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- [00:01]
Candace Rondeau
The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad free version of the Lawfare Podcast. Become a material supporter of lawfare@patreon.com lawfare that's patreon.com Lawfair also check out Lawfare's other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter, Lawfare, no Bull and the Aftermath.
- [00:32]
Justin Sherman
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- [01:24]
Candace Rondeau
Go.
- [01:25]
Justin Sherman
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- [01:34]
Howie Mandel
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- [02:38]
Candace Rondeau
And that first experiment grew into basically a professional troll farm. The one that we now know as the Internet Research Agency that very famously was involved in fomenting anti election, anti Clinton propaganda during the US 2016 election.
- [02:56]
Justin Sherman
Justin it's the Lawfair podcast. I'm Justin Sherman, contributing editor at LawFair and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, with Candace Rondeau, senior director of New America's Future Frontlines program and author of the recently published book Putin's the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos.
- [03:19]
Candace Rondeau
Putin has really wielded the Wagner Group to great effect as a weapon to smash the global order, to change the way Russia is seen in the world, and to demand a place for Russia at the table as a great power through wielding covert forces like the Wagon group around the world.
- [03:37]
Justin Sherman
Today we're talking about Yevgeny Prigozhin and his founding of the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company Prigozhin's rise and Fall and what role PMCs will play in the future of Russian power. To kick us off the same question I always like to ask. Tell us a bit more about yourself and your work for those who may not be as familiar and how you came to the topic we're going to talk about today.
- [04:04]
Candace Rondeau
Well, I wear a few different hats. I'm based here in Washington, D.C. i have been for a really long time. I'm a journalist by sort of avocation and training, but also a Russianist sort of by passion. It's, I guess, my other avocation. And I lead a couple think tank programs here at New America. One in particular that has been very, you know, important for the work on the Wagner Group is called Future Frontlines. And it's a public interest intelligence service that looks to use technology to also explain how technology is changing the character of war and challenging some of the international security norms that we had grown accustomed to up until very recently. And the other program I run is called Planetary Politics and that looks at the geopolitics of decarbonization and digitalization and geostrategic competition. So not small things, but we try and sort of manage them here. And I also am a professor of practice at Arizona State University with the Future Security Initiative, which again, sort of looks at security and international affairs issues. And we have a longstanding partnership between ASU and Arizona State.
- [05:19]
Justin Sherman
Many hats and certainly something to come back to with the research. So let's start from the beginning. You have a new, as we heard in the intro, a new book out I commend to our listeners titled Putin's the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary chaos. It's a lengthy book, it's very detailed and an interesting read. Let's start from the beginning of that story with Yevgeny Prigozhin, who came to found the Wagner Group, as well as the Internet Research agency Troll Farm, which we'll get to later. So how did Prigozhin grow up? How did he get his start in the Russian business world?
- [06:01]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, Yevgeny Prigozhin's origin story is, to me, super interesting, I think to a lot of other people too. For those who don't know a lot about Russia, say in the 70s and 80s or even the 90s, his background will seem a little bit unusual. But for folks who studied the Soviet Union and kind of have an understanding of its evolution over time, his background's pretty typical of a lot of middle class kids in big cities like St. Petersburg. So he grew up in St. Petersburg and he was the only child of a single parent, a mom who was a doctor. He lost his father when he was very young, at about age 5 or so. His father was actually a mining engineer of Jewish descent and. But they lived a fairly comfortable life up to a point. And at about age 13, Prigozhin, with some connections that his stepfather used, entered the Olympic Academy in St. Petersburg, which of course at the time was kind of this premier institution for training future gladiators in the Cold War. And his specialty was cross country skiing. He was actually very good at it. There are all these stories about him whipping around in the forest of St. Petersburg and doing sort of, you know, 50 kilometer runs. And then at some point later in his teenage years, he allegedly had an accident that lamed him up and ultimately seems to have sent him on sort of a path of idleness and criminal life. And he starts a gang of his own in St. Petersburg. You know, petty crimes, robbing people on the street, but also robbing neighbors and friends. Stuff that teenage boys kind of tend to get up to at a certain time in their life. But in the Soviet Union, of course, lots of motivations because, of course, luxury items were always pretty scarce. Famously, he jumped a guy, potentially a foreigner, who was visiting St. Petersburg, who tried to sell him a pair of jeans and ended up sort of taking his money. Ultimately, he landed a prison stint about nine years. And flash forward to right around 1990 when he's getting out and his path converges with another son of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, who was just home himself from a stint in East Germany. At that time, Putin was actually first working as a deputy rector at what was then Leningrad State University, and then ultimately got recruited into the campaign of Anatoly Sobchak, who was the mayor of St. Petersburg. Quite an interesting character himself. He was actually kind of thought of as a potential future successor to Yeltsin at one point. And Putin becomes Anatoly Sobchak's right hand, a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. And at the same time that this is all happening, Prigozhin is kind of making his way in the business world. He starts with his stepfather, a hot dog stand, which was kind of sort of super popular at the time because there wasn't a lot of fast food in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg. And that one stand grows into many all over the city. And in fact, I was in school there in 95, 96 in St. Petersburg, and I'm pretty certain that I ate some of those hot dogs because it was sort of like a popular thing to do after a party, after a long night of drinking and partying at the university or off campus, at some of the bars there, these Sosiski hot dogs were always available. And that business and his connections to the mafia underworld of St. Petersburg grew into a grocery empire, a casino empire, and ultimately a luxury restaurant empire, which included one of the restaurants that he first opened in St. Petersburg called the Old Customs House, which became kind of almost like a clubhouse for Vladimir Putin. And a lot of his friends, politically connected people with a lot of money to throw around, used to eat there. And that's how Prigozhin sort of started his path on being the number one chef to one of the most powerful people in all of Russia.
