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- [00:04]
A
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com this podcast is.
- [00:19]
B
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C
Carvana.
- [00:46]
B
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- [00:50]
C
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- [01:19]
B
This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast and Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me is now playing only on Netflix.
- [01:53]
A
Sheps are nutters. They're all self obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them. Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey.
- [02:06]
C
I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [02:07]
A
And that Gordon is not Yevgeny Prigozhin, really speaking about his chosen profession of chef. That is Gordon Ramsay, famed British chef, potential psychopath, I think. Actually self admitted psychopath right there in that quote. A nutter. And as we were talking earlier, I think in a different context, Gordon Ramsay himself may have become a mercenary warlord, but didn't.
- [02:39]
C
But he's so can we just make clear, stunted? Yes, for legal reasons he was never involved in mercenary activities or large scale massacres in Africa and around the world. But that is the kind of wildness of this story. Is a guy who starts off as a hot dog salesman, chef, restaurateur, high end restaurants like Gordon Ramsay, and yet also becomes a mercenary warlord, I guess leading a coup against the government.
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A
I mean, I guess the equivalent in this case because we're going to talk in this episode about this transition that Prigozhin Makes from when we left him last time. He was not the hot dog salesman.
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C
No.
- [03:17]
A
Anymore he's moved on from that. He's moved on. He spent, you know, a lot of the mid-2010s running a large sort of PR and disinformation campaign firm called the Internet Research Agency, which is very useful to the Kremlin during the 2016 US election. And we're going to see now how the next chapter of the Afghani Prigozhin story becomes mercenary warlord. And I guess it's kind of like if at some point after running one of his. His wonderful restaurants, I should say wonderful restaurants. Gordon Ramsay, if you're listening, Gordon Ramsay, through contacts that he had at 10 Downing street decided that he would. He would outfit a military company to help the sort of flailing, you know, allied effort in Afghanistan. Yeah. And he was going to go and. And round up a bunch of very, you know, undesirable characters from his kitchens, which still couldn't be plausible, and give them an offer that they can't and absolutely won't refuse to fight and die.
- [04:24]
C
In Afghanistan, which sounds like a bad action movie. Which will come to bad action movies later because they are also going to play part of this story.
- [04:31]
A
That's right.
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C
So how does it happen that Evgeny Prigozhin goes from this businessman to Warlord? Spring of 2014, he's introduced to another key character, a 44 year old called Dmitry Utkin. Now, Utkin is a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian Special Forces. What kind of person was Dmitry Utkin? We've got a picture of him which I think tells you quite a lot. Shaved head, mean eyes.
- [04:57]
A
Mean eyes.
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C
Mean eyes. He has SS tattoos on his shoulders and neck, supposedly a Nazi eagle on his chest. And he's into weird paganism, Slavic rituals, racial purity with fascist tendencies. What kind of person do we think he is? I mean, I don't know.
- [05:16]
A
Sounds like the person that maybe Gordon Ramsay would have had a hard time finding in his kitchen. Yes. But Prigozhin.
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C
Yes.
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A
Has.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Somehow contacted. This seems like a guy who, number one. This seems like a guy that Prigozhin probably gets along with fairly well.
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C
I mean, yeah, the hard man.
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A
He was in a penal colony.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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A
In Soviet Russia. So this, this guy, he can relate.
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C
He knows people.
- [05:42]
A
Yeah, he knows this guy.
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C
So.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So Putin has fought in the Chechen wars. His career stalled in the military. And it's interesting partly because he preferred fighting to sitting in headquarters. His wife would say he was never happy unless he was fighting. I Mean, you know, and in Russia, if you hit 40 in the military, no sign of advancement, you're out. So he left because he kind of wants to fight rather than go up the ranks. So he joins a mercenary group. Initially, this is doing stuff like anti piracy. He then part of another group called.
- [06:11]
A
This isn't a normal thing to do when you leave the Russian military at this point.
- [06:15]
C
Is it impossible that some of them would join some of these mercenary groups? You're seeing some of them emerge, even though technically. And we'll come back to this, mercenary groups are technically illegal in Russia, but there are security firms and big companies have security arms, some of which look a little bit like mercenary groups and militias. But at this point, they're kind of taking on a slightly different role. There's one called the Slavonic Corps, and they get sent to Syria, and Utkin was going to go with them in 2013, supposedly to protect pipelines, because this is often how it's kind of phrased Russia, big into natural resources extraction. It's got these big companies like Gazprom, the gas company. You know, they often hire mercenary groups to protect some of their facilities abroad. Utkin's going to be part of them. Ends up fighting ISIS with kind of crap weapons. They're going to withdraw in failure. He's looking for what to do next. He gets introduced to Prigozhin, and I think it's a fortuitous meeting. It's a kind of romance, you know. No, it's not a romance.
