in the book, he's now he's left Russia for the west, but, you know, he very much just kind of a military guy, right. Who just sees that as what he was meant to do. And he stays fit and he makes sure that he's up the training and very kind of, you know, disciplined. Disciplined. And. And then you get these other guys who are like total psychopaths.
- [40:22]
Santi Ruiz
Right. And experience a freedom in volume group that they're not going to get anywhere else.
- [40:27]
John Lechner
Yeah, exercise. Yeah. Guys who are. Yeah, exactly. And you get guys who are just total drunkards. If, when you look through some of the leaked documents, you. You see how much effort there was internally within Wagner, at least bureaucratically, to make sure that people are, like, not drinking, doing drugs, not doing crazy stuff. I mean, because there's a certain. There's a certain filter of the type of guy that you're also getting who's signing up for this type of thing, too. And so there was a lot of, again, at least on paper, bureaucratically, efforts to sort of kind of internally police their behavior.
- [41:04]
Santi Ruiz
I was reading this over Christmas this past year as Assad's regime in Syria was falling apart. So it was a fun. I don't know if it's a serendipity, but that I'm getting the capsule history of Russian involvement in Syria at the same time as it's coming to an end. Coming to an end or changing. And one of the things that I think you highlight very clearly is the often the disdain that folks from Wagner have for the Syrian security forces when they have to retake Palmyra for the second or for the third Time.
- [41:32]
John Lechner
Yeah.
- [41:33]
Santi Ruiz
What's in your view, what's your sense of the future of Russian involvement in Syria?
- [41:39]
John Lechner
Yeah, I got, I, I, I managed to kind of get one source who fought with Wagner, Assyrian who fought with Wagner, and, and he, he fought in Libya as well. But Assad, Syria was not a very easy place to get people to chat. So that, that's all I say. I'm sure a lot of the disdain was mutual and they had an incredible amount of complaints probably about Wagner as well, that hopefully we can capture a little bit more now in this environment. But I think at the moment there are talks ongoing about Russia being able to keep its bases, especially its air base at Khme and the naval port at Tartus. But my guess, given kind of the direction of things internationally, is if I were putting myself in Alshara or Jelani's shoes, he has to consolidate his position politically at home. He has to worry about an economy that is like, absolutely in tatters. And so money is going to be an issue. I don't see the rest of the international community that quick to be lifting sanctions on Syria and opening up trade. So I think it would be very difficult for him not to deal pragmatically with Russia at this point. I think he'll try and get as much as he can out of it. He's already mentioned to the Russians handing over Assad. I could go either way in terms of if they hand him over or not. There's reasons to think that they would not do it because it sends a bad signal to your other folks that you support.
- [43:18]
Santi Ruiz
But also it's an iterated game.
- [43:19]
John Lechner
But also they could probably find a way, find the right narrative as to why it was like the right thing to do, too. And it is the right thing to do. They should hand over Assad and, and you know, who is going to pay the rent for those bases. No one else is, needs them, I don't think, at the moment, or is willing to come in quick and, and do it. And that's a chunk of change that would probably be tough to pass up. To pass up. So I, I just wouldn't be, I think a lot of folks, including myself, initially kind of the initial reaction was, oh, say goodbye to those bases. But now I feel that the Russians might actually pull it off and be able to keep them. It'll be a very different relationship with the government, I think, and they'll certainly have a lot of distrust that they'll have to overcome, given that, you know, the guy who's now in power was sitting under Russian bombs for, for a long time. But Jelani is, if he knows how to. They must have had McKinsey consulting him or something about the transformation. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. He's too good at it.
- [44:29]
Santi Ruiz
It's remarkable.
- [44:30]
John Lechner
It's incredible. Yeah.
- [44:31]
Santi Ruiz
It will be very interesting to watch that relationship though, between the Russians and the rebels. I was in 2018, I was. Worked for a summer at Air wars tracking civilian casualties in, in Iraq and Syria. So I spent a summer just sifting through bomb sites basically. And it's a. A lot to. Yeah.
- [44:50]
John Lechner
A lot to forgive.
- [44:51]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Last question for you or last line of questioning. You've done some remarkable foreign correspondence here. I mean, you were in Ukraine, you were in Syria, you were in car, you were in Libya. What practical or tactical advice would you have for people who want to do that same kind of work in conflict zones?
- [45:07]
John Lechner
You have to make sure that you are working with people on the ground who you trust and that you listen to them whatever they. They say and you don't deviate. If they say don't do it. I. You have to trust them because, because you're also, you also are in turn responsible for the people who are hiring. You're hiring and working with too. And especially in Ukraine during the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022, I think there were a lot of. In 2023, there, there were a number of folks who were killed and they were killed because they wouldn't listen necessarily to their fixer or they pushed to try and do something that always try and get the next thing and a.
- [45:53]
Santi Ruiz
Healthy instinct that goes too far. And.
- [45:55]
John Lechner
Yeah, and so I think you have. Yeah, you just have to take a risk, but you have to make sure that you don't push yourself like over. I mean, the other thing too is I think what I also did, however much I can, I go to places first and take it easy and don't. Like the first time I went to the Central African Republic, I just went and just met a bunch of people.
- [46:20]
Santi Ruiz
You know, get a sense of the.