- [10:20]
Justin Sherman
First of all, the personal hot dog anecdote is excellent, and I do want to come back to the restaurant and some of those other elements, just briefly on the 1990s piece. Russia had quite an explosion of crime and violent crime following the Soviet Union's collapse. As you write, there were private security firms during that time that were using, quote, unquote, striped protection, so employing active badge holding security service personnel to protect privately hired clientele. So a blurring of public and private boundaries, as you put it. There was rampant organized crime and corruption and hostage taking, and in an always horrific statistic, more people murdered in Russia in one year than the number of Russian soldiers killed over a decade in Afghanistan. So. So just to zoom in on this period for a moment, you mentioned, for instance, that Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin during this era. Are there other lessons that you think Prigozhin sort of took from operating that environment? That were helpful or even harmful to him for his later security work.
- [11:30]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, I mean, to set the scene a little bit more and kind of give a fuller picture. One of the other things, obviously, that's happening when Putin's path converges with Prigozhin's in the early 1990s is the collapse of the Soviet Union. And this is total economic freefall. It's political collapse. All of the institutions are turning in on themselves, imploding. People are out of work and out of money. So anybody who did have cash or did have food had a lot of power and a lot of influence. And Prigozhin was one of those people by dint of his entrepreneurial spirit, but also the connections that he maintained with elements of the mafia world in St. Petersburg. So I think one big lesson for him was, in chaos, there is always opportunity, and particularly opportunity for people who are willing to work in the gray area. And that's kind of where he's resided, you know, ever since basically until, obviously, his death in 2023. That's kind of where he lived most comfortably, was in this kind of gray zone between private and public, but also the criminal underground. And I think that early those early 1990s, they used to call them the wild 90s, when there was so much Mafia violence, was extremely formative for him. But another lesson I certainly think that he took away was it's really important to get to know the guys in charge of VIP security. And one of his great talents was because he was kind of. He could be between two worlds, he had a pretty decent education, and he also was a sort of autodidact. He spent a lot of time in prison, in solitary confinement, reading, learning, teaching himself. And then when he came out, he sort of maintained that appetite for learning. And on some level, he was able to kind of move between classes and between worlds. And so he befriended a lot of Putin's bodyguards. And I think that was really important. And those people, many of them were veterans of the Afghan war and had come back pretty broken, but looking for a sense of purpose, because, of course, the state didn't really have a Veterans affairs department in the same way that United States does. And these guys were kind of cast offs. And I think he really related to that. I mean, I think that was always sort of one of his special talents is the ability to relate to people who were thought of as sort of cast offs or throwaways. So I think those were some of the big lessons. And of course, the critically important piece is that restaurant touring is Real estate. And I think there's. The CEO of McDonald's made the same comment. And I think he was very astute as a builder, as a real estate developer, as a construction manager. That is one of the hidden talents of Prigozhin. I think we often fail to appreciate.
- [14:19]
Justin Sherman
At this point in time. Now we're talking maybe 1990s into the 2000s. What is the role of private security forces in Russia, both domestically and abroad at this point in time?
- [14:32]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, well, what's really interesting is there isn't really much of a broad private security company industry, certainly not in the same way that we kind of think of it in terms of, let's say, Blackwater or some of these other large scale American contracting forces. In fact, in the 1990s, early 2000s, technically, there were a lot of prohibitions against private military security companies operating under the laws at the time, although there were some executive orders that made some exceptions for that, particularly when it came to state enterprises like Gazprom, Rosneft, Big sort of state enterprises that were important for the economy did have the ability to stand up their own, essentially private armies. On the domestic front, there was a huge proliferation of private security agencies and very kind of classic looking out after protecting buildings, doing surveillance, maybe VIP bodyguard protection. And the reason for that sort of big boom was largely because now the free market was making people extremely rich. You know, you had heads of industry, heads of companies who needed guarding. And still that criminality, you know, that was just so prevalent all through the 1990s and early 2000s, made it impossible to really do business without some sort of personal protection. And so some of the folks who ended up being veterans of the Afghan war would stream into those domestic private security companies. Many of them, however, kind of found themselves in between worlds. And so there was always this kind of struggle, I think, for particularly for veterans to adjust to a world that didn't really have a place for them.