- [07:14]
A
Bromance.
- [07:15]
C
Bromance, yeah. Butkin has got a reputation for violence. He would sometimes greet Prigozhin with Hyel Petrovic, using his boss's codename, and supposedly sign some documents with SS symbols. So, again, I think you're getting a slight picture. And the key thing about him, and.
- [07:32]
A
This is a. I didn't think Russians were super hot on Nazis, Gordon, what with the, you know, invasion in the Great Patriotic War.
- [07:41]
C
And I asked someone about this and they said, like, it is weird, but there's a kind of bit of hard Slavonic nationalism which merges with fascism. So they wouldn't think of themselves as German Nazis, but maybe admiring Nazism and wanting a kind of Slavic version of that, I think is the best way to understand it. But here's the crucial thing again. Back to his kind of Hitler obsession, though, because I think he really does have a Hitler obsession. He had become. He'd become obsessed with Wagner, the composer who was Hitler's favorite. And so his call sign as A mercenary is Wagner. So he is Wagner, you know, not Prigozhin. Not Prigozhin. And the Wagner group will be, you know, effectively named after Utkin. His group. This is Prigozhin. The kind of deal maker, isn't it? You know, we saw last time how he's understood that the Kremlin needed help with social media and we're trolling and he was going to offer a service there, and he's going to understand now that the Kremlin needs a little bit of help with men of violence and mercenary work and with Utkin and with his people. There's an opportunity there. So I think it's, again, that moment of possibility that, you know, mercenaries might be in now. I think the value of mercenaries, as we'll see, is they're kind of useful for a state, they're deniable, they've got lots of benefits. I mean, they've had that through history, haven't they? In a way, it's a business opportunity.
- [09:05]
A
Yeah. I will say there's a wonderful book on Wagner and kind of the Return of Private Warfare by John Lechner. It's called Death Is Our Business, and I highly recommend it. I think it's a great read on kind of Wagner in particular, but this dynamic in general, and one of the points that Lechner makes in the book, which I think is spot on for those of us who have grown up in a world of the military is a public good.
- [09:33]
C
Yeah.
- [09:33]
A
And military is sort of financed and resourced by the state. And it's official, that's not usually been the case in history, actually. And we're sort of going back to this world of, you know, maybe 400 years ago, where private military companies are our real thing. I mean, I guess you think of in the States, Blackwater, you can call it a contractor.
- [09:54]
C
Yeah.
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A
But it's really a private military company, I think here in the uk. Executive outcomes.
- [09:59]
C
Yeah.
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A
Those are the kind of outcomes I want, are the executive kind. So Wagner, and there's a longer tradition, isn't there?
- [10:06]
C
You go back to the kind of the Italian city states, you know, and the thirty Years War, you'd have mercenary groups fighting in Europe, hired by a state to do their business. So, yeah, I think Wagner is in a tradition of mercenaries, which is quite age old, but I guess each. Each age has its own mercenaries, doesn't it? You know, depend. And each country has its own mercenaries. And I guess Wagner, in the image of the kind of Putin's Russian and in Prigozhin's image, I Guess is more to the point, kind of greedy, brutal, nationalistic, and actually quite closely tied to the state, closely aligned to the Kremlin and its priority. And that's what's different.
- [10:44]
A
And I guess the value, the immediate value that they'll provide will be in Ukraine, where this mixture of deniability, relatively cheap when compared to using state resources or sort of the official military. You can see how Prigozhin brings this entrepreneurial streak to violence in what is turning out to be this kind of hybrid gray zone conflict in Ukraine in 2014.
