103. Putin's Secret Army: The Coup That Almost Brought Down Russia (Ep 6)

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Speaker 1 It's better if you kill me, but I cannot lie. Russia stands on the threshold of a catastrophe.
If you don't tighten the bolts, the airplane will crumble in mid-air. Welcome to the Rest is Classified.

Speaker 1 I'm David McCloskey. I'm Golden Carrera.
And that, of course, is Yevgeny Progozhin. And we are now wrapping up our six-part series, our deep dive into the life and times and joys of Yevgeny Progojin.

Speaker 1 And in this very last chapter, we're going to see how Progozhin, who's, when we left him last time, has

Speaker 1 started

Speaker 1 on the rise in Ukraine. He's become critical to the war effort.
He's building his image and brand back home.

Speaker 1 And I think aspiring to a role in Russian political life and in Putin's inner circle that he feels is his due.

Speaker 1 And he's going to run into some resistance to that, isn't he, in this final chapter in his life.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the tension is going to be between Wagner-Progoshin and the regular Russian military leadership, which is going to see effectively Putin's inner circle going to war with itself as well as in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 And the spark for this is going to be a series of really heavy battles involving Wagner mercenary forces in Ukraine. Wagner's involved in the east, Solidar, January 2023, assault mining town.

Speaker 4 Progoshin poses there with soldiers and tries to take credit for victory, one of the few that Russia's had, so it's a big deal. And he's saying, I did it.

Speaker 4 But the Russian Ministry of Defense at first doesn't mention Wagner at all.

Speaker 1 Progoshin's furious.

Speaker 4 His narrative is my boys are doing the fighting and dying, and they're being abandoned by the top brass in the military.

Speaker 1 Taking on maybe what sounds a little bit less like the role of the aloof businessman and more of a father figure.

Speaker 1 I think father figure is stretching it.

Speaker 4 It's more the voice of the ordinary person and the ordinary Russian soldier against the elite who are resentful. The battle, as as we said, is with Sergei Shoigu, the old friend of Putin.

Speaker 4 And this rivalry between Shoigu and Progozhin goes back to 2014. Shoigu is also going to fire a deputy in the Ministry of Defense who'd been the one handing the kind of contracts to Progozhin.

Speaker 4 So I think Progozhin can sense that Shoigu is maneuvering against him. February 2023, there's a restriction on Wagner recruiting in prison.

Speaker 4 Other mercenary groups are appearing, some under the kind of companies that exist. Progozhin is kind of angry.
The new groups that are arriving make it feel like he's being pushed out of business.

Speaker 1 And these are rival

Speaker 4 mercenary

Speaker 1 groups.

Speaker 4 But more under the control of the Ministry of Defense than his group. Surovikin, General Armageddon.

Speaker 4 the honorary member of Wagner, gets removed as overall commander of forces in Ukraine in January of 2023. And Garasimov, the kind of head of the overall military, takes personal charge.

Speaker 4 So Progozhin can see the pushback. He's trying to kind of use his media machine in turn, picturing himself on the front line, complaining that they're doing all the fighting.

Speaker 4 He's using the war correspondents, courting them, directing his anger, not just against the top brass, but a kind of corrupt elite is the way he puts it.

Speaker 4 Interestingly enough, a lot of the focus is on kids. Progoshin has made a big deal of saying the kids of ministers are off partying.
They're living it up while ordinary Russian boys are dying.

Speaker 4 Then a video of Progoshin's own children turns up singing on holiday at his daughter in Dubai and places like that.

Speaker 1 It's kind of shocked that he's not genuine on social media. Yeah, so exactly.

Speaker 4 It's like revealed the realities does not match the myth.

Speaker 1 But so the kind of PR battle is growing.

Speaker 4 And also there's kind of smears against him. One of the interesting smears that comes out, which gets spread quite widely, is that he'd been sexually abused.
in prison by other inmates.

Speaker 4 And a tattooed man says he was a crime boss back in the kind of 80s, you know, when Progozhin was in prison. And Progozhin had been what's known as a rooster and performed various intimate acts.

Speaker 4 We won't get into the detail back in the day.

Speaker 4 Now, no idea if it's true, not much sign necessarily it was true, but it's a kind of sign that the dark arts and the smear campaigns, you know, are being turned against Progozhin himself.

Speaker 1 And so, I mean, I guess a year after the war in Ukraine has started, he's lost important patrons inside the the war effort. General Armageddon's gone.

Speaker 1 The bureaucratic conflict with Shoygu at the Ministry of Defense is heating up. There's sparring over contracts and Progozin is losing.

Speaker 1 Shoyu is trying to create alternatives, mercenary alternatives to Wagner. Yeah.
And there is a PR campaign that's been unleashed to discredit him. So if you're Progozhin,

Speaker 1 you're thinking, I've provided all of these services

Speaker 1 to the Russian state, and this is the thanks I get.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's the way he thinks. What he doesn't see is a logical person will go, maybe I need to kind of negotiate, think about my position.

Speaker 4 But he's come from the prison courtyard culture where you never back down, you always escalate, you always show strength. And that's what he's going to do.

Speaker 4 And this is all going to kind of come to a head over another really significant battle over a place called Bakhmut.

Speaker 4 From the winter of 2022 becomes probably one of the most brutal, long-running battles of the Ukraine war.

Speaker 4 The Russians trying to take this back from the Ukrainians. Both sides are going to throw everything at this battle and it becomes absolutely brutal meat grinder in the mud from late 2022.

Speaker 4 The Russians are just throwing these kind of meat waves that we talked about last time of people to take sometimes just 100 meters of land a day for very heavy losses.

Speaker 4 And the Wagner group are being used on the front line and they're going to be the ones taking the heavy casualties.

Speaker 1 You've written about this. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I wrote about some of these meat waves because I interviewed some of the Ukrainian commanders and they just couldn't believe the way that Russians use their troops.