- [16:18]
Justin Sherman
That's interesting in your comparison to, of course, to the differences with Blackwater. And you talk about Executive Outcomes and other entities in the book as well. So how is Prigozhin, I mean, once Putin is in office, how is Prigozhin evolving his businesses at this point in time? And you mentioned the importance of interpersonal currency, certainly in Russia. How is his relationship with the new president evolving in the early and mid 2000s?
- [16:45]
Candace Rondeau
Prigozhin is really Mr. Fix It. At this stage, especially in the early 2000s, he has a big business in luxury restaurants. He almost had, I think, seven restaurants by let's say around 2003, he was starting to kind of build out an actual empire. One of the most important ones was New island, which was basically a floating restaurant and was modeled after the Baton Mouche of Paris that he fell in love with after traveling there in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And he decided to open this luxury restaurant on this boat that became kind of the go to place for Putin when he was president and also prime minister. And famously, of course, Prigozhin hosted Laura Bush and George Bush on New island and at a couple of other restaurants. He also catered the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg. So this big tricentennial party over at the palace in Pitta Golf, he rehearsed that for years. So he was an extraordinary commander of both resources and men already. And that was clear from just the size of his empire. And then he does get into the luxury real estate business. He opens a real estate development kind of on this very nice part of the Gulf of Finland that was supposed to be kind of almost a reenactment of Louis XIV or Louis xvi had all these sort of chateaus and British style mini palaces. And so he got really into luxury real estate. And then ultimately this evolves. And all the while, Putin turns to him constantly because he's the kind of guy, Prigozhin, who can get you sort of a really old bottle of Chateau Lafitte or get you a whole bottle of brandy from the early 1900s, and can show up at the right time with the right things. He kind of genuinely is almost like an extraordinary butler. But of course, this is where he gets the name Putin chef. And also he wins a lot of contracts. And that starts to happen right after 2008, after the beginning of a series of military reforms that springs from the Russo Georgian conflict in August of 2008. And it's that set of reforms, and particularly the privatization of catering and hygiene services that sets Prigozhin off on this defense contractor path.
- [19:23]
Justin Sherman
It's an excellent segue around 2008, and you mentioned Russia and Georgia. You write of the 2000, 2008 time period that three imperatives drove Putin's strategy as his second term suppressing armed rebellions and territories adjacent to Chechnya, controlling Caspian and Black Sea trade, transport and energy routes, and blocking further NATO encroachment in Russia's traditional spheres of of influence. By this point in time, you mentioned in the 90s, a lot of the private security was perhaps domestically focused, given the Mafia and criminal environment. But by this point in time, how, if at all, are Kremlin decision makers thinking about private military companies or talking about private military companies? And what role did paramilitary forces play in these objectives, including, as you referenced, the 2008 Russo Georgian War.
- [20:21]
Candace Rondeau
Well, so one important thing that happens in 2007, 2008, is what was just a kind of patchwork of executive orders pertaining to companies like Gazprom and Rosneft and Rostec, which is, of course, the big arms purveyor, having the right to hire their own private security forces. In 2007 and 8, the Duma passes a couple of laws that kind of expands that remit and really gives these major state enterprises a lot more leeway and power to essentially contract their own private armies. And this coincides with a real concern inside the Kremlin over Russia's ability to contain rebellions in Chechnya. And also, of course, the succession of color revolutions that happens, starting with the Rose revolution in late 2003 and then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and then very shortly thereafter. One that most people forget, but I certainly remember, is the Tulip Revolution, which was in Kyrgyzstan. And all three of these uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were viewed by Putin as both a plot by the west to overthrow what was sort of an extant piece of the Soviet Union to kind of undermine what remained of this relationship of cooperation between Russia and those countries. But it was also clearly just an overall threat to Russia's ability to do everything from sell weapons and move them abroad to also moving energy and exporting energy across those territories. So for Putin, it was almost an existential crisis that really threatened some of the most important engines of the economy. Importantly, Gazprom had huge amounts of investments, or at least had ambitions to extend its reach across Georgia and certainly across Ukraine. As we all know now, there are still pipelines now that are kind of at the center of the war in Ukraine. And so those things kind of converge around 2006, when Gazprom is also having a lot of financial trouble. And I write a little bit about this in the book, and I think it's one of the underappreciated parts of Russia's kind of motivation around its incursion in Georgia, is just how much Gazprom was having trouble with paying its own debts and bills, and started to put pressure on Georgia, started to put pressure on Ukraine, upping the rate that was due, revising the amount of debt that was due because of energy transfers. And this becomes ultimately the crux of some of the financial and economic entanglements between Russia and Ukraine and Georgia. In order to stir the pot even further, some people within the Kremlin, particularly in the gru, begin to experiment with the idea of using diversionary forces in some of these places, particularly in Georgia, deploying them quietly in 2006 and seven into Abkhazia, which of course, is this disputed part of Georgia, and then into South Ossetia. And some of those folks who were inserted actually were inserted under the guise of being contractors for protecting the railway services in the region. In actual fact, they were attached to one of the very first hubs for private security forces, which is known as Redut. Some people call it PMC Redut. But today, I think we can say with certainty that Redut was always a GRU sort of funded and founded enterprise that was led by some of its more adventurous Spetsnaz leaders and ultimately became the basis for which some within the GRU and some within the Defense Ministry began thinking, well, maybe they could spin something up on the order of Blackwater. And I think there's a real division between, especially later on after the 2008 Russo Georgian War, there was, I think, a split between some Russian generals and leaders in the military who genuinely wanted to see a private military security contractor, a la Executive Outcomes, a la Blackwater, giving it a very, very long leash, putting it on contract. And then there were others who saw that maybe just saying that something was private would be just enough to divert attention from some of the accountability issues, some of the attribution issues that often come with deploying people in expeditionary contingents abroad. And I actually think that what actually would ultimately end up winning the day was that second conceptualization, which is a PMC or private military contractor in name only.