- [11:12]
C
Yeah, exactly, because I think the context here is important. We're talking about that meeting between Utkin and Prigozhin in 2014. This has happened just as a pro Kremlin government has been removed from power in Ukraine, much to the Kremlin's anger and disappointment following popular protests. The issue being how close should Ukraine be to Europe versus Russia? It's moving more towards the European side rather than the Moscow Kremlin is angry, determined for that not to happen. Famously, Russia kind of seizes Crimea using undercover special forces who just pop up in Crimea. These are the famous people called little green men. They've got no visible affiliation to Russia and they say they're a local self defense force, but basically they're Russians. And before anyone knows it, before the west can react, Moscow sees Crimea and is going to annex it. But then in the east of Ukraine, there's also violence in the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk, the source of fighting now. But back then, also an area where there are significant numbers who were pro Russian against the kind of tilt towards Europe in Kiev, in the capital. And so you get separatist forces there who will start to fight the new government. In Ukraine, you get militias to protect people. It's a kind of conflict heavy with Russian nationalism. And it's going to draw in Russian nationalists and imperialists from Russia to come and fight in Ukraine. You know, they want that bit of adventure, but they're struggling against the Ukrainian military. And so mercenaries are the obvious answer, aren't they, for Russia? If you want to help these groups fight, but you don't want to invade at that point, it's 2014, not 2022. You don't want to have your own military go into a war. You don't want the west to then, you know, kind of turn against you. At this point, they don't want to do that. They don't want to also lose lots of their own troops if you don't have the body bags Come home. There's a need. There's a business need.
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A
There's a business need. Yeah. And for folks who have just heard of Wagner and maybe heard of Prigozhin, to think he's kind of the commander on the ground. He's not really.
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C
Right.
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A
I mean, he's the guy who can link supply and demand here. Yeah, Right.
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C
He's.
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A
He's that kind of commercial guy where he knows what the Kremlin wants. He's got the connection to Dmitry Utkin. And Utkin knows Ukraine well. Right. Because he's been brought up there.
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C
Yeah.
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A
So there's kind of this natural fit. And Prigozhin can source violence.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And violent capacity for Putin.
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C
Yeah. So it is a little bit unclear how far Prigozhin is talked into kind of backing Utkin and mercenaries and how far he's just sensed an opportunity to make money or to be useful to the Kremlin. But I think that being useful to the Kremlin, as we've seen from his restauranting days all the way through, that's one of the kind of threads, because he knows that moves him upwards. Closer, I guess, to the inner circle.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Closer to more wealth, closer to more power, closer to more status. The other thing is he's already in the world of military contracts because he's doing the catering.
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A
That's right.
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C
You know, so. So you've already.
- [14:14]
A
You know how to navigate the bureaucracy. He knows how to do.
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C
How to do a proposal and a contract.
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A
Right. Which anyone who's ever tried to get a contract from probably any Ministry of Defense Pentagon would know. There's a particular set of skills that you need to get these contracts. It's not. There's the barrier to entry. Right. There's real barrier to entry. And he already knows how to do this.
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C
Yeah, He's a contractor.
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A
We laugh, by the way, at that. You know, sort of the food contracts. But it was a 500 million pound. It's a massive contract that he's gotten.
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C
And also, it does mean as well that his kind of catering business has logistical and supply lines, because he's got to get the food out to all parts of Russia and all kinds of places. So he's also got a kind of logistical network which also is useful if you're going to smuggle mercenaries, gangs, weapons to mercenaries around. So in a weird way, you start to see how he moves into that space. So he's going to meet with Utkin. Utkin is, as I said, Wagner. The group are also sometimes called the orchestra, which I love, you know, and the fighters, musicians and the battles they engage in are called concerts. I mean this weird jargon but it's only 200 people or so at the start. When it's in Ukraine and they're going to turn up in Luhansk, in the Donbas, where local forces are on the back foot to fight against Ukrainians, they'll open up supply corridors into Russia. Crucially they down a military transport in June 2014 which kills 49 Ukrainian servicemen. So a big deal. The mythology starts to build. Utkin, you know, will claim he was injured in the fight for Luhansk airport where his 40 men take on 400 Ukrainians, taking them by surprise. Ukrainians actually say it was more like 150 of their men. But you can see the beginnings here of this mercenary work. Next I think interesting fact though is that the money for this, a lot of it is coming from the Kremlin and partly because it's easier to be deniable if it's from the Kremlin. And there's already you start to get the first signs of bits of tension with the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, which is run by one of Putin's old St. Petersburg pals, Sergei Shoigu. He's defence minister from 2012. He's kind of pragmatic and low key but he's a kind of Putin pal. And already you get the kind of military in Moscow I think already starting. These guys are not under our control. There's a tension there. There's going to be some big developments. 2014 MH17 disaster when a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet is shot down by Russian backed rebels in Ukraine. A disaster for the people involved most of all. And it's going to get investigated interestingly by a new group called Bellingcat, the open source investigation.
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A
That point is basically unknown.
