Putin’s Sledgehammer
This week, Gaslit Nation welcomes a leading expert on the future of warfare and U.S. national security Candace Rondeaux, author of the new book Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. Before there was Trump vs. Musk, there was Putin vs. Prigozhin. It turns out the oligarchs trying to kill us are just a couple of scorpions trapped in a jar.
Two years ago this June 23rd, Yevgeny Prigozhin led an armed mutiny of his infamous Wagner group, getting within 125 miles (200 km) of Moscow. In her book and this gripping conversation, Rondeaux unpacks what Wagner really is—and what it isn’t—debunking the myths surrounding Russia’s most infamous mercenary network. Wagner’s mutiny marked the first real crack in Putin’s power in decades. Prigozhin wasn’t an outsider—he was Putin’s creation. Funded. Protected. Enabled. And ultimately? Eliminated. On August 23rd, exactly two months later, his plane exploded above Russia, killing him and his inner circle.A special message from Gaslit Nation:
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Andrea Chalupa (00:21):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. Our guest this week is Candace Rondeaux, a veteran war correspondent and Russian speaker who has reported from major global conflicts including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, and the caucuses, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She covered 9/11 for the New York Daily News and the Virginia Tech massacre for the Washington Post. She directs the future frontlines and the Planetary Politics Initiative at New America and teaches at Arizona State University. Rondeaux holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence, NYU and Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs, and is a leading expert on the future of warfare, democracy, and global security with deep access to insider sources and years of reporting on the Kremlin Shadow Wars.
(01:20):
Rondeaux brings a rare and chilling perspective to the story of the Wagner Group. In her new book, Putin's Sledgehammer, Rondeaux unpacks how a brutal private army rose from the underworld to challenge the very heart of the Russian state. And of course, this June marks two years since Wagner tried to violently overthrow Putin's regime. So tell us, what is the Wagner Group, including its connection to Hitler, and how did they go from Putin's private army to his worst enemy under his longtime ally, the oligarch, he helped build up Prigozhin, who exploded from the sky. Sorry. This is like an exciting topic for Gaslit Nation. We loved it when these scorpions were fighting each other in the jar in June, 2023. So break it down for us. Who is Wagner Group? What is the connection to Hitler and how did they become Putin's worst enemy two years ago?
Candace Rondeaux (02:22):
Yeah, that's such a great analogy. Scorpions in a jar. I think that that describes so much of Kremlin politics in general for the last decade or more really since Putin came to power, so almost 30 years now. The Wagner Group, people tend to think of it as a company like Blackwater. It is not a company like Blackwater. The way to think about the Wagner Group is a network of shell companies and a network of individuals who profited from Russia's war machine for close to a decade. We all know the story of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his very dramatic March on Moscow in June of 2023 that you just mentioned. He's very dramatic end of his life exploding airplane and apparently sort of juggling grenades, according to Vladimir Putin. The reality is a little bit less dramatic in some ways. There was almost an inevitability to the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin and this mercenary, paramilitary army.
(03:18):
One reason for that is that Russia's conventional warfare capacity has always been really challenging and lagged. And the Wagner Group grew out of Russia's need for more agile forces that could move quickly into situations like we found in Syria into situations like Ukraine, and to do so in a way that the Russian state distance itself use plausible deniability for the actions of these characters. The Wagner roup really is mostly, I think of it more as a brand than a band of brothers in some ways. And the brand really centers around the identity of the Wagner Group as this very muscular, very violent, very aggressive force that is out there projecting Russia's way of war in the world. So that's part of the branding. The idea of Wagner actually comes from the call sign for the main field commander who was also killed. Of course in August, 2023.
Andrea Chalupa (04:21):
On the plane, that Prigozhin plane was on a plane with his closest aids, like the whole heart of Wagner was on this plane flying over Russia and the plane beautifully exploded in the air. And the official account from the Kremlin was, oh, they were playing hot potato with a live grenade. Sorry. I love this stuff.
Candace Rondeaux (04:46):
And they were snorting cocaine while doing it, which I thought was interesting. We can get into the side note...
Andrea Chalupa (04:51):
I would love that.
Candace Rondeaux (04:51):
But simply to say that Prigozhin and Utkin and the whole sort of Wagner, one part of the Wagner brand is that they're kind of teetotalers. It's not that they don't drink or you know what I mean, but they're a little bit more purist about drinking and doing drugs because they're special forces guys basically. But I mean, the short answer to the connection between the Wagner Group and Hitler is that Dmitry Utkin, who's the field commander that you just mentioned that was blown up in the sky. He was a guy who studied German in high school, became kind of obsessed with the Nazi era, and he adopted the call sign Wagner when he was working in Crimea and Donbas during the Russian incursion in 2014. Notoriously, he had a couple of SS symbols tattooed onto his neck and some more Nazi tattoos all over his body.