- [25:16]
Justin Sherman
No, that's. That's very interesting around this point. You mentioned this a little bit earlier. Prigozhin sees an opportunity for a restaurant. This sounds like an absurd transition, but this is. This, of course, is. Is related. Talk to us about. You mentioned a little bit, but a little bit more about this restaurant and its sort of involvement with or precipitation of, as you mentioned, Prigozhin then getting into both the online disinformation as well as the private military company sectors.
- [25:49]
Candace Rondeau
Well, so the restaurants are part of a larger sort of broad catering umbrella known as the Concorde Company or Concord Group, depending on which shell company you're referring to. But ultimately it's Concorde that is the vehicle by which Prigozhin not only grows his restaurant empire, but builds this vast catering enterprise that ultimately becomes a major defense contractor and ends up feeding an army of 1 million people. Right. And it's a little bit like becoming like the McDonald's of the United States army or the Burger King of the United States Army. That's essentially what happened with Concord. But well before that contract was fully in play, and this is circa 2010 11, there were other things happening in Prigozhin's life, as with many restaurateurs, not just in Russia, but of course, around the world. We're coming out of the 2008 recession. Anybody who was in the food business will know that demand for eating out was pretty low. And if you found yourself stuck with a lot of restaurant real estate, you probably took a hit. And Prigozhin definitely took a hit. And a lot of his restaurants, especially one of his fast food restaurants, which mostly served blinis, which are kind of like Russian pancakes, and it was called Blean Donald's. It was like an ironic play on McDonald's. Those restaurants ultimately ended up folding. But in the process, he learned a lot from some of the young people that he began to hire to work with Concorde in his company, who were really into social media, who were really into Facebook and Twitter. He was really, I think, intrigued to find that actually you can kind of game the system by hiring people to comment on your rival's businesses. And very famously, one of his kind of close young advisors in the Concorde company had this idea to compete with a rival, another rival catering company, by making a sort of fake video of that caterer serving bad food that ended up making people vomit and so forth, and then throwing it online. It was sort of like this, you know, kind of blackmail expose video that was completely faked. Then that first experiment grew into basically a professional troll farm, the one that we now know as the Internet research agency that very famously was involved in fomenting anti election, anti Clinton propaganda during the US 2016 election.
- [28:24]
Justin Sherman
In the ensuing years, the 2010s, into the early 2020s. Talk to us about how did the Wagner group get stood up? What was its role in the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, which, as you notice, sort of the first time this new PMC is seen publicly on the international stage. And what does this group look like, the financing and organization, and where does it get its weapons and. And so on.
- [28:58]
Candace Rondeau
So Fast forward to 2013. We've already now seen Vladimir Putin return to office as president. We've seen mass street protests in opposition to Putin's return to office. And what Many in liberal Russia perceive as corruption and gaming and electoral fraud within the election system. And of course, Prigozhin was very instrumental in trying to kind of help manipulate public opinion using again, Facebook, Twitter, Vkontaktio, which is kind of the Russian Facebook. And to some degree, that success or perceived success of Prigozhin's ability to manipulate public opinion and kind of provoke people to action seems to have also commended him and his services well beyond kind of just the sort of standard contractor. In 2013, you might remember, there was a serious meltdown in relations between Ukraine and Russia over a proposal for Ukraine to join the eu. This ascension agreement became very contentious. There was all sorts of threats of protectionist tariffs, and at one point, one of Putin's advisors condemned Ukraine for even thinking about joining the EU and said it was suicidal. Ultimately, the explosion of tensions between Russia and Ukraine ultimately plays out in the Euromaidan crisis in the fall of 2014. And I will just remind you that this is also after the Olympics that Russia has hosted in the Black Sea resort area of Sochi. And there's some degree of staging or pre staging of troops, some sort of anticipation that something is going to happen there. And while that's all happening, Prigozhin is winning contract after contract. By this time. It's kind of hard to say exactly how many tens of millions of dollars worth of defense contracts he's won. But what we do know is that he also began building businesses in Ukraine itself. And we don't know what those companies were about, but there was some degree of preparation on his own part, almost as if he anticipated that trouble was coming for Ukraine in late 2013, early 2014. If you fast forward just a little bit further, we have the Crimea invasion in February of 2014, and then not that long afterwards, a group of separatists that are clearly affiliated with the Kremlin and have the backing of the Kremlin march over into Donbas and they take control of huge parts of the Donetsk area in eastern Ukraine. And it's at this stage that trouble starts brewing, largely because those forces were ill trained, sort of under equipped, not really particularly prepared. And in May of 2014 is when we see the first kind of inkling that there's something new brewing on the horizon. There are new troops appearing in Donbas with much better weapons, much better uniforms, much better training. And some of those were associated with what we now know today as the Wagner Group. At the time was known as Battalion Group V, which was one of several experimental paramilitary battalions that was deployed secretly, covertly by the Kremlin into Donbas in order to shore up the separatists who were doing the fighting on the front lines.