Speaker 4 And this is one of the kind of great imbalances between Russia and Ukraine is the Russian side just has a kind of casualness about the loss of life and about throwing troops to die.

Speaker 4 Whereas the Ukrainians have got some of their best troops there. And when they die, it's a kind of tragedy, whereas the Russians are just throwing Wagner and prisoners at them.

Speaker 4 And it's one of the kind of challenges for Ukraine. It's kind of how you deal with that.

Speaker 4 And by, I think, February 2023, the US reckoned that Wagner had about 30,000 wounded or killed, mania in Bakhmut.

Speaker 4 And the stories are just kind of, you know, grim and people who flee get executed. And it becomes interesting here because one theory is that the Russian military is deliberately trying to weaken.

Speaker 4 progression and derail Wagner by letting as many of his men fight and die there as possible, which actually does seem kind of plausible.

Speaker 4 If you're the Russian Ministry of Defense and you don't like this guy who's on the rise, you just go, we're going to kind of wear him down.

Speaker 4 Some of the kind of maneuverings around here are really interesting and odd.

Speaker 4 So there's a US intelligence report which gets leaked, something called the Discord leaks, which claims that in January 2023, Progoshin tries to negotiate with the Ukrainians and through a back channel secretly and says to the Ukrainians, if they withdraw from Bakhmut and let Wagner take Bakhmut, he would give Ukraine information on Russian troop positions so they could attack them.

Speaker 4 Now, if that's true, it's nuts, isn't it?

Speaker 1 But is it the big if true category? Or do you buy it?

Speaker 4 I don't know. I mean, it could be that Progoshin was kind of...

Speaker 4 lying to the

Speaker 4 you could imagine him telling that to the Ukrainians just let me take that back and having no intent no intention of following through but he wants the victory of taking bakhmut because he knows how much is riding on it so he might be kind of lying about it rather than really planning to do it but you know he staked his reputation on taking bahmut and he promises to take it by may 9th 2023 you know victory day in russia it's not going well he's thinking that he's not getting enough ammo from the russian ministry of defense Now, it may be that they're restricting ammo.

Speaker 4 It may be that they've not got enough ammo. It may be he's looking for an excuse for why he's not winning.
But this is where the whole thing starts to unravel and go out of control.

Speaker 4 5th of May, there's a video of Progoshin standing by corpses of his own men. It looks dark and he sounds kind of angry and wild.
And he goes, these guys are Wagner PMCs that died today.

Speaker 4 The blood is still fresh. Now listen to me, you bitches.
These are someone's fathers, someone's sons. And he's kind of screaming.

Speaker 4 And those pieces of shit, sorry about the language, that don't send ammunition, those bitches will be eating their entrails in hell we have 70 ammo shortages and this is the famous line shoigu garasimov where is the fucking ammunition he's crossing a line here right he's crossing because he hasn't done this no up to this point complaints would have been private or sort of sent through yeah a third party to leak out and now he's he's just doing it directly and i think it's a sign of desperation he's not winning as he'd hoped he's losing men he's got to blame someone And this is a big deal because, of course, you know, this is supposed to be the special military operation.

Speaker 4 It's not a war, but this is coming out in Russian kind of media and Russian telegram channels with pictures of dead bodies, which again, you're not kind of supposed to see. So it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 4 And then there's another video, 9th of May, complaining about the lack of shells and ammo. He's saying, you know, they're collecting them in warehouses.

Speaker 4 Instead of spending a shell to kill the enemy and save the lives of our soldiers, they let our soldiers die. And the happy grandfather thinks everything is fine.

Speaker 1 That's a Putin reference, right there.

Speaker 4 This is the thing. Who's he talking about? Because there is this kind of talk in Russia that Putin, like his critics call him grandpa in the bunker.

Speaker 4 And it's the way that aging leaders in the Soviet Union were kind of referred to as kind of grandpa. Progozin will later say,

Speaker 4 you know, that he wasn't talking about Putin. He'll kind of give multiple choice answers.

Speaker 4 He will never actually say who he's referring to, but he kind of tries to point that it's Garasimov he's talking about, the military chief.

Speaker 4 So he'll try and point away from being Putin, but a lot of people will interpret it.

Speaker 4 Will assume it is.

Speaker 4 So something's kind of changing. Bakhmut is going to fall.
Wagner are going to claim they want it. The Ukrainians are going to say it's not true.

Speaker 1 And this is basically late May of 2023 when Bakhmut falls. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And by this time, maybe

Speaker 4 20,000 Wagner men have been killed in the battle alone, killed.

Speaker 1 And prior to the war in Ukraine, the entire size of Wagner was like 4,000 to 5,000 people. Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 And then it had grown to 25,000, and now they've just lost 20,000 in Bahmoud. I mean, they've grown because of the prisoners,

Speaker 4 but it's brutal. I think this is the moment where he breaks with the Ministry of Defense, partly because it's not going well for him.

Speaker 4 And he becomes outspoken about the whole war, which is something no one is supposed to do in Russia, but he's escalating.

Speaker 4 He says the aim might have been to demilitarize Ukraine, but it's had the opposite effect.

Speaker 4 So he's now starting to criticize the overall decision-making the strategic leadership the kind of ideas behind the war not just the ministry of defense giving him enough ammo and he's accusing the russian forces of deliberately killing his people may 24th another interview and this interview is a big one because he kind of warns if the toll of dead and coffins for ordinary russians continues while the elite shake their asses in the sun then the homes of the elite could be stormed by people with pitchforks.

Speaker 4 You know, and he singles out the daughter of Shoigu, the defense minister, who'd been spotted vacationing in Dubai with her fiancée, a fitness blogger.

Speaker 4 And he said, you know, first the soldiers will stand up. After that, their loved ones will rise up.

Speaker 4 There are already tens of thousands of them, relatives of those killed, and there'll probably be hundreds of thousands. We cannot avoid that.
This divide can end, as in 1917, with a revolution.

