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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
How the Wagner Group Became Too Powerful for Putin to Punish
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How the Wagner Group Became Too Powerful for Putin to Punish
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:17]
B
You're listening to the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggit, and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. On June 23, tanks rolled into Moscow and the Russian city of Rostov on Don, and troops surrounded military and government buildings. These were fighters from the Wagner Group, a private military battalion. The group's leader is Yevgeny Prigozhin, who used to run a restaurant on a boat where Vladimir Putin liked to dine. Now he was initiating the strongest challenge to the Kremlin since the fall of the Soviet Union. Joshua Yaffa began reporting on the Wagner group months before their attempted coup. In a recent story for the New Yorker, he documented how the mercenaries went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging an armed mutiny against Vladimir Putin himself. The story lays bare the surprising vulnerabilities in Putin's regime, and it's also just a stunning piece of journalism. The magazine's editor, David Remnick, recently said that never before in Putin's 24 years of power has he read an investigation of Kremlin politics as astonishing or as revealing as this one Hi, Josh. Thank you so much for being here.
- [02:26]
C
My pleasure.
- [02:27]
B
So this is just an incredible piece that you've written, and I have so many questions about it, like how you even reported it. I'm just so curious about how this came to be, but I guess let's just start with some background stuff. So, you know, I feel like the Wagner group was largely, you know, a secret mercenary outfit until about, like, a month ago when, you know, they became a household name, at least in America, after, you know, staging a coup against the Russian state. And so I'm wondering if you could sort of walk us through what happened that day. I feel like a lot of people are still confused about what it all meant and what the intentions were.
- [03:04]
C
Sure. Even though I admit I'm a bit confused about all of that still myself, despite having spent weeks and in fact months looking into this question and others surrounding Wagner group. But specifically, the questions around what happened in this so called mutiny, insurrection, uprising, coup, maybe even from late June, still are a mystery and perhaps only known to Prigozhin and perhaps Putin himself. But that said, we can make some educated, informed guesses and analysis about what happened. And certainly the basic facts are known because Wagner carried out this insurrection very much in public and sort of purposely in public. It was meant to be, among other things, a public display of force. And so it began on the evening of June 23rd when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner group, accused yet again the Defense Ministry, Russian Defense Ministry, of trying to undermine Wagner work against its interests. In this case, he actually claimed that Defense Ministry launched a missile strike on a Wagner camp. I'm not sure that's really true. I almost would argue it's kind of immaterial to the larger story because the rivalry, and I would say even hatred, at least from Prigozhin's side, toward Russian military leadership was genuine. But Prigozhin used this incident as the pretext to launch what he called a march for justice, which was really an armed march, first on the city of Rostov, where Russia has the headquarters for its southern military Command, which is effectively the military command overseeing or running the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin then sent another armed column on the way to Moscow that clearly freaked out and angered Putin, who gave an emergency address declaring the Wagner insurrectionists to effectively be traitors, comparing their actions to a stab in the back. And that, I think, is what freaked out Prigozhin. I'm convinced that Prigozhin thought with this display of force, he could essentially force Putin into having a conversation with him. I mean, however crazy this notion sounds, especially in hindsight, he. Prigozhin was frustrated that for many weeks he felt like he couldn't get through to Putin and that this was a last desperate attempt to get Putin's attention and to force Putin to consider Wagner's interests and to reconsider an order that would have seen Wagner become effectively subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. But this gesture was clearly taken not as the opening for a conversation, but as a direct threat by Putin. And when Prigozhin realized this and that, Putin, if he continued, would respond with the perhaps total destruction of Wagner. And even Prigozhin personally essentially called it off.
- [06:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, as you say, it seemed like it was supposed to be a display of force that would force a negotiation of some kind. But Prigozhin also said a bunch of incredibly inflammatory things about, you know, how the war in Ukraine began and the failures of the Russian military. It just seems like it would have been difficult for there to be any sort of negotiation after pulling out the big guns almost immediately.