- [32:41]
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- [34:14]
Justin Sherman
As the group evolves, then you discuss some of the other areas of the world in which Wagner begins operating, sometimes more clearly aligned with the Kremlin objective, sometimes times perhaps, due to its own business venture. Can you elaborate more on what the group gets up to, where Prigozhin is sending these forces and what kinds of activities they're engaged in in Syria and so on.
- [34:42]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, well, listen, a crucial factor that we haven't really touched on yet is what is the origin of this Wagner moniker in the first place? And it comes from a guy named Dmitry Utkin, who is a VDV airborne assault paratrooper. Very seasoned. He spent years in Chechnya jumping out of helicopters, was very well known for being kind of hardcore, and he happened to be a very ardent fan of Adolf Hitler and more specifically of Richard Wagner, who was, of course, Hitler's favorite composer. And there were kind of lots of different sort of reasons for the Wagner moniker or call sign that he adopted. But one was that he actually genuinely was a neo Nazi. He had SS tattoos bolted on his neck. He had tattoos all over his bodies that had sort of swastikas and Nazi symbolism. It's kind of a strange thing to think about a Russian who's falling in love with neo Nazi culture, but this is part of Special Forces culture, not just in Russia, but certainly other parts of the world as well, is to kind of take on that sort of supremacist hardcore vibe. And Utkin was really kind of the engine, in some ways, of the paramilitary operations that we see now today in the guise of contingents based in Syria and Libya, Central African Republic. It's Utkin who really is kind of the field marshal, while Prigozhin is more like figurehead. Seriously, he's kind of the business guy. And there's a third guy named Andrei Trochev who's the executive director. And he's one of these very salty Afghan veterans who seems to do all the sort of personnel work. And what was basically a battalion of roughly 300 guys in Donbas in 2014, 2015 very quickly grows in size to a couple thousand in Syria, a couple thousand more than in Central African Republic, and then Libya and Sudan, and it becomes a worldwide enterprise. But the one thing that's important to understand is that even though we talk about the Wagner Group, there's no such company known as the Wagner Group. Still to this day. There's no address, there's no headquarters. There was never any company registered as the Wagner Group. There was always a bunch of shell companies. And so the way to think about the Wagner Group was really a network of shell companies and individuals who were essentially servicing Russia's arms trade and its oil and gas trade.
- [37:15]
Justin Sherman
Let's turn back now to Ukraine. What role has Wagner played in Russia's full scale invasion of and war on Ukraine since February 2022?
- [37:28]
Candace Rondeau
Wagner played an incredibly important role. And I think maybe for some outsiders who maybe we're not fully expecting kind of the scale of the invasion that the Kremlin planned and plotted in February 2024? I think some folks were very surprised to see how central the Wagner Group became to the operations there in Ukraine. But for anybody who really understood the challenge that Russia was facing just militarily, it was pretty clear that the Russian military, despite its very large size, despite its tremendous amount of money being spent on not just men, but also equipment it's very advanced and sophisticated weaponry. Despite all of that, it was riddled with corruption and always has been. And this really was problematic for having forces that have the capacity to maneuver in wide expanses of territory. However, that was not a problem that Prigozhin faced, and it was not a problem that Wagner faced. They were actually. They were almost built for purpose as maneuver units. They were very small and fleet. Usually the detachments were roughly about 300 guys apiece, and they had very distinctive roles. And they were actually, many of them were very seasoned Spetsnaz veterans who had fought in conflicts around the world. Quite a few had also fought with the French Foreign Legion. And so these were guys who really understood the importance of maneuver, of creativity, of innovation in the battlefield, learning lessons very quickly. And that's something that was very different than the conventional military. And so when in early March of 2022, we found Russian forces bogged down in Kiev, bogged down all across the country, that's when the Wagner group kind of jumped in and began to kind of break up a lot of the log jams, particularly in the East. And of course, we also saw the insertion of a rival group of paramilitaries associated with Redut, which was primarily operating in the center of Ukraine, around the Kiev region. And there's a lot of conflation about who was doing what, which is actually quite useful in terms of a deception operation. They were incredibly important, of course, very famously in the Battle of Bakhmut, which lasted almost 10 months. Historically speaking, I think it rivals only Stalingrad in terms of its destruction and a number of casualties and just overall kind of sacrifice on a daily basis. Bakhmut was really a treacherous situation where, of course, we had the recruitment of prisoners in order to fill the ranks and foment these human wave attacks in the open battlefield in Bakhmut that went on and on. At some point, the number of casualties in Bakhmut counted somewhere near 200 to 300 a day on the Russian side. So Wagner took a lot of casualties there. But what it did do also, despite those many losses, and this is where Prigozhin's special talent for social media marketing, I think, comes in, is it had already created itself as a brand. People recognize the skull and crossbones, the skull and cross hair, iconography, the sledgehammer, all of these things became kind of symbols of Russia's rise again and a new way of fighting war. And I think what Prigozhin really achieved, along with his compatriots, of course, with the help from the Kremlin was taking what was really kind of like a kind of crappy army and turning at least the perception of it into something that was much more powerful than it really is.