(05:41):
And he was really obsessed with this idea of kind of Russian purity and white purity. And so he's a pretty extreme white supremacist, and he was really obsessed with a couple of things. It's kind of like a triple entendre. The first is because he was a neo-Nazi uan, loved the idea of Richard Wagner, who was of course Hitler's favorite composer. But also there's a very famous scene in Apocalypse Now, you might remember it, where this helicopter pilot and these sort of macho guys are blowing up Vietnamese village, and while they're doing that, they're playing Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
Scene from Apocalypse Now (06:28):
Down below. We're going to go down and check it up ... Shot outstanding with the outstanding...
Candace Rondeaux (06:48):
And so it kind of is evocative of that scene because also Uken was a paramilitary and a paratrooper, so he used to jump out of helicopters on a pretty regular basis. So there's that. And then this is kind of a little known weird fact, but there was a quartermaster in the SS by the name of Edward Wagner who was considered to be kind of the architect of a lot of the ethnic cleansing and cleansing of Jewish communities along the Ukrainian and Russian border during the Nazi offensive on Russia in World War II. And so it's kind of all these three references stacked up on top of each other, and that's why Utkin adopted the name and Wagner just kind of stuck because it had that kind of cool neo-Nazi skull and crossbones kind of vibe.
Andrea Chalupa (07:39):
And yet Russia accuses Ukraine of being a neo-Nazi coup.
Candace Rondeaux (07:45):
Yeah, this is one of the more mind bending parts of the whole Wagner Group branding is, there're supposed to be this bulwark against Nazism, but many of them are neo-Nazis. I think that they would more kind of characterize themselves also as pagans. So they're really into the idea of reviving the Viking macho power. They used to paint ruins Viking ruins on their industry fighting vehicles. They would, so
Andrea Chalupa (08:13):
They're witchy.
Candace Rondeaux (08:14):
They're kind of witchy.
Andrea Chalupa (08:15):
I'm into that because. Can we talk? So Mike Coven and I, we talk about this, about how the evil we're up against, he's using literal dark sorcery against us, so we have to fight back with light.
Candace Rondeaux (08:27):
I love that. Yeah. Fighting back with light is, I think, absolutely. It's kind of the only way, I mean, this is why I became so obsessed with documenting all the war crimes associated with the Wagner Groups operations across six countries, and is why we continue to do that work today under my program Future Frontlines is just really showing what was the command structure? How did these guys work? Many people think of them as this mysterious ghost army that's amorphous, that doesn't have any structure, that doesn't take any commands, but actually these are really disciplined guys, most of whom came up during the latter part of the Afghanistan, Soviet War, some of whom quite a few fought in Chechnya. So they really have seen a lot of action and they imported the culture of Russia's paramilitary paratroopers, the VDV Airborne, a vast majority including kin, had spent time jumping out of planes and doing behind enemy lines, reconnaissance, operations, sabotage, operations. And so a lot of that culture was very much part of the Wagner Group. And another piece, of course, what the VDV Airborne is known for is psychological warfare. And this is where the kind of use of excessive violence, recording it, sharing it on social media, developing this kind of trophy mentality when it comes to atrocities, that's where all of that kind of comes from.
Andrea Chalupa (09:51):
Absolutely. And that ISIS does the same. I remember being in Kiev, I think 2015, and a security expert who was there. He is from the UK, he had just gotten back from Iraq. He took one of the last planes out before ISIS had taken over Baghdad. And I asked him, what is the greatest advantage ISIS has against us? And he said, social media, because what they do is they put all their trophies online and that terror spreads. And so when ISIS is coming, their targets will just empty out because they know that the terrorists coming and the sadism is coming. And so Russia very much operates like ISIS then, is what you're saying?
Candace Rondeaux (10:30):
Yeah. Well, it's funny that you say that because I mean, I don't know if I even really managed to squeeze this into the book. It's a long book, but one of the first things I noticed while looking at Wagner Group social media, something that really kind of scrambled my brain in addition to the neo-Nazi part was there was this chat between sort of a Wagner bro and a couple of other Wagner bros online on VKontakte. And in their chat they were talking about living and working in Syria operating against ISIS, and they kind of described themselves as the counter calliphate and that they were basically fighting for the new Byzantium, which is sort of this kind of idea of a revivalist Christian, orthodox imperial movement. And they literally kind of started to adopt this philosophy that if ISIS can use these kind of medieval techniques to sow terror and project their power via psychological warfare, we can do the same basically. And they did do that I mean, especially in Syria. There's so many examples of beheadings on camera beatings, and of course there's one very famous one which is kind of the reason for the title of the book. But this
Andrea Chalupa (11:45):
Did you want to talk about that a little bit? Like the sledgehammer?
Candace Rondeaux (11:48):
Yeah, I mean the sledgehammer, there are many things I've seen over my years of tracking the Wagner Group, collecting the social media, tracking how they talk to each other, talking to defectors and sort of military insiders. But there's one thing that still haunts me is the images and the video from the beheading, the ritual torture of a Syrian national by the name of Hondi Butna. He was a guy who was a bricklayer basically, who left Syria, went to Lebanon to work, came back, got captured by Syrian authorities, and then was press ganged into fighting on behalf of the Wagner Group in one of their contingents in the Palmeyra area. He escaped and then he was caught again. And because he had been sort of involved in fighting Wagner and there were a lot of casualties, a group of guys basically surrounded him on this gas plant property and beat him to hell with a sledgehammer.