- [06:43]
C
Yeah. I think another element of this story writ large, not just the story of the mutiny, is. Is Prigozhin believing in his own impunity, believing that his role in the war effort and the role that Wagner played in Ukraine, especially in a place like Bakhmut, which we can talk about the battle for Bakhmut, an extraordinary, bloody battle, but also one of the signal battles for Russia in this phase of the war, that he thought all of that gave him kind of carte blanche to do and say as he pleased. And that for a while, this did work. I talked to sources in the Russian political elite who were certainly surprised at the degree to which Prigozhin was allowed to say things that any other person would be arrested and put in jail for immediately criticizing the war effort. The very foundational logic for the war, as you mentioned. So Prigozhin was right to a degree, but he seems to have overstepped that logic and gone too far, even for someone like Prigozhin.
- [07:47]
B
I wonder if you could clarify for our listeners what the relationship was exactly between these mercenaries, the Wagner group, and the actual Russian military, at least in the context of the war in Ukraine. I mean, it seems like the mercenaries were fighting alongside just like normal Russian troops. And then you have Prigozhin, who clearly has different ideas about strategy and how the war should be fought that sort of differ from what Russian defense ministers thought. I mean, what was the structure there, basically, since it seems like the thing that sort of set this all off was the Kremlin essentially trying to make Wagner subordinate to the actual Russian military, even though they had been independent sort of independent. I don't know whether it's right to call them independent, because it seems like they were controlled by Putin.
- [08:36]
C
Well, you're right. Or I'm certainly sympathetic to your confusion, because I think we all share it, and that's kind of confusion by design. To understand the kind of precise nature of the relationship and hierarchy between Wagner, the Defense Ministry, the Kremlin, those are relationships shrouded in purposeful opacity for many years. That's what gave Wagner the ability and license to operate in places like Africa and Syria and even in Ukraine. That's also the way the Putin system habitually operates. It's more of an ad hoc system than it is one with rules written down on paper that are strictly followed. And I think Putin likes it that way. He likes to have these rivalries between clans and groups inside the system to preserve its own stability, so no one institution or group can get too powerful. So Putin kind of liked having this mercenary army on the one hand, because it was able to operate militarily in places where the Kremlin didn't want Russian troops to formally be on the ground either, because that would create domestic backlash. Like in the case of Syria, the Russian public wasn't ready for coffins to be coming home from Syria of Russian soldiers, but losses of Wagner could be covered up, ignored, and wouldn't be as politically liable. Or in other places like Africa, where there are various political geopolitical sensitivities involved in certain African countries. And it's more convenient to have Wagner operate than to be sending official Russian.
- [10:12]
B
Troops just to stop you really quickly. I mean, how was, I guess, like, how were the Wagner mercenaries seen in places like Syria and. And in Africa, like in Syria, do they see these as Russian fighters? Do they make that same distinction that we make at this political level?
- [10:28]
C
Well, what we can say with certainty is that there are formal events, like, say, a summit between Putin and Orel Bashir, the then leader of Sudan, at which they discuss all sorts of cooperative relationships, including military cooperation. And then some months later, Wagner mercenaries show up in Sudan. The same thing happened in Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere, where Russia as a state creates a geopolitical foothold. And then the boots on the ground, as it were, that are actually implementing that relationship are Wagner forces. But that can then also lead to rivalries on the Ground because Wagner has its own corporate commercial interests. Certainly that's the case in Africa in a place like car, which one US official referred to me as a de facto proxy state for Wagner, where Wagner not only controls or has great influence in the presidential palace and the army, but in the timber industry, diamond mining, gold mining. And so Wagner is both pursuing its personal mercantile corporate interests, while also pursuing the larger geopolitical interests of Russia, which has made a priority, for example, of re establishing a foothold in Africa, something the Soviet Union had in the Cold War that was lost in the 90s and 2000s and that many officials from Putin to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have stated as a priority. And Wagner is one way of achieving that. So. So Wagner is very much a story of acting in pursuit of two interests at once, its own and Russia's.