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C
Yeah, right, unknown. Elliot Higgins in his bedroom investigated this and they're going to start doing open source investigations. This is where you also see the kind of merging of Prigozhin's different things because then Prigozhin's media trolls will a unleash on Bellicap, but also try and muddy the waters about who was behind MH17. So you see the launch of kind of trolls to say oh no, it was someone else who did it. No, it was Ukrainians who did it, you know, trying to muddy the waters about the events. So again you see the kind of value to the Moscow and to the Kremlin of Prigozhin's media machine and it's kind of merging with security work and what's going on in Ukraine. So the mercenaries are on the ground in Ukraine and Putin is kind of engaging them more and more. They come under the deputy head of the gru, a General Vladimir Alekseyev. He's in charge of the kind of dirty work for the gru, Russian military intelligence, sabotage, intimidation, assassination. He's going to oversee some of the Wagner connections. They've got a training base at Murkino next to a Special Forces base, which tells you how close they are. And also Wagner also at this time, it looks like, as well as doing some fighting, they do a lot of dirty work to the Kremlin.
- [18:12]
A
I'm shocked.
- [18:13]
C
Shortened these bunch of fellow separatist leaders. So pro, technically pro. Moscow leaders get assassinated and it's always claimed it's the Ukrainians, but it looks like it's Wagner and it looks like what Moscow is doing is basically getting rid of anyone who they can't control, you know, and who won't agree with their strategy for what's to happen. And Wagner and Utkin's team are doing this and they get known as the cleaners for that work. So you can see that they're already more than just fighters and mercenaries. They're kind of involved in the darker side of things. And they're growing by 2014 to about 500 and then maybe 1,000. But then you get the Minsk agreements, which are going to kind of freeze the conflict, stop it being quite so full on, and more of a kind of low level conflict for the following years, which I guess in a way means it's over for Wagner. Their need seems to have passed at that moment.
- [19:15]
A
Well, Gordon, though an enterprising and psychopathic chef, of course, is going to find new markets, isn't he? And I mean, maybe, maybe there. With the Russians beginning to turn their attention elsewhere to new hotspots around the world. Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll see how Wagner goes global. This episode is brought to you by attio, the CRM for the AI era.
- [19:46]
C
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A
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- [21:19]
B
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up.
- [21:24]
A
My son from school. Streaming only on Peacock.
- [21:30]
C
I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
- [21:32]
A
You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned.
- [21:36]
C
What are you gonna do?
- [21:37]
A
I will do whatever it takes to.
- [21:40]
B
Get my son back.
- [21:40]
C
I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
- [21:45]
A
All her fault.
- [21:46]
C
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A
Find your next ride@autotrader.com powered by Auto Intelligence. Welcome back. It's September of 2015 and a new, I think we could say a new business opportunity is beginning to emerge for Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner group. And it's not in Ukraine. No, it's in Syria.
- [22:38]
C
Yeah. Most restaurateurs would be like, where can I open my new restaurant? We're here with our Gordon Ramsay of the Russian warlord going new market. You know, Syria looks good for. For some for an opening.
- [22:51]
A
I also like how essentially a map of the other parts of the world where Wagner will expand is essentially inversely related to how well off that part of the world happens to be doing at any point in time.
- [23:05]
C
Because normally if you're a restaurateur, you'd be like, where's a nice place where lots of rich people are going to pay lots of money for my fancy food? Here he's thinking, where is there death and destruction, chaos, disorder and a desire for mercenaries? So it is slightly opposite.
- [23:20]
A
And we should, I will say, and this will probably be the only time in the series that I defend Yevgeny Prigozhin. But you put on your mercenary hat.
- [23:30]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:32]
A
The whole value he's providing is, you know, essentially as an antidote to that, he's going to provide the security quota that's so horribly lacking.
- [23:41]
C
Yeah. In some of these countries.
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A
Eastern Syria.
- [23:45]
C
Order.
- [23:45]
A
Central African. Yeah, order. Peace and stability. Right.
- [23:48]
C
Because here we've talked about. He's worked in Ukraine, but there's been a peace deal. But now Syria country, you know. Well, that's right. The civil war, I guess, has been raging. President Assad is struggling in Syria against the opposition forces, rebels and ISIS. At this point, September 2015, it's reached a critical juncture. And of course, Russia has a lot to. Has a lot of interest, doesn't it, in Syria?