Speaker 1 So, this is where, okay, so throughout the series,

Speaker 1 we have used Gordon Ramsey

Speaker 1 as sort of the, you know, a comparison point for what happens if a psychopathic chef.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Speaker 4 yeah,

Speaker 1 becomes a mercenary warlord. Yeah.
And how the two

Speaker 1 are not so dissimilar.

Speaker 1 And we actually, you know, if Gordon Ramsey's lawyers are listening, we, of course, we have a Gordon Ramsey quote that we've used to demonstrate that Gordon Ramsey also believes that chefs are psychopaths.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we're on solid footing there.

Speaker 1 But this is where I think the Gordon-Ramsey comparison has already broken down. It broke down three episodes ago.
But now it's definitely broken down. Now it's definitely broken down.

Speaker 1 But this behavior that we've charted here in the spring of 2023, it would be akin to Eric Prince, who's the head of Blackwater, essentially running a smear campaign against the Bush administration and the Pentagon's handling of the war in Iraq.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And a warning of a revolution.

Speaker 1 Warning of a revolution. Yeah.
If the course of the war doesn't change. And, oh, by the way, this would all be happening with a relative body count in Iraq several orders of magnitude higher.

Speaker 1 And so it'd be much more visceral at home than it ever was. That would be kind of the equivalent here.
I think that's which would be very frustrating for the White House.

Speaker 1 They would not be happy about it. They would not be happy.

Speaker 4 Because he's warning of a revolution. And it's again, he's trying to position himself as like the voice of the masses against this elite.

Speaker 4 And he's saying we must introduce martial law, must have mobilization. He starts saying, you know, I shouldn't have been called Putin's chef.

Speaker 4 I should have been called Putin's butcher and everything would have been fine. I mean, he

Speaker 1 sounds exasperated.

Speaker 4 He's exasperated.

Speaker 4 And he's pointing his anger towards kind of Putin and the overall leadership. And this is hard for Putin because Putin's, you know, message to everyone is things are fine in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 Special military operation is proceeding, maybe not entirely as planned, but we're going to get there.

Speaker 4 Now we get to the kind of final moments where it's really going to kind of descend because the Ministry of Defense, I think, are moving against him. Early June, June 10th, 2023, Shoigu.

Speaker 4 Defense Minister orders all volunteer groups, mercenaries, had to sign official contracts with the Ministry of Defense by the 1st of July.

Speaker 4 So basically saying we are going to bring all of these groups under our control. Now that is basically the end for Wagner.

Speaker 4 And I think it's also starting to get clearer that Putin is going to have to choose in this increasingly kind of visceral, visible battle between Shoigu and Progoshin.

Speaker 4 Putin's going to have to choose sides because those two are kind of warring with each other.

Speaker 1 Which is not something you want to do as the autocrat, right? We might think of a dictator as wanting to just be dictating.

Speaker 1 but I think it's better for Putin if these courtiers understand the guardrails and kind of play by the rules and he can kind of balance them subtly. Having to weigh in

Speaker 1 almost publicly in favor of one over the other, this is the sort of final fail-safe in the autocratic system, right? You don't want it to get to this point.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I think at this point, Putin is going to choose. And the problem for Progoshin is he's not going to choose him.

Speaker 1 Maybe there, with this fateful choice looming, let's take a break. When we come back, we will see how it all goes horribly wrong for Evgeny Progoshin.

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Speaker 1 well welcome back it is friday the 23rd of june 2023 i'm sure it was a lovely day

Speaker 1 and wagner forces are moving from ukraine back into russia which is not what you're supposed to do it's the wrong direction. It's the wrong direction.

Speaker 4 They're supposed to be going to fight in Ukraine. But this is the moment where Progozhin realizes he is being locked out.
His overall plan of, I'm going to force my way into the inner circle.

Speaker 4 I'm going to kind of get Putin to kind of get rid of Shoya. He's overplayed his hand.
But what he's going to do, he's going to double down. He's not going to back

Speaker 4 as always, which is the Progoshian style. Now, he's going to claim his camp was attacked by the Russians, by missiles, and some of his fighters killed.

Speaker 4 Now, it looks like that was a kind of staged attack or faked, a kind of pretext.

Speaker 4 One of the interesting things, I think, is that the FSB, Russia's Security Service, don't seem to spot what's going on, which I think partly suggests that this is quite an impulsive move.

Speaker 4 It's not a problem.

Speaker 1 There wasn't a lot of advance warning there.

Speaker 4 There's not a lot of advantages.

Speaker 1 Which also would be classic Pergoshian. Yeah.
Impulsive.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I think one of the problems, because the FSB, as the KGB in its time, you know, spent a lot of time actually spying on its own military precisely to prevent coups and mutinies.

Speaker 4 But in this case, they don't seem to have had the kind of intelligence within Wagner because it's a mercenary group outside of their control.

Speaker 1 Which is even more astounding because one of the larger and most important units or departments inside the FSB is the set of military counterintelligence, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, to keep tabs on the people with weapons. Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 And they failed.

Speaker 1 And they failed here.

Speaker 4 And Progozhin issues a video which is kind of off the rails now. He says the whole justification for the special military operation, the war in Ukraine, is a lie.

Speaker 4 He says the idea that the people in the Donbass, the east of Ukraine, were suffering genocide at the hands of Ukraine and that Russia had to intervene to protect them from an imminent threat wasn't true.

Speaker 4 You know, what was the war for, he says? It was needed so that Shoigu could receive a hero star. The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war.
Now, this is wild stuff, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Because he's undermining the whole basis for this war.

Speaker 1 And I guess he's got 25,000 men that in the middle of the year. That's what he says.
Yeah. Could march to Moscow to make a point.

Speaker 4 It's thought they've got about 25,000 men then. I mean, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration.
So he says, The evil carried out by the country's military leadership must be stopped.

Speaker 4 And so he says, he's going to restore

Speaker 4 justice in the military and after that, justice for all of Russia. It's a march for justice, David.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, who wouldn't join a march for justice? I mean, on Moscow, led by a bunch of ex-convicts. Yeah.
But he's portraying, I love the cannibals marching back to Moscow.