- [12:11]
B
And so let's talk a little bit about their participation in the, the war in Ukraine, because it seems like that was really a, a turning point for Wagner. In some ways, they really emerged as like, the most prominent fighting force for Russia, like on the front lines. And I guess how did their image change as they, you know, began fighting in Ukraine? And how did the specter of Wagner sort of change within the, the Russian government?
- [12:38]
C
Well, interestingly and importantly for understanding both the Russian war effort and, and Wagner's role in it, they were not included in the initial invasion plan. And that's largely because Putin and other military leaders assumed, as we now know, that Kyiv would fall in three days. Russia would cleanly and easily take over the country.
- [12:57]
B
The secret mercenaries weren't needed.
- [12:59]
C
Right. You didn't need these mercenary stormtroopers for such a fight. That, of course, didn't happen. Russian forces quickly became bogged down. And Ukrainian intelligence and military officials first noticed Wagner fighters in eastern Ukraine and Luhansk region sometime in March or April. So pretty soon into the war, but not at the very beginning, Wagner mercenaries did play a role, large role, in the capture of the town of Popasne in eastern Ukraine in the spring. But after that fight is when we saw Wagner morph in perhaps the most dramatic transformation that the mercenary outfit has gone through in its existence and became the Wagner that we all saw with increasing shock and horror was no longer a kind of niche, shadowy mercenary force using former professional soldiers who were paid fairly well and had some expertise and experience, but rather using stormtroopers, cannon fodder, really recruited from Russian prisons, tens of thousands of them who were thrown into the fight in really merciless ways that differed very much from previous Wagner tactics, or really from the way that any professional army would fight, in that these troops were meant to advance strictly through numbers alone, and these expendable convict stormtroopers were thrown into the fight in waves. The first wave often was used just to attract or draw fire, so as to identify Ukrainian positions that could be targeted by other waves. And in this way, one wave after another, up to five, six or more waves, Wagner forces in some places were indeed able to exhaust and overwhelm Ukrainian defenses and move forward, and in so doing, become just about the only component of the Russian military that was advancing at all. And that's what gave Wagner its reputation, its image. And Prigozhin, the stature that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation.
- [15:05]
B
And is this image, this stature, is that something that was recognized by the Russian public at large, or do they all just kind of blend together, these sort of, like, leaders who are part of the, like, the military operation in Ukraine?
- [15:21]
C
Well, Prigozhin worked very hard at developing a media Persona for himself. At the same time that he was sending these convict stormtroopers into these one wave of attack after another, he was also releasing increasingly vitriolic, brutal videos of himself talking oftentimes near the front in Bakhmut, sometimes in a field office not far from the front. And in one of the more notorious videos that got a lot of attention last Sledgehammer, I mentioned the piece. Well, yes, there are so many gruesome, horrible Wagner videos that you can begin to confuse them. I was thinking of the one where he is in a field strewn with the bodies of. Of dead Wagner fighters, and he shows the bodies, he points to them, and in so doing, he gained the reputation as a kind of honest, straight shooter. He didn't hide the ugly truth about the war. He called on Russia to fight more aggressively, to mobilize society, to mobilize economy, to close the borders. At one point, he said Russia needed to become more like North Korea in order to win the war. So he was really unsparing in what he was calling for. But he also was more honest about Russia's failings and weaknesses and losses in the war. And that did find an audience with people who kind of have nationalist inclinations, patriotic inclinations, whatever you want to call them, supporting the war, but running Russia to wage it more aggressively, to not pull its punches.
- [17:08]
B
I mean, obviously, Wagner recruited heavily from prisons, as we mentioned earlier, but it seems like it would be hard to take that sort of approach and expect people to want to fight for you or fight with you as you Say, you know, people in the Russian public kind of appreciated this to some extent, but do you think that the fighters appreciated, appreciated it too?
- [17:31]
C
I mean, it is, of course, a strange recruiting tactic.
- [17:34]
B
It's the opposite of an ad. Yeah, right.