- [24:11]
A
I guess at the face of it, you think, well, why. Why in the world would that be so? I mean, Syria at that point has got maybe 20 million people. From a oil and gas standpoint, it really has no impact on the international market. Those will see, there are resources there, no nuclear weapons. It's just why. And I think a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that the timing matters. We're at a period in 2015 where much of the Arab world is in sort of turmoil. I mean, you have real sort of protest movements, insurgencies, civil wars that have grown out of the Arab Awakening in 2010 and 2011. Yeah. I think from the mindset of Vladimir Putin and the Russian sort of leadership, there's a sense that the US and in particular in places like Libya, the US has sort of attempted to intervene or intervened to suit its own geopolitical ends. And so I think there's a. There's a sense here that the Russian state, to project power and influence, to be a global region, to be a global power, needs to intervene to prop up its own sort of friends and allies in the region in the same way that the US has done. I mean, more tactically, I guess. The Russians have a naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. They've had that since they've had that concession. I think since the 67 war, there's an opportunity in Putin's mind to sort of extend Russian influence in the Mediterranean. And as we'll see over the course of the civil war, that naval base is hugely expanded and modernized. There's an airfield at Habaim in the northwest of Syria that gets built, Russian airfield. So there's a lot of Russian linkages. Not to mention, of course, that the Russians have been, you know, a massive arms supplier to the Assad regime going back into the days of the Cold War. So there's a lot of connection there. And at this point in 2015, you know, we would have thought that Assad had probably lost control of maybe three quarters of the country. And I think there was a feeling in Moscow that In the fall of 15, Assad's days are maybe numbered.
- [26:16]
C
Yeah.
- [26:17]
A
And so Putin, there's, there's, there's a whole bunch of reasons that coincide to get the Russians involved.
- [26:22]
C
Yeah. And of course Moscow wants to support Assad, but a bit like Western governments, it doesn't want to do the full scale intervention. It doesn't want to put, you know, boots on the ground, does it? So I guess what it's going to do is use air power to bomb the rebels and then give some support on the ground through mercenaries, you know, through Wagner and others.
- [26:44]
A
Now there eventually will be a Russian military intervention that's pretty extensive. But why use Russian special forces troops, soldiers, when you can use Mercenaries?
- [26:56]
C
Yeah. By 2016, you're gonna have about two and a half thousand Wagner mercenaries stationed in Syria. Interesting enough. Directed to some extent by the gru, by Russian military intelligence. You can see that they're kind of, you know, they're not out there on their own and they get loads of equipment from the Russian military. I think this is really interesting. You've got T90 tanks, helicopters, anti aircraft batteries, howitzers, artillery, you know, all from the Russian military, which is going to kind of help them. And technically it's training and equipment. It's going to get flown on military transport. Interesting enough, the salary for a mercenary then is about four to five thousand dollars a month. Pretty good.
- [27:33]
A
It's not bad.
- [27:33]
C
It's not bad. Nearly four times what a normal Russian soldier earns. So Wagner's now got some kind of, tends to be experienced commanders, you know, your Utkins and his people who are kind of running the show. And then you get all of these recruits who are coming in to kind of be the guys on the ground doing it basically for the money. You Know, often only for six months or so. Sometimes they're people who are ex soldiers themselves, but you read about them and, you know, they're sometimes like taxi drivers, you know, or mechanics who are just.
- [28:01]
A
Like, it's good money, it's good money.
- [28:02]
C
I'll do this for six months, big payday, then go back home.
- [28:05]
A
It's hard to go back a little bit in the chronology, but I think it's an important point because it speaks to the nature of Prigozhin. We're talking about the sort of official wrapping of this intervention. And it is true that Wagner has connections, deep connections, and in some cases, I think is being subordinated to the gruff and Russian intelligence in the military. But Prigozhin, the entrepreneur, as soon as he sees sort of, you know, the Russian state tilting towards Syria, you know, he starts interacting with Syrians, senior Syrians in the government, or there's a couple of Alawis close to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, known as the Jaber brothers. And Prigozhin cuts a deal with them initially. And these guys ran these kind of pro regime militias in Syria. So you kind of see how Prigozhin, he gets himself almost ingratiated or woven into these situations to create facts on the ground that then the Russian state has to kind of respond to himself useful. Making himself useful.
- [29:14]
C
Yeah. Wagner are going to kind of train alongside and work alongside some of these Syrian soldiers. But there's going to be tension, I think, with the Syrian military. As you'd expect, both sides, you know, think the other's a bit inept. There's all these reports that at times Wagner try and get Syrian troops to join a battle by shooting at their feet to try and get them moving. And at other times the Syrians shoot at the backsides of the Wagner men. But I think one of the other things that comes of that is the reputation for brutality really starts to emerge here in Syria. And there's one particular set of videos which come out in June 2017, which I think we should say, if you're.