- [41:09]
Justin Sherman
Briefly, on the branding point, what is the perception in Russia, perhaps globally too, of Wagner at that point? And can you say more about the sledgehammer piece? Because this is a really interesting sort of double entendre, I think, in the title of your book and relating to some of the themes we're discussing.
- [41:29]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to emphasize or like hard to kind of explain. Just, you know, Russia's military has always had this challenge of, on the one hand, being huge, powerful, strong, second largest army in the world, competitor to the United States, on the other hand, inefficient, corrupt, you know, broken down materials, broken down men, a lack of kind of fighting spirit. And what progressively the Wagner group does is recreate the image of the military as something extremely virile, extremely violent, extremely forward looking and thinking outside of the box. And I think in some ways Prigozhin achieves with that reinvention of the image of the Russian military as something very stealthy and smart and capable, agile and virile. He really recreates the image of the Russian military as something much more powerful. And to his credit, to some degree, and the credit of those behind the campaign, he's able to also give Russian people a sense of who is actually fighting on their behalf. One of the things that I think has always stood out historically about Russia's wars, whether it's in Afghanistan or Chechnya or Tajikistan, some of the earlier World wars before 2022, was that many people fought in anonymity, particularly in Afghanistan. Very famously, casualties would come home in zinc boxes and there would be no official burial. You weren't allowed to talk about that. And I think what the Wagner group did was sort of put all of that old fashioned covert warfare and secrecy to bed and kind of valorized the image of the virile Russian man. Even though he was wearing a mask, he was still a virile Russian man. And it really starts with a very famous video of a bunch of Wagner fighters who beat mercilessly a man, a Syrian man, on camera with a sledgehammer and then of course dismembered him and burned his body. And that video became just this sort of viral symbol of not only Wagner's sort of brand and power, but also Russia's brand and power. And from that moment forward, the sledgehammer becomes very closely sort of associated with the Wagner group. But you're right about the double entendre. It's also, I think, a symbol of, you know, in the old days, the Soviet Union used to be sort of the hammer and the sickle. Right. And the hammer was this sort of sign of Russian power, Soviet power. And Putin has really wielded the Wagner group to great effect as a weapon to smash the global order, to change the way Russia is seen in the world, and to demand a place for Russia at the table as a great power through wielding covert forces like the Wagner group around the world.
- [44:36]
Justin Sherman
In June of 2023, Prigozhin had what some dub a sort of march on Moscow or advance toward the Kremlin. Can you briefly recap to us what this event was and what prompted it? And I'm curious your answer here, as well. As someone who's been studying this at length, were you surprised by Prigozhin's turn against Putin? What did you make of how far he got, how successful or unsuccessful you think it was, and. And so on?