- [17:37]
C
Though in the kind of grim world of Russian prison life, I think Prigozhin had a certain kind of appeal there too. And some other videos that I found really shocking, compelling at the time when they were released and then I revisited them for this piece, are some of the early videos that leaked out, perhaps by Prigozhin himself from Russian prisons last fall, where he's in the prison yard speaking to thousands of prisoners who were gathered there to hear his appeal. And he's really forthright about what he's offering, which comes down to fight for me for six months and you have a chance to gain your freedom. That was the deal. If you fight for Wagner for six months, after that you are pardoned. But in order to get your freedom, you have to survive. And if you sign up for me, you're going to not just a war zone, but to the most dangerous, difficult, gruesome part of that war. You're going to be at the absolute tip of the spear and a lot of you will die. And I think that in the world of Russian prisons, Prigozhin himself is a former prisoner. That, that did resonate with a lot of prisoners. I spoke to some for the peace, former Russian prisoners who signed up for Wagner and then fought in Ukraine. And they described making that wager clear eyed about their perhaps even minimal chances for survival. One of the more illuminating interviews I did was with an activist named Olga Romanova, who heads up an organization called Russia Behind Bars. And what Romanova drew my attention to reminded me of is just how grim and hopeless an existence it is for many inside Russian prisons, especially who might not survive the end of their terms. I talked to one Wagner fighter who was HIV positive at an advanced stage of infection, and he believed that he wouldn't, if he stayed in prison, he wouldn't have the chance to see his children again because he would die in prison. And so for people facing that kind of reality, rolling the dice on joining Wagner, even being sent into the meat grinder, as Prigozhin called the battle for Bakmut, seemed like a wager worth taking.
- [19:53]
B
All right, let's take a break. We'll have more with Joshua Yaffa on the political scene from the New Yorker in just a minute. On Friday's political scene, Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer and and Susan Glasser. Will discuss a major moment in American history, the indictment of former President Donald Trump for the January 6th insurrection. That's the Washington Roundtable from the political scene, available every Friday wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [20:26]
D
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- [20:54]
C
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [20:56]
D
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- [20:59]
C
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the.
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D
Unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die.
- [21:25]
B
False.
- [21:26]
D
Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:39]
B
So you mentioned that you spoke to a lot of people directly who had fought for Wagner, for the peace. How did you get these people to talk to you? I mean, were these people who were fighting and then they, they basically won their freedom and then they're. They're able to, to chat after that? I mean, it's how, I guess, how does it, how does the reporting for a piece like this work, essentially?
- [21:58]
C
Well, there are a few different Wagner fighter sources and characters. One is a guy in his 20s named Andrei Medvedev, who was a low level commander, but still a commander in and around Bakmut last summer and fall. And he was essentially in charge of these convict waves. And he told me about just what a conveyor of death these convict assault waves were that he was assigned one wave, then another. And as I quote him saying in the piece, someone comes for five minutes and after that they're dead, and a replacement comes and that person is dead. So it was just a really grim and horrific, unrelenting conveyor of death. And Andre became disillusioned with Wagner, disillusioned with the war, escaped to Russia, and from there escaped in a really dramatic scene, being chased by guard dogs across a frozen body of water into Norway. And so someone like Andrei Medvedev I was able to see in Norway, where he has recounted his story to me and to other journalists writing about Wagner. Then there are prisoners, prisoners in a dual sense of the word. These are people who were recruited inside Russian prisons, came to Ukraine, fought as part of these convict stormtrooper assault waves, and then were injured or captured or both on the battlefield by Ukrainian forces, and have ended up in Ukrainian custody, and then volunteered, as far as I was able to ascertain, to speak with journalists such as myself. I was very clear in my interviews with these Wagner fighters that they didn't have to talk to me, that they could tell me as much or as little as they wanted. But those I ended up interviewing for the piece seemed genuinely interested and eager to tell their stories. They felt in various ways, duped, manipulated, sent into the horror of the meat grinder, not fully prepared for that reality, and having lived through this horrible and, I think, fair to say, traumatic experience, and we're now in the relative safety of custody, wanted to share that experience, talk about it. They had stories they wanted to share.