- [29:53]
A
Listening to this with your kids, shame on you.
- [29:56]
C
Shame on you.
- [29:57]
A
You've opened up a six part podcast series on a mercenary warlord with your young children. But if you have, if you've made this life decision, you may want to skip just the next couple minutes. Yeah.
- [30:08]
C
Because these videos, June 2017, which emerge, there's some of a man being beaten with a sledgehammer, also of a body being set alight, there's a beheading, there are people kicking the guy's head around who's been beheaded. And these videos start to circulate amongst Russian military veterans. And you can hear someone. It's clearly in the desert, so it looks like Syria. Someone speaking Russian in the video. And it gets geolocated to a gas facility in Syria. And this is a kind of big moment, actually, in Wagner in its story, because it's going to cement this idea that Wagner are a kind of nasty bunch capable of brutality, but also create a kind of cult around them amongst people who kind of like that in Russia, I think, which is a bit wild.
- [31:00]
A
I like to. Now, I think you could picture as kind of your mental model for this. If Gordon Ramsay was running Gastown in the Mad Max movies, you know, out in the desert, he's kind of, you know, he's wearing, like, a medieval Dungeon Master outfit. There's sort of an apocalyptic. You know, there's gas flares going off, guys driving around in gigantic trucks.
- [31:25]
C
Yeah.
- [31:26]
A
You know, with skulls mounted on the front. This is what's going on in Eastern City. Yeah, you're right. It is Mad Max.
- [31:32]
C
Yeah. So the man who's kind of getting sledgehammered, it was supposedly a deserter from the Syrian army who'd been captured by Wagner. There's an investigation by Wagner's internal security, not into killing the man, but how the film got out of killing the man, I love that, you know, and it turned out it had been shared. And it kind of creates this weird, dark fan culture online as it goes viral. Part of the kind of brand. And Prigozhin will say, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, but it's gonna help recruitment. That's what's kind of crazy. Particularly amongst military veterans, nationalists and others.
- [32:09]
A
Who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer?
- [32:11]
C
Who would like to be swinging a sledgehammer? Yeah, because the sledgehammer is gonna become associated as the kind of unofficial logo, brand thing of the Wagner group. So that's the kind of brutality. Also important for later in the story that Prigozhin will get to know the new Russian military commander on the ground, a brutal general called General Surovikind, who was known as General Armageddon because of his. A bit on the nose, isn't it?
- [32:40]
A
Yeah.
- [32:41]
C
His preference for flattening cities from the air. The two will become allies, and the general, interestingly enough, becomes an honorary member of Wagner. Wagner plays a role in the Palmyra operations. 2016. Then the Syrian forces.
- [32:54]
A
This is a fight against the Islamic State in this central. There's a City in central Syria, Palmyra. Ancient set of ruins, actually. Lovely, beautiful place I visited. It had been a kind of hotbed of Islamic State activity during the civil war.
- [33:10]
C
When Wagner wins some battles there, who gets the credit? Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu tells Putin, we took Palmyra. And then Prigozhin says, no, no, no, we did. And Shoigu reportedly stated that the Gopniks cannot go down in history. Now, Gopnik is like a low level Crip. It's a thorough thug. Thug, thug. Or also have the kind of connotation of being trashy working class. It says something already about the way in which Wagner is seen as these kind of rough guys, the military are like, can't let them have credit. You see this also, this kind of view of some of the elite, which is Prigozhin's getting a little bit above his station. He's a bit of a thug. The other thing which is going to be important for Prigozhin, I think, is that he starts to see, doesn't he, that how do you make money? And one of the answers in Palmyra, there's, I think there's some oil and gas.
- [34:02]
A
Yeah. And he's going to work out gas town.
- [34:04]
C
It's a gas town. Yeah. There's a way of funding this through the resources which are on the ground.
- [34:10]
A
Which would suggest to me that these contracts that he's on are lucrative, but not staggeringly so from the military. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it makes a ton of sense that if you're going to provide security to a regime, a great way to ensure that you're paid well is to get access to some amount of the cash flow that comes out of an asset. Right. And it could be a mine, could be a gas plant. Right. It's a change to his business model here. It's the next evolution.
- [34:46]
C
That's right. Which is, you know, you can sign a contract with the Syrian government saying if we bring a gas facility back under Syrian control, we get a quarter of the profits. And it's kind of good business for both sides, isn't it? Because you create an incentive for yourself to get it back. And for the Syrians, yeah, we have to give up a quarter of the profits. But if these guys can take back some of these facilities from ISIS, then.