Speaker 1 He's trying to make it sound like Martin Luther King or something, you know, like we're on a civil rights march.

Speaker 4 When in fact, it's, yeah, as you said, it's prisoners and cannibals and Dmitry Utkin with his SS tattoos.

Speaker 1 It feels like he is

Speaker 1 improvising. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that there's not a plan. Yeah.
This is why I don't think we should think about it as a coup attack.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 1 I think it's part of a negotiation.

Speaker 4 Yeah. It's a mutiny, it's maybe

Speaker 1 a better word.

Speaker 4 The mutiny as a negotiating tactic. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes. We will depart the front

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 march to Moscow to demonstrate that you need us

Speaker 1 and in the hopes of getting to a better outcome with the Ministry of Defense and Jude Gu.

Speaker 1 And that seems like the sort of thing that the FSB's military counterintelligence units who would presumably be watching Wagner and have sources inside Wagner, you would think, wouldn't really pick up on until it's happening.

Speaker 1 Because there's no high-level plan. Yeah, there is no.
Yeah, I think that's right. There's maybe not even the concepts of a plan.

Speaker 4 I do love this fact.

Speaker 4 His mother, Violeta, who we encountered at the start of the story, will later say that when we saw each other before the march, I told him, Zenya, that's his nickname, only people on the internet will support you.

Speaker 4 No one will go with you.

Speaker 1 People aren't like that now. No one will come out to the square.

Speaker 4 Her son replied, no. they will support me.
Now, I don't know whether she's misremembering that, but I love it.

Speaker 1 I love it. Only people on the internet.

Speaker 1 just people on the internet

Speaker 4 like the twitter trolls will support me yes i'll get loads of likes but no one's going to come out in march and then this leads us to saturday the 24th of june and that is i so i can remember this vividly because i was in the bbc that day in the newsroom covering this and it is one of the more memorable days it was one of those days where you thought history could turn you know this could be the day and as the day starts and as it unfolds where you think, this could be the day that Putin is removed from power, in which there's a coup in Russia, in which a civil war starts in Russia.

Speaker 4 As the day was unfolding, you genuinely didn't know what was going to happen or where it was going to end. Because Wagner forces have moved into Russia.

Speaker 4 They take the military headquarters for the southern command of Russia, which is in Rostov-on-Don. Best guess is there's about 8,000 troops from Wagner who have taken this.

Speaker 4 Now, the public, it's so interesting. They don't know what to make of it in the city because ordinary life is going on.

Speaker 4 Wagner troops are now occupying the city, and people are asking for selfies with Progozin when they see that. They're like, it's Progoshin.
You know, he's the kind of nationalist hero.

Speaker 4 And he appears in Rostov in a number of videos. And it's a weird scene because the kind of police are there as well.
And also some of the regular Russian military.

Speaker 1 It would be confusing.

Speaker 4 It's just confusing. No one seems to know what to do.
And one of the soldiers asks, you know, Progoshin, what are you doing here? And he says, saving Russia, which is his line.

Speaker 4 But it's interesting, there's no resistance,

Speaker 4 which also leads to some, you know, wonder,

Speaker 4 is there some collusion? I think this is the key fact. Actually, the regular Russian troops don't want to fight Wagner.

Speaker 1 Why would you even assume that he's attempting a mutiny at this point?

Speaker 4 But even if he is, do you want to fight it?

Speaker 4 He might be the winning side. And I think what we'll see during this day is lots of people basically stand on the sidelines.

Speaker 4 I mean, in a way, his mother is right when she says no one will go with you but it's also true they're not with putin they're not kind of protesting or fighting him so they are basically everyone is standing on the sidelines waiting to see how this how this plays out so the kremlin you know on saturday is trying to work out how to to to respond one of the most interesting things video by general surovikin who we've mentioned a number of times general armageddon now he is an honorary member of wagner the kremlin get him to do a video in which he says i urge you to stop.

Speaker 4 Now, when you look at that video, I remember watching it on the day, it looks like a hostage video. You know, he is in a kind of blank room reading to camera going, I urge you to stop.

Speaker 1 That might just be the natural, sunny, charming personality of General Army. Army Kiddin.

Speaker 4 But I think U.S. intelligence is later going to think he had advance warning.
And I think there is a very logical...

Speaker 4 possibility, which is that Progojin is thinking, I'm going to end up Ministry of Defense. Surovikin I'll make the head of the armed forces.

Speaker 4 They're in cahoots, but the Kremlin have got to Surovikin first and said, you're going to make this video. You know, there's no way that's going to happen.

Speaker 4 Now, crucially, at 10 o'clock in the morning on the Saturday morning, Putin comes out and he denounces those stabbing Russia in the back at a time of war.

Speaker 4 This is exactly the kind of blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917 when the country was fighting the First World War, he says, warning about civil war.

Speaker 4 And he says there's going to be a counter-terrorism regime in Moscow.

Speaker 4 And the organizers of this mutiny have betrayed their own people and their country and this is you know this is a disaster for progoshin because if the point is negotiation pressure on Putin to kind of get him to get rid of shoiku it's failed and let me guess gordon for once in his life you've given me progoshin just turns around and backs down

Speaker 4 he goes yeah okay i'll go back no instead just keep on going he keeps on going because he sends a convoy a military convoy of wagner up the M4 motorway from Rostov to Moscow, to the capital.

Speaker 4 He must be hoping that on the way the army, the National Guard maybe will join him.

Speaker 4 I mean, Moscow seems paralyzed, I think, at this point, because one of the problems is they don't actually have defenses set up to stop a mercenary force. Where's Putin?

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, he's done this address, but everyone thinks Putin's maybe fled, just in case they make it.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's all these kind of mysterious questions about, you know, are there private jets flying out of Moscow, which belong to oligarchs and others? Is Putin's presidential jet heading for St.