- [24:20]
B
Did you witness any of the fighting firsthand for this piece when you were reporting in Ukraine?
- [24:26]
C
I took a reporting trip in the middle of May to an area around Bakmut. This is at a time when the city of Bakmut was 90% captured by Russian, which really meant Wagner forces. And so it wasn't possible to get inside or even all that near Bakhmut itself at that point. I mean, that would have just been a suicide mission that no one from the Ukrainian military would have let me anywhere near. But I was able to spend several days in some towns around Bakhmut that functioned as bases, staging points for one interview for the peace with the Ukrainian battalion commander whose forces had been fighting Wagner for the last six months. We could hear and see the fighting in the sense that smoke was visible, artillery was certainly audible and going off all around us. But I certainly didn't witness and wouldn't want to pretend or act as if I witnessed the real kind of intense street by street fighting, these human wave attacks. No, that was reported, thankfully, secondhand. I mean, not something I. I think any journalist has any business being directly near. But in those several days in and around Bakhmut this spring, I was able to talk with a number of Ukrainian soldiers of various levels, officers, commanders, people from intelligence who were able to paint a picture about not just the fight at that moment, but also over time.
- [25:55]
B
So what is the current state of the Wagner Group post attempted mutiny.
- [26:00]
C
That's a big open question that I think it's too early to answer conclusively. What we know now is that they have closed down their base in southern Russia, Molchano, where Wagner forces were operating out of for almost a decade. And now, to the extent they have a main base of activity that does seem to be Belarus. And I think ultimately, and this is my more kind of analytical take than something I have concrete reporting on, is that Putin understood or decided that Wagner was too useful an instrument to be discarded or disbanded. Perhaps even less so in Ukraine, where at the current moment Wagner is largely absent from the fighting. Wagner is not present on the front anymore. They have withdrawn from Bakhmut. They are not really involved, in fact, at all, in the defense against the current Ukrainian counteroffensive that has been unfolding over the summer. So they may be called upon at a later date. Depends on how the fight in Ukraine unfolds. But they do seem to retain their foothold in Syria and Africa, and that may be because in those theaters, they're just difficult to replace. They have the relationships with local political and military leaders. There's a whole kind of structure in place, and that it turns out, right, there's a reason why Russia wanted technically private, kind of shadowy forces to operate in those theaters. There are reasons why Russia doesn't want to send regular army troops to those places. And right now, if they were to remove Wagner from those theaters, well, they'd have nobody else, right? There isn't a kind of Wagner 2.0 ready to go. So I think having looked at the. The map and. And again, considered Russia's geopolitical interests as the Kremlin or Putin defines them, there really is no workable alternative to Wagner in a lot of places where they've.
- [28:01]
B
Been operating is the fact that they're no longer fighting in Ukraine. Do you get a sense that that's going to have, like, a lasting effect on. On the war and its outcome? I mean, it seems like because they were such a prominent force and known for their brutality, the fact that they're gone now, it would almost seem as though the attempted mutiny was kind of like a victory for Ukraine in a way, because it led to Wagner departing, essentially.
- [28:25]
C
Well, the only thing I would clarify there is just the causal timeline in that Wagner was pulled off the front in Ukraine before the mutiny. In fact, one of the things that allowed Prigozhin's rivals to move against him and to push through this order, that would have seen Wagner become subordinate to the Defense Ministry is that they were off the front, they were no longer needed, they were no longer playing this crucial role in the war. And as long as the war stays in its current phase, in which Ukraine is on the offensive, counter offensive, by all accounts, not going nearly as well as many, certainly in Ukraine, and I think even in the US had hoped. But nonetheless, Ukraine is trying to push on a number of fronts. Russia is defending against this counteroffensive. That's just not the kind of battle in which Wagner is so kind of equipped to play a large role. And I don't think its absence is hugely significant. But you could imagine some scenarios in the war. One would be kind of a total collapse of Russian defensive lines, however unlikely that looks at the moment. The other is a decision to go back on the offensive in which having Wagner back in the fight could be advantageous or even necessary in some particular sectors of the front. But at the current moment, and given the current dynamics, I don't think the absence of Wagner is all that decisive.