- [45:06]
Candace Rondeau
Well, I'll start by answering the last part of your question, which was, was I surprised? Yes, I was surprised by the form of Prigozhin's rebellion or resistance against Putin's push to put him back in the box. And I certainly, I woke up one morning on June 23rd to find my inbox dinging and just constant, like, incoming, and only to see that Prigozhin, of course, had decided to order some thousands of Wagner forces to march from their encampment just over the border in Ukraine to Rosa Vandan and then onward to Moscow. And this was his great march for justice, as he called it at the time. And Prigozhin characterized this as his masterclass in how war should be fought and won. In reality, it was his last gasp effort to try and save his political career at a time when he had been really for months haranguing publicly not just his rivals in the Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, who was the Defense Minister at the time, and Valery Gerasimov, but also really jabbing Putin's regime for the way it was running the war. And some of you may remember, actually several months before this great march on Moscow In June of 2023, there was a series of videos that Prigozhin issued on Telegram, and he does a huge telegram channel, following about 500,000 followers just for his own channels, to say nothing of the dozens of others that were affiliated with him. And the Wagner group, very famously, in, I think it was late April, early May, of 2023, he's standing in this field of corpses, shouting at the top of his lungs, where's the fucking ammo? And screaming for the Defense Minister to provide more sources, more resources, and accusing them essentially of corruption for failing to outfit the troops at a time when they were in the greatest of need. And this is, of course, during Ukraine's counteroffensive in 2023. So, of course, Wagner forces, all of Russian forces, were really feeling the pain in the spring of 2023. And instead of sort of predicting, sort of just toeing the line and doing what he says, I mean, he's not a military guy, he's a mafia guy, right? And so his instincts are to go to the mafia playbook. And he begins to openly threaten Putin's regime, essentially threatening to bring charges in the Prosecutor General's office against the Defense Minister for treason and so forth and so on. In a way, his ego is blown way out of proportion. There are public polls showing that he was extremely popular. Some people thought he might even replace Putin. So he's kind of getting full of himself. And he was also kind of going mad at the same time. I kind of like to think of it as his Colonel Kurtz moment, where he just sort of was like, I think, so soaked in the horrors of Bakhmut that he really started to kind of lose his sense of mental bearings, basically. And so he marches on Moscow starting on, late on 6-20-23, and allegedly with this idea that he's going to go petition the parliament and sort of say, we've got to do better by mercenaries, these guys should not be second class citizens and so forth. But obviously in reality, when you drive thousands of men across into Moscow and begin shooting down jet planes, maybe your message is a little bit mixed. And so it all falls apart very quickly. Within about 48 hours, Prigozhin backs down and says he's made an agreement to lay down his weapons and encouraged his men to seek amnesty so that they can redeploy to Belarus and sort of live in peace and serve the state, as it were. It's a crazy episode. And while I certainly didn't expect thousands of men to march on Moscow, I think it was always clear that Prigozhin was going to be the kind of guy who struggled with his own ego and that ultimately his ego would be the thing that took him down.
- [49:20]
Justin Sherman
Stepping back and looking at the book as a whole, I wanted to make sure to ask you about the research itself, because Wagner, like many things Russia, but especially I imagine due to its activities, isn't necessarily the easiest group to track. What kinds of techniques, just maybe an overview, if you want, were most helpful as you studied the group. And in terms of what we know and what you've uncovered in your work about Wagner, is this information that Wagner wants hidden, but is leaked through sloppy tradecraft or hacks or something else, or. You mentioned the brand earlier. Are there also areas or, or scenarios where Wagner actually wants to put out photos or materials or videos which then of course can contain some of this interesting insight?
- [50:13]
Candace Rondeau
Yeah, that's a great question. I started this journey of studying the Wagner group in early 2018, and that was around the time that Wagner forces, some might remember this clashed with US Special Forces in Syria. They got schwacked. It was a couple hundred guys that they lost. And for a brief moment, the Wagner group was once again in the headlines, in international headlines. And I sort of started looking at, trying to sort of see like, what is this all about? The one thing I found very frustrating in the early part of that journey was that all the news coverage and really even some of the think tank analysis was pretty limited. Nobody was able to say with any certainty how the operational culture was working out within the Wagner group. The only things that we knew was that there was this Dmitry Utkin guy and there was Yevgeny Prigozhin. We just knew two names, but it was clearly a paramilitary that certainly was in the hundreds, if not the thousands by then. And so one thing I did, of course, is just turn to the historical record. Always with Russia, as with any country, you really need to understand that actually it's a place where built more by continuity than it is by change. And there was a lot of continuity with the way Special Forces or Spetsnam Forces operated during the Cold War era as sort of comrade tourists, very secretly, kind of surreptitiously servicing partner and client states in Syria, in Egypt, deploying to Mozambique, et cetera. So there was already this historical precedent. So I spent a lot of time looking at the historical record and of course reading in the Russian original, a lot of the historical accounts of the evolution of Russia's Special Forces and also the debates over that. But a big piece of it was also examining the law, looking at the policy. Again, very important to do so in the Russian language, as opposed to just relying on English language sources. But the second thing that I thought was very helpful was really using open source intelligence techniques or investigative techniques, sort of using as much public information as, as possible to put the puzzle pieces together. And Eventually I realized that while I could do that on an anecdotal basis, I might be able to discover, for instance, how one commander was connected to another just by looking at their social media accounts. Or I might be able to reconstruct, for instance, what happened in that sledgehammer video with a Syrian national who was beaten and beheaded by using different techniques like geolocation. But that was sort of the one off. Stories were very frustrating. And I realized actually, actually, if I could just do something bigger, get bigger data, look at how networks formed, then I might be able to prize out what is the command structure, what is the operational culture of this organization that most people think just consists of two people. You have Guinea Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin. And so, working with Arizona State University's School of Engineering and also a couple of information scientists, asu, we were able to really dig deep on tens of thousands of social media accounts and build this network analysis. And that was sort of the next evolution. And then finally, as you mentioned, of course, there were just tons of leaks about Yevgeny Prigozhin's businesses. Most famously, at some point, his business, Evropolis, was hacked. The servers in St. Peter's were hacked. And very shortly thereafter, these little bits and bobs of information started appearing and being offered by different organizations as kind of evidence of what Yevgeny Prigozhin was up to. And I got very lucky in working with a couple of partner organizations. I just want to name the dossier center as one. Another was, of course, C4ADS. And we got access to about 130,000 data files from Yevgeny Prigozhin's businesses. And we were able to piece together a lot more of the command structure, a lot more of who was in charge, who was deployed, where, simply by looking at those files.