Speaker 4 Petersburg? No one knows.

Speaker 1 Putin, throughout the conflict, has sort of moved, floated around. Yeah.
Right. Regularly.
Yeah. Down at the Black Sea.
He's in Moscow. He's up.
I mean, he has, you know, place in St. Petersburg, too.

Speaker 1 So it could just be

Speaker 1 part of doing business.

Speaker 4 He often has these identical looking offices. So he can be filmed in an office in Sochi or wherever.

Speaker 1 You won't know where he is. And you won't know where he is.

Speaker 4 You'll think he's in the Kremlin. So he can move around.

Speaker 1 His Zoom background is the same. His Zoom background is the same.

Speaker 4 So the convoy is making its way up. There's some half-hearted roadblocks.
Now actual resistance gets to 200 miles from Moscow. It's only a couple of hours away now.

Speaker 1 We should say Progozhin is not in the convoy. Yeah, right? I originally saw it.
He stays in Rostov. He stays in Rostov.
So he's basically, guys,

Speaker 1 you go on ahead.

Speaker 4 The Russian Air Force flies over, and the Wagner team are actually going to shoot down.

Speaker 4 They've got kind of mobile air defense, at least one, maybe three helicopters and a command aircraft during this.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's a big deal because you're now Wagner mercenaries are killing Russian military. Yeah, this is the moment where you go civil war.

Speaker 1 My interpretation of, I guess, fence-sitting that we're seeing on the part of a lot of Russian military security services elites are kind of just everyone's looking and watching and waiting to see how it goes down.

Speaker 1 You could kind of look at it through multiple lenses. I mean, one is,

Speaker 1 does this actually show some of the strength of the system that Putin has built? That no one actually joins Progoshin? Yeah. And they just kind of sit back?

Speaker 4 I'm not sure if I'd

Speaker 4 think I'd do that if I was Putin. I'd be like.

Speaker 1 Or does it reflect

Speaker 1 maybe some of, I mean, because obviously in an autocratic system like this,

Speaker 1 there's not a lot of incentive to act, to go do things, right? I mean, Progoshin's a little different from a lot of these other kind of Russian elites, right?

Speaker 1 In that way, because he's very entrepreneurial. He goes out and does stuff.
You know, you kind of get the sense that

Speaker 1 they're hedging for sure. And that it feels like a double-edged sword to me because it's helpful to Putin here in that nobody quite knows what's going on.
So they don't, you know, there's

Speaker 1 not joining. And yet it's stripped out all of the incentive to go out and actually just take them down.
Yeah. You know, no, everyone wants to see how it plays out.
So he gets tremendously

Speaker 1 hard.

Speaker 4 And I mean, you know, the world's holding its breath because this is a nuclear-armed country which could descend into civil war.

Speaker 4 You know, in the White House situation room, they're watching it, but they can't do anything.

Speaker 4 I remember people asking, you know, Putin is bad, but Progoshin and his nationalist friends, you know, could this actually be worse for Ukraine, for Europe and the world?

Speaker 4 But the key thing, I guess, is Progozhin doesn't want to fight. There's some talk that maybe he thinks he's going to take the Ministry of Defense in Moscow and remove Shoigu and, you know, take over.

Speaker 4 But he's actually on the way. He's still trying to negotiate.
This is a negotiating strategy rather than a coup. So he's calling Putin, or he's trying to call Putin, and Putin's not taking his calls.

Speaker 4 And then crucially, the person who gets involved is Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. And he's got good contacts with both.
So he becomes the kind of intermediary.

Speaker 4 And Lukashenko tells Progozhin that Putin will not meet with him, nor surrender Garasimov and Shoigu. And Progozhin supposedly says, but we want justice.
They want to strangle us.

Speaker 4 We will march on Moscow, says Progozhin. Halfway there, you'll be squashed like a bed bug, Lukashenko replies.

Speaker 4 So finally, Progozhin is being told and being warned, don't keep escalating, because if you do, you're going to get squashed.

Speaker 1 Do you think Progozhin was on drugs?

Speaker 4 I think that is entirely plausible, isn't it?

Speaker 1 I mean, it could be.

Speaker 1 Like, this seems like a drug-addled fever dream that he's in the middle of. No, I think that's the only thing.
And he's going to afterward, you know, he's going to sober up and

Speaker 1 regret some of these things.

Speaker 4 So finally, I mean, I guess Lukashenko will talk Progozhin down after a few of these calls and barter agreement. I think Progojin knows he actually, at this point can't win.
He can't win.

Speaker 4 So early evening, Progozhin halts the convoy, effectively gives up. Progozhin pictured in a black SUV in Rostov, where as you said, he's been all the time, driven away.

Speaker 4 And very suddenly, very suddenly.

Speaker 1 This is over. It's over.

Speaker 4 I just remember it so vividly that for hours you thought Putin's going to fall. There's going to be a kind of civil war violence in Moscow.
And then suddenly... It's literally over.
It's amazing.

Speaker 4 And a deal's struck.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the deal is essentially that Progozhin will agree to go with any of his men who want to go to Belarus

Speaker 1 where they'll be able to set up camp. I guess on the face of it, it's not a bad deal for a mutineer.

Speaker 4 No, I mean I think it's amazingly a good deal, isn't it? No criminal charges at this point. Immunity.
I mean you've led a mutiny and you're getting immunity for all those involved.

Speaker 4 You know, I think it's a sign of Putin's weakness at that moment because he just doesn't, you know, Putin's been a bit paralyzed in the day.

Speaker 4 And I think Putin doesn't want to push things too far and actually have a rebellion. So, on the 26th, so just a few days after, Putin gives a public address to explain it.

Speaker 4 He's angry and he'll say that many men were led astray. He reaffirms they'll now have to sign contracts with the military.

Speaker 4 Still doesn't name Progoshin, though. He still can't quite destroy him.
Because after all, I think, you know, he's very popular. He's got a lot of fighters, got a popular in the nationalist community.