- [35:09]
A
It kind of gets 75% of something we had nothing of before.
- [35:12]
C
Yeah. I think what's interesting as well is you start to get the ambiguity of is he doing this for the Russian state, is he doing it for himself? Is it feels like Much more for himself. You know, the overall policy of help the Syrians is for the Russian state. But the I'm going to do a deal to get this gas facility is about enriching himself and Wagner, basically, and funding their activities here.
- [35:33]
A
You could say he might not be doing this at the exact direction of the Russian state, but he's operating with overall sort of protection and cover from the big boss. And so he knows there's a set of rules and there's sort of some guardrails to his behavior and I'm sure how much he can take and how much needs to be kicked up the chain money wise to the powers that be. So I think he knows the rules. Yeah, he's doing this because, you know, Putin and the people above him in the Kremlin, they want this to happen.
- [36:03]
C
Yeah. That also explains this one absolutely fascinating story, which we'll just look into. So this Incident happens in February 2018 in Deir Ezzor. Am I pronouncing that right? Yeah.
- [36:17]
A
Largest city in eastern Syria at this point. It's a really complicated place because we have a small contingent, as we'll see, of US Troops on the ground. We have the US Backed sort of Kurdish forces that are there. We have, of course, the Russians operating in Syria. And you know, the Russians have been really on the ground in force in Syria since 2015. So three years at this point. The US and the Russians are trying desperately to avoid accidents killing each other. There's a deconfliction mechanism that's been set up to make sure that we don't get into a shooting war with the Russians.
- [37:00]
C
Yeah.
- [37:00]
A
And now we've got Wagner out there.
- [37:02]
C
Yeah. And Wagner forces at this point in February 2018 are going to along with Syrians. And it's a bit unclear which Syrians, you know, militia or government and even how many Syrians there are. But Wagner forces are heading for a particular gas facility, the Conoco gas facility.
- [37:18]
A
Gas town.
- [37:19]
C
Gas town. The gas town, which had traded hands a number of times in the civil war. It's a kind of pretty valuable gas facility in the country, potentially offering hundreds of millions of dollars a year revenue. But it is right over that deconfliction line, you know, with the other forces just on the other side of it. And right next to the Conoco gas facility is a small observation post containing about 30 U.S. special forces, you know, Delta Force Rangers and some Kurdish allies. Now, they watch a kind of buildup of these Wagner forces, you know, maybe with some Syrian forces near their base over a Period of days. And then they see them getting closer and closer. They cross the Euphrates River. They cross what would normally be the line of separation. The Americans have a support base about 20 miles away which is looking at drone feeds. And they can see what looks like a force assembling to take the plant. So at about 3pm one afternoon, they see the forces including, which is about 500 troops, nearly 30 vehicles, edging towards the plant. And of course, at the plant is this outpost, you know, of Special Force, US Special Forces and Kurds. By early evening, they're getting very close to the base. And this gets escalated upwards, as you'd expect, to the kind of U.S. air operations base in Qatar, base in Kuwait, and to the Pentagons, it's going all the way up. Aircraft are placed on alert. Everyone's watching drone feeds. At 8.30pm, three Russian T72 tanks are moving within a mile of the plant. The mission support base 20 miles away. The Green Berets and Marines are thinking, we might have to go and fight. And as you said, there's this contact isn't there for Russian and US forces to communicate and deconflict. So as you'd expect, the Americans are on the phone, you know, and kind of every day they're talking to each other. And the Americans ask the Russians, are the troops approaching the base yours? And the Russian high command says, no, they're not ours. Now, that's what is later testified, you know, by the Secretary of Defense to a Senate committee. And yet the people on the ground are listening to radio transmissions with the people speaking Russian.
- [39:32]
A
You can see how it would not be immediately believable that you don't know who they are and yet go to the Russian side of this, it's easy to see why the Russian military may have thought that'd be kind of great if the US Killed these guys. Yeah, because there's no love lost between the military and Wagner.
- [39:53]
C
So in the outpost, you know, by the gas facility, they see the tanks, these T72 tanks turn out of a kind of neighborhood, and then they start to fire. And they're firing tank artillery, mortar rounds at the base. The Americans dive into foxholes for another 15 minutes. They're trying to call the Russians and tell them to stop, you know, nothing back. The US Fire warning shot still advancing. Now, having been told the Russians denied all knowledge, the Secretary of Defense directs, you know, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the force to be annihilated, the attacking force. So the US launches this staggeringly, overwhelmingly ferocious attack on the forces attacking the outpost.