- [54:19]
Justin Sherman
Looking forward now, what do you think the future of PMCs in Russia looks like, including that they're, in many cases, as you noted earlier, not one clear corporation, or maybe not technically legal. And how do you see the Kremlin shifting its approach to PMCs, especially given the activities of the Wagner group in Ukraine. But then perhaps the leash that it gave Prigozhin turning back on Putin and the regime.
- [54:50]
Candace Rondeau
Well, I doubt we will ever see the likes of the Wagner group again in the near future. What we have seen since Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in August of 2023 in an unexplained fiery plane crash. Since his disappearance from the stage, we've seen kind of a reorganization at the top of the Defence Ministry. So a lot of generals and officers who were partisans or friends of the Wagner Group, supporters of the Wagner Group have now been purged and pushed aside, including, of course, the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu. And there's now, of course, a new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, who's been very instrumental in transforming the war effort into a much more. More economic enterprise. He himself is an economist by training. So one effect of the Wagner group's legacy is simply to kind of take the Defense Ministry in a new direction, just by dint of sort of the purges and the reorganization. But the second thing that of course happened was that Wagner's rival, or sort of kind of rival redut, ended up becoming the main hub for contracting contingent, contracted forces, a la the Wagner Group. So there are now PMCs, they're not really PMCs, they're really sort of contingents that are contracted, volunteer contracted, that have been deployed into Ukraine. Some are deployed in Belarus. And then, of course, most famously, quite a few, we think about at least 10,000, have been deployed to Africa under this expeditionary corps, which is also known as the Africa Corps, and that is largely run by the GRU intelligence wing of the military and tends to be on a much tighter leash than Wagner ever was. So I think one big sort of legacy is simply much more structure, much more intentionality about control over the forces. The downside of that has been their kind of capacity to maneuver, particularly in places like Mali, has been reduced somewhat. We've seen a lot of casualties there in the last year, and so it's a little bit of an uneven legacy, I think. But one big lesson is the Wagner group. The brand lives on. And in fact, there's something now called Wagner Group Istra, which mostly consists of some of the old commanders who became quite famous during the first stage of the Ukraine War, who kind of are leading the charge as the new wave of Wagner forces. And Wagner has been very instrumental in mobilizing and recruiting young men in Europe to foment sabotage campaigns. And I've been covering that quite a bit.
- [57:34]
Justin Sherman
All very instructive for where we might be headed. So, lastly, you've written a book here and again for listeners, the title is Putin's the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. That, as you've noted, is about Prigozhin and of course about the Wagner group, but it's also about and contains history and analysis on a much wider host of issues. So to close us out here, are there any broader themes or a big point not so directly related to Wagner that you hope readers take away about Russia writ large.
- [58:09]
Candace Rondeau
I think there are two things that I think are really important, especially when we're thinking about these ongoing conversations about a potential ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. And one is that there's a deep path dependency between the decision that the Soviet Union made in its reorganization, the post Soviet period of reorganization of its energy and arms industry. It still to this day remains largely in control of the state. And the sovereign wealth fund of Russia depends very heavily on oil and gas and arms revenues. That hasn't changed fundamentally, which means that the structural factors that kind of led to the war in Ukraine haven't changed either, and they're not likely to change anytime soon. So that's one really important lesson, is that no matter what we think about different approaches, whether it's Biden or whether it's Trump or another president who comes to replace Trump in the future, the United States will always wrestle with those fundamentals. And the sooner the foreign policy apparatus of Washington and starts to understand that, the better for the idea of containment and or engagement with Russia. I think the second thing I just would point out that's really important for people to understand is Russia has been at war pretty much since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's been at war either in Chechnya or in Georgia or in Ukraine or all of the above at various times. And it has been at war both physically in the sort of classic military sense, but also politically with its neighbors and with its sort of regional rivals and in the minds of many who now sort of sit in the Kremlin today. They believe they are engaged in World War 3 and that they're in an epic struggle with the west, with the United States, for survival. And the sooner we understand that, the more we're going to understand how difficult it will be for Putin's Russia to climb down from this escalatory path that it has been on, and how hard it will be also for domestic politics to kind of bridge the sugar high of many, many, many years of war, almost 30 years of constant war, and how difficult it will be to mitigate some of the risks that come from such a militarized society. And these are the fundamentals of dealing with Russia going forward. No matter where we look, whether it's Putin in charge, whether it's Trump in charge, these fundamentals remain the same, and they have to be factored into our foreign policy responses.
- [60:49]
Justin Sherman
That's all the time we have. Candace, thanks very much for joining us.
- [60:53]
Candace Rondeau
Thanks for having me.
- [60:57]
Justin Sherman
The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare Podcasts by becoming a Lawfare Material supporter through our website, lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation. Our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about about the war in Ukraine. Check out our written work@lawfaremedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Patya and our audio engineer. This episode was Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening.
- [61:51]
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