Speaker 4 His men are doing kind of important work in Africa. So I think, you know, he can't do anything, or at least not yet.

Speaker 1 I guess it is maybe one of the bigger unanswerable questions around this whole affair is

Speaker 1 how close they were to some kind of civil conflict.

Speaker 1 Because if you look at Progozin's behavior through the lens of someone who's maybe drug-addled, but certainly making some very impulsive decisions,

Speaker 1 from Putin's standpoint, it could make sense to just kind of like, okay, this guy guy kind of burned out. All the steam burned out of this thing.

Speaker 1 He came to his senses before we had to smash him. Take Lukashenko's point, you know, don't make us actually have to smash him

Speaker 1 because we will and we can. You know, he doesn't get what he wants, right?

Speaker 1 He still has to sign a contract with the MOD. Yeah.
And Shoigu and Grasimov are still there. You need to give him a deal good enough for him to take so that you can deal with him.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 I think that's the key is that I think the Kremlin knows it's got to deal with him, but it's going to deal with him slowly, you know, and carefully.

Speaker 4 Because I think Progozhin has to hand back to the MOD some of his tanks and artillery, some of his men transfer.

Speaker 4 I think he knows it's over for him in Ukraine, but he's maybe still hoping he can do the whole Wagner thing around the world because he's still got this base in Belarus.

Speaker 4 But the problem for the Kremlin is that they're going to know that he's got this base. And I think they're going to start to discredit him.

Speaker 4 There's this fascinating poll that so as you get to June 2023, 58% of Russians fully or partially approve of Progozhin. So that's in the run-up to the coup.
Afterwards, it's going to drop to 29%.

Speaker 4 But if you think 58%

Speaker 4 is really high approval rating, but 29% after the coup, so after he's led a mutiny against Putin, 29% of Russians still, I mean, polling in Russia, let's be honest, a bit wobbly.

Speaker 1 Also, 58% doesn't seem high for a Russian leader. It seems like the polls would show much higher.

Speaker 4 But I just think, you know, 29% fully or partially approve after the coup. So I think Putin is kind of calculating.

Speaker 4 I'm going to put the squeeze on him, but I'm not going to kind of just go after him in one move. So they're kind of starting to dismantle his business empire.
They're dismantling the media empire.

Speaker 4 They're forcing things to be sold. They're closing down some of the propaganda outlets.
So he's only left with, you know, his Telegram channel. There's going to be a...
campaign to discredit him.

Speaker 4 The Russian security services raided his house on the day of the mutiny, unsurprising, in St. Petersburg.
And then photos are going to come out which reveal the luxury he lived in.

Speaker 4 His private swimming pool, the helipad, the sauna, the gym, the medical office. You know,

Speaker 1 the man of the people image is kind of

Speaker 4 being diminished. Yeah.
The idea he's the man of the people versus the corrupt elite.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is where we get the pictures of him with all the wigs, because those get released. But there's also, you know, the great Sasha Baron Cohen dictator wigs.
Would you really like to do that?

Speaker 1 Because he had the wigs. One of the pictures

Speaker 1 is of the wigs in a big kind of cabinet, like his storage, his disguise cabinet. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Which we've all got in our houses. I mean, you must have one, David.

Speaker 4 And they find stashes of gold bars, a stuffed alligator, and a framed photo which is purported to show the severed heads of exiled enemies of Progoshin.

Speaker 4 And also, I mean, in his own house, a giant sledgehammer with the inscription, for use in important negotiations.

Speaker 4 You know, it's like, he's almost like a kind of parody of himself.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, he's gotten high on his own supply. He's gotten high.

Speaker 1 And it also makes me think how different the Russian approach to diplomacy is because he's got the sledgehammer. And in U.S.
embassies, in some U.S. embassies, they'll sell in the

Speaker 1 store a special bourbon that's called liquid diplomacy.

Speaker 1 I think the Russians would also approve of that kind of diplomacy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but the progotiation is a lot of people.

Speaker 1 We don't have sledgehammers going for a negotiation. If any American diplomats are listening, I would heartily approve a sledgehammer.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 4 I think the squeeze is on. He's flying around now, you know, from Belarus to St.
Petersburg.

Speaker 4 It looks like he's just desperate to keep some of his business going around, but he's starting to lose the contracts, including catering, you know, for the Ministry of Defense and schools.

Speaker 1 They didn't keep him on the catering contact. They didn't keep him on the catering contact.

Speaker 4 Africa is his kind of last hope, I think.

Speaker 4 So the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Labrov, gone around Africa to reassure leaders that, you know, they'll still get the support from Moscow even after the Bagner thing.

Speaker 4 But Progozhn is still going out to Africa himself to try and get new deals. So, he's still kind of pitching, it looks like that he can to Niger, he can send thousands of fighters.

Speaker 4 Mid-August looks like he was in Mali, Central African Republic. There's one video of him in the desert with a rifle, but even there now, it looks like he's been kind of shut out of contracts.

Speaker 4 The squeeze is on.

Speaker 1 And I guess he's lost that luster of the, you know, even if Moscow isn't the one directing him to go get these contracts, a lot of his African clients would have signed up because they presume that he's got the inn with the Kremlin.

Speaker 4 And now. And now they know.
They know he's not. Yeah.

Speaker 4 He sees his mother that summer, Violetta. When I last saw him, he looked doomed, she will say.

Speaker 1 I think Mama Pergozhin might be filtering a lot of these quotes back through what's happened since. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 4 I'm not sure. I think he probably thought he could keep going, or he hoped he could.
Certainly, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But then August 23rd, 2023, 5.46 p.m., executive jet, tail number RA02795 lifts off from Moscow's airport, heading for St. Petersburg.

Speaker 4 Now, there had been an inexplicable delay for some repair work, strangely, David, just before...

Speaker 4 the plane takes off, according to one of the crew, cabin stewardess, Christina Raspopova, in a text message to her family.