- [29:50]
B
Would moving Wagner to a more subordinate role, making them subordinate to the Russian military, would that have kind of ruined the whole, I guess, sort of lack of formality to their relationship? I mean, would that have made them more of a entity of the Russian military? Or is that more just like a chain of command type thing that wouldn't actually make a. Like a large political difference in terms of whether we, you know, we refer to the mercenaries efforts as Putin's efforts, basically?
- [30:19]
C
Well, you're right, I think, to split the question in the way you did, because it certainly would have complicated Prigozhin's personal interests. Right. As someone who profits both in a commercial sense, but also just in terms of his own power, influence, reputation from leading this private army and being able to do so with a high degree of autonomy. And so I think we can't forget the degree to which this is very much Prigozhin's project, done, of course, in coordination and with the explicit approval of the Kremlin and cooperation of the military, but that first and foremost in launching the mutiny. Prigozhin did that as a result of seeing his own personal interests threatened. I mean, so much in Russia is seen through the prism of kind of personalized politics. We see this with Putin, too, right, who confuses his own interests with the interests of Russia. And in fact, those two have become synonymous over the past 24 years, at least in Putin's mind. I think a similar thing happened with WAGNER, But a U.S. official said something interesting to me for the piece That I quote in saying that, you know, deniability was baked into Wagner's MO from the beginning for a reason. There was a reason why the Kremlin wanted a deniable, technically private, paramilitary, mercenary structure, and that by bringing it too much under the hierarchical command of the military, yes, you would reduce the danger, as it were, for kind of Wagner going rogue and causing the kinds of political problems or political crisis that it did with the mutiny. But. But at the same time, you're decreasing the efficacy. That is essential part of the very reason why you created this force in the first place. And if Wagner were to become just another division or unit within the formal armed forces, then I'm not sure how much of a point there is left in having Wagner. So there's a difficult to solve paradox there that I don't think the Kremlin has in fact solved conclusively. I think that that's what we'll see playing out in the coming months is the Kremlin playing with this idea of how much can we bring Wagner to heel and to kind of force it into the centralized hierarchy that is Russia, while also retaining the autonomy and deniability that gives Wagner its very point of existence in the first place.
- [32:47]
B
And so where is Prigozhin now and what is his status? Is he in Belarus?
- [32:53]
C
He seems to be all over the place. I quote a scene at the end of my piece in which he's giving a kind of motivational rah rah speech to the Wagner forces who've assembled at their new training camp in Belarus. But then a few days later, he was spotted at a Russia Africa summit in St Petersburg, being photographed with various African leaders. So he clearly retains a degree of access. He's clearly not on a wanted list or facing immediate prosecution or persecution inside Russia. The fact that he can walk the halls of a very high profile political summit in St Petersburg shows that he's very much still part of the political military architecture of Putin's Russia.
- [33:36]
B
Are you surprised by this? Because even though Putin understands the usefulness of Wagner and of Prigozhin, it seems unlike him to, I guess, let someone get off so easy.
- [33:47]
C
To be honest, I am a little surprised by that. On the day of the mutiny, when Putin gave this emergency address on Russian television, which I referenced earlier, essentially calling in all but name Prigozhin a traitor, referring to the Wagner insurrection as a stab in the back. Yeah, I didn't necessarily think that Prigozhin was going to end up dead, though I did think that was a possibility. If he continued the mutiny, and perhaps that's one reason why he called it off shortly thereafter. But I didn't think that he would be able to play a high profile role in Russia after that. He might be allowed his freedom and his safety, but that he would have to lose his stature, given the degree to which Putin had staked his own political reputation on casting Prigozhin as not just an enemy, but as a traitor, the worst possible category in Putin's mind. To me, that's just a testament to the degree to which, as we've talked about, that Wagner and therefore Prigozhin personally remain a really necessary, crucial instrument in the eyes of the Kremlin, one they can't do without. And so therefore, they have to tolerate Prigozhin, even post mutiny, in the way that they long tolerated him, pre mutiny.