- [46:22]
John Lechner
Yeah, you get a sense. Get a sense of the place, make friends, keep in touch with them. And then the next time you go, you're like, okay, I know the lay of the land a little bit more. I know the people instead of just kind of showing up and trying to do something crazy right away.
- [46:36]
Santi Ruiz
What was the hairiest situation you were in, reporting this book?
- [46:40]
John Lechner
It's in the book, but like I disappeared into a black site in Mali for two days. Got blindfolded and spirited away. That was probably more scary for my family than, than it was for myself because there's a lot of kind of Al Qaeda and ISIS that operate over there, local affiliates. And so the initial reaction is they have the FBI telling them that, you know, you'll be lucky if it's Al Qaeda and not isis. And so that was not fun for them. And, you know, I've traveled through a lot of rural Central African Republic where, you know it, and it's just kind of you and the Wagner guys are there, but I can kind of look like a guy in Wagner too, and be mistaken for one. And so it, it. Usually when I was meeting with the guys in Wagner, I would meet with them in Bangi, but in the capital because there's just more infrastructure there. Once you go outside of Bangi, there's nothing.
- [47:40]
Santi Ruiz
You're off the map.
- [47:41]
John Lechner
You're off the map. And so I've been up on the border with Darfur where those guys are and stuff, and. But usually it's just curiosity. You have to remember too that like in these places there's often all of this humanitarian infrastructure as well. Like in these crazy remote places, you'll. Or at least formally you would find like USAID and things along those lines. I always think that those were the people who were like the most commendable because I would do these things and then I get whatever partial glory of writing a book about it and people asking me about it. But there are so many people who are out there. They just do their work and, and are not in the spotlight or anything.
- [48:24]
Santi Ruiz
As we're recording, there's this, obviously this big debate going on about USAID and not just the humanitarian value of this work, but also is it geopolitically useful? Is there a soft power element of doing humanitarian work? I'm curious. I guess this is such a big can of worms, we could spend a lot of time on it. But just before we close, how do you think about the soft power component of our humanitarian work abroad? Like, how do you weigh it against hard power that Wagner is exerting in places like car?
- [48:55]
John Lechner
Oh, that. That was huge. It's huge in Africa, the humanitarian work. It's massive. And it's massively important for the US's image as well. I've talked to Russians about it. They always felt that the presence of USAID was something that always put them on like the back foot as kind of, you know, they would never be able to oust the Americans from anywhere. And you saw that they never did. They sort of ousted the French, but they never ousted the Americans from any particular place. And so because of how important USAID is, I can probably say that I was like released from detention probably a lot earlier. They are still a tremendous presence in the Central African Republic. It buys an incredible amount of goodwill and especially in an environment where the US Is not interested in putting boots on the ground.
- [49:54]
Santi Ruiz
Right.
- [49:55]
John Lechner
And committing troops to these conflicts or anything. I mean, they, they occupied in a way a different space than Wagner or these other countries. And it bought them an incredible amount of, of influence.
- [50:09]
Santi Ruiz
You closed the book and I was just really struck by this vignette which was talked about in other outlets as well. But with the case where we weren't forced out by Wagner, we may have accidentally forced ourselves out of Niger by invoking Wagner or overplaying our hand, as you put it.
- [50:24]
John Lechner
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:25]
Santi Ruiz
Just to remind readers, I'll quote here, Niger's prime minister said that U. S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Fee urged him in, I guess this was March 2024, to stop engaging or to pullback on Niger's engagement with Iran and Russia. And apparently we were not offering enough in return. It was all stick and no carrot and we got kicked out of the country for it.
- [50:48]
John Lechner
Well, I, I mean, I think we're heading back towards this Cold War environment. And there's a way to look at the Cold War as this kind of inherent competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. But there's also a way to look at it as a product of decolonization. At the time, like the competition was also only possible because there were all of these new states emerging that were. Suddenly there was the question of will they be communists or will they be capitalist? And in that environment, these states have a lot of power in terms of balancing and playing these competitors off of each other as well, especially the elite in these countries. I think multi, multiple multipolarity will come to different parts of the world quicker than in others. Africa is one of those places where it has come more quickly or is already here. And one of the reasons that Wagner very much helped create the concept or kind of the narrative of great power competition in Africa and then benefited from it. It was like a kind of both phenomenon were happening at the same time. But that competition was coming out because for the first time in 30 years there was an alternative security provider to the west or kind of a Western dominated intervention through the UN and just that presence created this very kind of.
- [52:12]
Santi Ruiz
Binary with us or with them.
- [52:14]
John Lechner
Are you with us? Are you with them? And African leaders, they've been doing this forever. They know perfectly well how to play each one against each other. We're back in that environment, and it's important to recognize that these states also have a lot of power and a lot of kind of ability or cunning in to navigate this.
- [52:33]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah. We'll close here. John, thank you for joining.
- [52:37]
John Lechner
Thank you.
- [52:37]
Santi Ruiz
This was John Lechner. His book, Death Is Our Business, Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Private Warfare is a pretty thrilling read.
- [52:44]
John Lechner
Yeah.
- [52:44]
Santi Ruiz
You did a lot. You did a lot of work for this book, didn't you?
- [52:46]
John Lechner
Yeah, I did.
- [52:47]
Santi Ruiz
Yeah. All right. Thank you.
- [52:48]
John Lechner
Thank you so much.