Speaker 4 And there are also reports that two potential buyers for the jet had been on board an hour just before it departed. Suspicious, perhaps, some might say in hindsight.

Speaker 4 But the plane soon reaches its cruising altitude of about 30,000 feet. Just after six o'clock, suddenly goes into a steep dive.

Speaker 4 Eyewitnesses on the ground say they hear two explosions, see the plane falling, disintegrates in the air, losing one wing and part of its tail. No time even for a mayday call.

Speaker 4 Crashes nearby a village, flames, smoke rising from the field. Now, this is interesting.
All ten people die, including the pilot, the cold pilot, the stewardess,

Speaker 4 obviously, you know, entirely innocent, but the passengers, of course, include Progoshin himself and Dmitry Utkin, our SS-loving friends.

Speaker 4 and the head of security and logistics for Wagner, along with two of Wagner's soldiers and two of Progoshin bodyguards. It wipes out basically the leadership.

Speaker 1 Feels like

Speaker 1 a mistake to have the entire leadership of Wagner essentially flying together. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Two months to the day since the mutiny. You know, there's some speculation, you know, that a missile took it out.

Speaker 4 Putin will suggest the crash was caused by Progoshian and other commanders drinking and using drugs, back to your point, while handling, stroke juggling grenades on board.

Speaker 1 This gets back to the, you know, nothing is true and everything everything is possible. Yeah, he can say that, yeah, it is just you just make up

Speaker 1 something else that's totally ludicrous, yeah, and then feed that into the state media, and there you go. There's

Speaker 4 almost everyone thinks it's a bomb. I mean, there are these theories that it was faked.
There seemed to be a theme in our podcast. People think someone's not dead who is dead.

Speaker 1 We've had it from everyone from Edwards Garner to Tupac.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he's gone to Tupac.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's gone away to Tupac.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he's actually alive and living in Cuba or Vedic. No, but he's dead.

Speaker 1 He's dead. He's dead.
He's dead. He's dead.
And I guess it must have been elements of the or contractors working for the FSB.

Speaker 4 FSB. G-R-U.

Speaker 4 G-RU. I'd guess GRU sabotage squads.
I mean, but on the orders of Putin. I think no doubt about that that would have to be a Putin thing.

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, they gave it a bit of time, a little bit of two-month delay, as we said, to kind of bit of time, bit of space, not make it too obvious.

Speaker 4 deal with Africa, make sure you've got mercenary groups ready to take over, wind things up.

Speaker 4 I think it's also Putin is, you know, trying to work out what are the risks of taking him out. How's it going to play out? And I think the problem as well is Progozhin has still not learnt his lesson.

Speaker 4 He's not gone quietly. He's still trying to kind of do stuff.
He's still got a bit of popularity.

Speaker 4 And I think the risk is, you know, he could have become the kind of rallying cry again for a kind of nationalist opposition. So I think leaving him around is, you know, is risky for Putin.

Speaker 1 It's got a risk.

Speaker 1 You have to send a message. to others who might in the future consider a similar path, right? Exactly.
That it will be dealt with very directly.

Speaker 4 There has has to be a price.

Speaker 1 And it's also possible that the delay of a couple months was that, yeah,

Speaker 1 there's probably some attempt inside the Kremlin or the GRU or the FSB to get a sense of how much support

Speaker 1 he has inside the military, where support or sort of, you know, potential aid may have come during the mutiny. But do you also wait a couple months to get all of these people together in one place?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 There's a moment of opportunity.

Speaker 1 There's a moment of opportunity. They're all all on the plane.
It also says something, I think, about the nature of Putin's payback.

Speaker 1 And Bill Burns, former CIA director, actual friend of the pod, unlike many of the people we reference as friends of the pod, he's a great friend of the show and was with us for a few episodes for disclassified club members.

Speaker 1 You know, he's referred to Putin as a great apostle of payback. Yeah.
And it's so true.

Speaker 1 And I think the theatrics are important as well because Pragozhin has been traveling inside Russia in this couple month period. He could have been arrested.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He could have been detained. Other members of his entourage could have been arrested or detained.

Speaker 1 There wasn't really any need, was there, to kill innocent flight attendants and civilians and to do it in this

Speaker 4 performance big way, right?

Speaker 1 He could have been just, he could have been quietly murdered

Speaker 4 at one of his properties he could have been killed in belarus quite easily but they chose a very public demonstration of how enemies of putin and the state are dealt with i think that's absolutely right putin on his death praises him as a talented person who made mistakes as if launching a coup or a mutiny was like you know a mistake like a poor post on social media like they made the odd mistake i agree with putin's assessment though don't you talented person who made mistakes yeah i mean that's his you know and people will say i knew progoshin for a long time since the early 90s he was a man with a difficult fate he made serious mistakes in his lives and he achieved the results he needed both for himself and when i asked him about it for the common cause as in these last months he was a talented person a talented businessman who worked not only in our country but also abroad in africa it's interesting because they also don't want him to become a martyr because makeshift memorials are going to start to go up you know in cities on his death you know candles, things saying hero of Russia.

Speaker 4 The fear is he's going to be a cult. So Wagner is going to get dismantled.

Speaker 4 Wagner operations in Africa are going to be taken over by a new Africa Corps, slightly unfortunate name, under the military control of the GRU. Shoigu survives only for the moment, actually.

Speaker 4 Shoigu gets moved on from being defense minister, but for the moment he's safe. And Progoshin himself, buried in St.

Speaker 4 Petersburg a few days after the crash, the city where he grew up, where he started, not far from the restaurants, where he first met Putin. But it's a private funeral, not much ceremony.

Speaker 4 They try and keep the location quiet. They even seem to kind of do some distractions so people, you know, think it's somewhere else and some of the journalists go off to a different site.

Speaker 4 Closed casket. It's a closed casket, yeah.
And

Speaker 4 very private in order to prevent that kind of cult of Progoshian from emerging. And after that, Progoshin's name is never mentioned in public again.