- [40:37]
A
I love the just Alphabet soup of weapons platforms that were brought to bear. F15 fighters, MQ9 Reaper drones, fire cal fire missiles. AC130 attack aircraft. AC130, that's a weapon system. That's a friend of the pod. If you remember back to our early Afghanistan episodes, they get cooled up. They are called up to absolutely wreck Al Qaeda prisoners during that prison rebellion. Ah, 64 Apache attack helicopters, B52 strategic bombers. It's just everybody's. Everybody's in the. The game. I wonder what the US taxpayer paid for this.
- [41:15]
C
It's pretty big, it's pretty significant. I mean, it's literally overkill. And then you also have the kind of Special Forces team from the kind of support base kind of arrives and they get there about 11:30, they've dark, they've driven 20 miles using thermal imaging cameras. And they actually have to stop because there's just so much kind of fire going into this. And eventually they engage the fighters as well with machine guns from the roof of their vehicles. So now there's about 40Americans on site. The Russians don't seem to have night vision, which I think is also a disadvantage. And so there's just this massive wave of air power which goes on for about an hour, hour. And it's kind of total annihilation.
- [41:53]
A
Yeah, Getting Prigozhin like that Homer Simpson meme, where he's just slowly backing into the hedge after this happens, that didn't go very well.
- [42:01]
C
Retreat, I think, is the goal. So at the end, there's no US casualties. One Syrian ally to the US is wounded. How many of the attackers are killed? I mean, the truth is no one knows. I mean, dozens. Best guess around 80. Some people thought 200, 300. It's a kind of crazy story because as you said, what is going on? Prigozhin will say this was an authorised operation. I had permission. You know, I discussed it with the head of the military. Others, though, will suggest that this is Prigozhin freelancing. That also, I have to say, seems entirely plausible to me. And then the question is, why does the Russian military say he's not ours and kind of, you know, go for it?
- [42:38]
A
I mean, it has a lot of sort of Prigozhin maybe pushing the limits of what's acceptable and finding, you know, sort of he's seeing what's possible and he found the limit.
- [42:53]
C
Yeah.
- [42:54]
A
And he might have thought. Or he might have thought he had agreement from the Ministry of Defense, or he might have thought that if we really get into it, we'll get some backup. And it didn't happen. So I'm not sure if it's some elaborate Ministry of Defense or Russian military setup of Prigozhin. It could be more that he thought he would get some help, and he didn't get it.
- [43:17]
C
Prigozhin will claim that the Russian Ministry of Defense never passed on the warnings that the Americans would attack.
- [43:25]
A
To him, that seems entirely believable, which.
- [43:27]
C
Also seems kind of believable. It's possible the Russian military thought at first, yeah, let him take that. And then when they see the Americans pile in, they're like, oh, actually, we don't want to start a war. We're not going to go defend Wagner. So let's pretend it's all Wagner's fault. But, you know, it's very ambiguous. But I guess the crucial point is it leaves Prigozhin furious with the Russian Ministry of Defense. And so, you know, there's been a bit of tension before, but this is already the start of a kind of the story which will plot not with the Kremlin, but with the Ministry of Defense in Moscow. Sergei Shoigu, the Defense Minister, you know, General Gerasimov, who's the kind of professional head of the military, and General Armageddon. Yeah, General Armageddon. Who is Surovikin?
- [44:10]
A
Oh, is that Surovikin? Yeah, dear. I've got.
- [44:12]
C
You've got your generals messed up.
- [44:13]
A
I got my generals all messed up. I got Gordon Ramsay on the board brain.
- [44:18]
C
And he feels betrayed and angry. Prigozhin, he's kind of on his own path to some extent now, still allied to the Kremlin. Just eight days after this big, big battle is the moment he gets indicted publicly by the US in 2018 for election interference for the 2016 election. So he's now, I guess you have a picture of a guy who's growing in power, but he was also getting more angry and more high profile, but who's also got a kind of business model which he thinks works, I think.
- [44:53]
A
There with the business model working. Prigozhin extremely angry with the Ministry of Defense and with some other terrible places in the world where he can expand that business model. Let's end it. When we come back, we will see how he moves out from the Syrian foothold into Africa. But. But if you don't want to wait, you don't have to. If you want to see how Yevgeny Prigozhin marches around the world, join the declassified club, go to the restisclassified.com Sign up. Become a member. Binge. Listen to the episodes. We'll see you next time.
- [45:33]
C
See you next time.
- [45:40]
B
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