- [35:00]
B
And do you think that Putin's image, both in Russia itself and elsewhere in the world, that it has been weakened by this entire saga, or do you think that he's sort of emerged stronger because the fact that Prigozhin is still playing, you know, like a kind of high profile role would indicate that Putin has successfully reined in the rogue?
- [35:23]
C
The weakened hypothesis was certainly the one that seemed most credible and convincing to me in the days and weeks after the mutiny. The old Putin would never have negotiated or tolerated someone he referred to as a traitor, which, again, in Putin's mind is like the lowest of low categories. Worse than an enemy. Yeah, is a traitor. These are people who end up, you know, poisoned, dying, horrible deaths in Russia and abroad. And here there is someone who was effectively deemed to be a member of such a category, who seems to have not lost a whole lot in terms of his status and influence. To me and to many other analysts, of course, that's a kind of humiliation for Putin.
- [36:05]
B
One thing that I was thinking about while news was trickling in, of course, the, you know, sort of the attempted coup, and we were all kind of trying to figure out what exactly was going on and whether Prigozhin was trying to replace Putin or whether this was something different. It was interesting because I started to think about the prospect of, you know, what it would look like basically for someone like Prigozhin to replace Putin. And is that something that you could see happening in the future?
- [36:29]
C
I think that Prigozhin had or still has the potential of being a disruptive force in Russian politics, someone who could definitely widen the cracks in the ruling system, not so much because he would then take power himself, but certainly if we look at the events of late June with the mutiny, that had the potential, if it continued, to really shake the very foundation of the Putin system, if there really were large scale armed clashes with people dying between, say, Wagner and the army and the FSB on the streets of Moscow, no matter how that ended, I don't think it would have ended with Prigozhin as president, but it could have ended with a real direct threat to the Putin system, perhaps injuring it irrevocably. And that's something that Putin definitely felt, and that's why he reacted the way he did. Prigozhin does have a following. We've talked about that before. He also has a lot of people in the elite, especially business elite, technocratically, not to mention military, who can't stand him and who are terrified at the idea of him taking power. And I think there was a kind of counter reaction. There were some murmurs in the elite after the mutiny of, wow, we really dodged one there. In fact, we should really double down in our efforts to make sure the system remains stable, because for us, as in members of the elite, what comes after could be more harmful to our interests than not. But I think that this is a classic dynamic that's played out in authoritarian systems through the ages across geographies, that there can be disruptive forces, just like happened in 1991, an event I mentioned in the piece, when a number of officials from the KGB and security agencies in the dying days of the Soviet Union temporarily ousted Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup, locked him in house arrest in Crimea, tried to take power, did take power in the country, tried to return the Soviet Union in its last gasps, to a kind of neo Stalinist order to try and stave off collapse. That coup ended up falling apart after just a few days, but the Soviet Union fell apart four months later. And I think that that's actually a useful analogy here, and that the danger in June and the danger going forward for the Putin system is not so much that Prigozhin sweeps to power and becomes Russia's next president, but that he sets in motion a series of events that could present a really direct and extreme threat to the regime, even if Prigozhin himself is sort of swept away by those events as a result. And I think that that is something that clearly Putin has in mind.
- [39:13]
B
Well, thank you so much, Josh.
- [39:15]
C
Thank you.
- [39:20]
B
Joshua Yaffa is a contributing writer at the New York. You can read his latest story, inside the Wagner group's armed uprising in this week's magazine. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. The show is produced by Michelle Moses with editing help from Catherine Winter. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Enjoy the rest of your week and we'll see you next Wednesday.
- [39:48]
C
Foreign.
- [39:55]
D
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [39:58]
C
I'm Michael Kollori, Wired's director of consumer, tech and culture.
- [40:01]
B
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [40:10]
D
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [40:20]
C
Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [40:28]
B
Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [40:31]
D
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [40:41]
C
From PRX.