Speaker 1 What do we make of this

Speaker 1 psychotic caterer turned mercenary warlord? I mean, it must this whole adventure, I think, does show

Speaker 1 some of the cracks in the Russian system under the strain of the war, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 I mean, it reminds me, there's, you know, a little bit of a mirror of what the Syrians had to do in the civil war, where you essentially had to turn to militias to make up for real weaknesses in your military.

Speaker 1 These kind of conflicts show kind of the weaknesses of societies, don't they? And Russia needed to turn to mercenaries. And

Speaker 1 this is a mercenary who sort of wanted to become something much bigger than himself and exposed,

Speaker 1 really threw a system that had kind of been in balance before the war into a tremendous amount of imbalance, at least for a period of time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's a wild story about one individual and ambition.
and ruthlessness and violence. But it does tell you something about Putin's Russia.

Speaker 4 I think it does tell you that the system is creaking. and Putin projects himself as this person who brought stability after the kind of chaos of the 90s.

Speaker 4 And yet, you know, here he is with kind of mutiny and coups because partly he failed to manage that court and because people got too big for their boots, like Progoshin.

Speaker 4 So there's a world of kind of rivalries and power and tussles for power beneath the surface of what looks like a kind of autocratic system, which were revealed by Putin under that pressure of war and mobilization.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Progoshin got out of hand and he had to be reined in. But I think he did reveal something.
You know, Progoshin is a kind of, he's no everyman. He's not the ordinary man of the street.

Speaker 1 He has some man of the people vibes. But he does have some man of the people vibes.

Speaker 4 You know, he's got the kind of prison background. But I think what he showed was that there was a part of the Russian population who were angry and who

Speaker 4 feel like they've been screwed over by the elite, who feel angry, for instance, at the way the war has been run, who are angry over corruption by the elite.

Speaker 4 You know, he kind of hit on something which is real and visceral. A kind of, I mean, it's a Russian nationalism, but also a kind of anti-elite feeling.
It's a hatred of the corruption.

Speaker 4 Now, of course, he was part of the corrupt elite, maybe not the inner circle, but he was part of that too. But I think he became the voice of something quite interesting.

Speaker 4 which also exposed how kind of remote and fragile the Putin court is because it's full of kind of rich corrupt people who are kind of distanced from the population.

Speaker 4 And I think, you know, that is showing something about Russia, which is

Speaker 4 which is important and potentially dangerous and unstable, I think.

Speaker 1 Finding the right words to describe the system is a challenge because

Speaker 1 it certainly looks stable.

Speaker 1 This mutiny aside, I mean, when you look at the Putin system from the outside, there are a lot of things, we could put together a whole list of factors that make it seem stable.

Speaker 1 Putin controls the security services. There's, you know, sort of multiple kind of Praetorian units that he can use for his own personal security.
He seems to have control over the military, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, there's all these different kind of elements in an autocracy that you kind of go down the list and he's like, check, check, check, right?

Speaker 1 I think what this episode shows with Progoshan is that there's an inherent brittleness

Speaker 1 in these autocratic systems where they're stable until they're not. Yeah, I think that's and then a little bit of imbalance in your

Speaker 1 elites

Speaker 1 creates a lot of pressure on the system because the whole thing has been set up in this kind of hub and spoke model.

Speaker 1 Putin's right at the middle, and everyone else kind of doesn't know what the others are up to, and Putin is balancing all of them against each other.

Speaker 1 In a normal system, you might have expected the military to act, to just stop this right away. Instead, they hedge.
And instead, they hedge.

Speaker 1 And so if you're Putin, I mean, that's kind of the way the system is supposed to work. But when that brittleness is exposed,

Speaker 1 there's this moment where an enterprising

Speaker 1 psychopath like Yevgeny Progozhin can potentially do incredible damage.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it shows kind of Putin is a kind of detached figure in a sense, not the master strategist, not all-powerful,

Speaker 4 but weak, requiring kind of ruthlessness sometimes to just be able to hold this together against the threats that lie out there.

Speaker 4 So yeah, I do think it really does tell you something about the nature of Putin. I think you're absolutely right.
These states look stable until suddenly they're not.

Speaker 4 Putin will know that a lot of people hedged, you know, on that day, on that Saturday, that the military and everyone didn't come to his aid. He knows that.

Speaker 4 And I think he is fundamentally a weaker figure than we give him credit for. And I think it also shows be careful about mercenary groups and, you know, giving mercenary groups lots of power.

Speaker 4 The Russian states privatized all these things and created alternative power centers.

Speaker 4 And if you create a private power center in the form of mercenary warlords, be careful because it might come back to bite you.

Speaker 1 See,

Speaker 1 I agree that Putin would understand that there was a lot of hedging. I also think that that's kind of what the system is designed to do, and that you don't necessarily want,

Speaker 1 you know, your sort of mid-level military officers, your colonels and whatnot, to be acting without orders, direct orders from the top. I mean, it can cut both ways.

Speaker 1 But I kind of think to some degree, I mean, this is definitely the biggest, the most significant elite challenge to Putin since he took power.

Speaker 4 And he survived it.

Speaker 1 His system survived it. He managed through it.
Progoshian's dead. And Wagner and his empire has sort of been cut up and parceled out.

Speaker 4 And Progoshin is never mentioned again.

Speaker 1 And Progoshin is never mentioned again.

Speaker 4 I think that's maybe a good place to leave it.

Speaker 4 Just a reminder, we've got a special series on the Declassified Club, which you can join at the restisclassified.com, where you can hear us look at the kind of emergence of Putin.

Speaker 4 as a KGB officer and a lot of the kind of roots of this story in terms of St.

Speaker 4 Petersburg and Leningrad under the Soviet Union, and then transitioning into Russia, that series is there for club members. That's right.

Speaker 1 We've done the perpetrator in Progozha, now the victim.

Speaker 1 Putin evicted. The exploration of the victims.
No one's ever called him that.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 4 But thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed it.
And we'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 We'll see you next time.

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