(12:51):
What's interesting about this isn't so much the beating, maybe not so new, if you think about other chapters in Russian military history, it's the fact that they filmed it on their mobile phones and it was basically, it was like a four minute long video clip, and the first scenes are of this man lying on the ground, being beaten by several guys with a sledgehammer. And then the next scenes are them sort of dismembering his body, carving the initials of their old VDV Airborne unit on his chest, and then dismembering other parts of his body and sending him on fire. I mean, this was one of the most heinous war crimes, I think really ever to be recorded in recent memory involving Russian forces. But it became the weird twisted brand that the Wagner Group adopted. And as soon as that video started appearing on Telegram and on Twitter, there were mugs, coffee cups and t-shirts and stickers and patches for uniforms that were being sold with scenes of a pretty muscular guy beating a horned devil with a sledgehammer. And that was the moment that the Sledgehammer mythos was born.
Andrea Chalupa (14:14):
And there are other viral videos like that, including for deserters of Russians of Wagner.
Candace Rondeaux (14:21):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people talk about, somebody asked me the other day about the Wagner Group's code of honor, and in some Russian ultranationalist circles, the view on Wagner is extremely positive because unlike the conventional military, their commanders in Wagner are very public. They're out there on social media, they're on videos, they're very open with what they're doing. But the code of honor also was pretty brutal. I, so I think the incident you're thinking of is the killing of a defector who was actually a prison mate inmate who joined the Wagner Group ostensibly to get amnesty after serving his term on the front lines in Ukraine. But pretty quickly, he decided to defect to the Ukrainian side, and once he was in Ukrainian captivity, this is Yevgeny Nuzhin, he was probably in his, I think early fifties, so a pretty grizzled guy, probably not super battle hardened.
(15:23):
And eventually at some point or another, he winds up back in the hands of the Wagner Group and on camera, very famously, his head was put on a cinder block. And this anonymous, faceless masked guy smashes his head in with a sledgehammer, and essentially the message is, this is a dog's death for a dog, basically. And that's what Prigozhin said. So they treated defectors very badly. There are plenty of documented incidents where they shot people on the front lines for not following orders or for refusing to be part of this massive human wave attacks in Bakhmut, pretty sinister stuff.
Andrea Chalupa (16:05):
Yeah, because the Russian military strategy is just bodies throwing bodies. It's body after body. They just want bodies for the meat grinder.
Candace Rondeaux (16:14):
Yeah, I mean, this is a conventional war. I mean, in the prior phase of Russia's war on Ukraine starting in the spring of 2014, you were looking at a kind of different scenario where Russia was very careful not to appear to be declaring war on Ukraine. There was a real concern about appearances, largely because Putin understood his primary adversary on the world stage was at that time Barack Obama. And if there was any intimation that this was a war was really a war, Putin would've risked maybe a potential retaliatory strike from either the United States or NATO or both. And so the object of the game in the first years of that incursion in 2014 and in 2015 was to mask everything using this kind of term they call maskirovka in Russia, which is hiding the real and showing the false. So the Wagner Group was very much part of that wave. They were characterized as a private military company that was acting independently out of patriotism separately from the Kremlin, but in actual fact, internal memos from Prigozhin and his employees to high ranking members of the Kremlin very close to Putin indicated all along that they had been receiving standard support.
Andrea Chalupa (17:41):
Not only that, I mean their whole operation also involved Mueller's investigation in 2016 because Prigozhin was also just running Wagner, but also had his bot farms popping off and pretending to be Ohio moms that were hardcore Christians and worshiped at the altar of Trump. So he really was like, could you talk about that journey of how you go from being a caterer, Putin chef. Did Putin just love his cooking? How did those two originally link up and how do you go from being a caterer to suddenly destabilizing the entire world order?
Candace Rondeaux (18:19):
Yeah, I mean, it's a long journey, but it really starts in St. Petersburg and in a way that's kind of what got me interested in writing this book in the first place. I was a student actually at the time when Vladimir Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and actually the city had just changed its name only a few years before I arrived, and just as Putin is returning home from his post in East Germany as a KGB agent. Right exactly at that same time, so 1990-91, Yevgeny Prigozhin is released from prison. He spent almost a decade in prison on charges of violent assault and various forms of thuggery, and he got out, his stepfather had started a hotdog selling business. This is a time in St. Petersburg when they called it the wild 90s, it was kind of like...
Andrea Chalupa (19:14):
The car bomb 90s, that's what you call it.
Candace Rondeaux (19:16):
The car bomb 90s. Yeah. If you were there, if anybody has any memory of this, I remember actually one incident where somebody launched a grenade launcher at one of the bridges in St. Petersburg. I mean, there was a drive-by shooting on Nevsky Prospect. I mean, it was a pretty violent time. There was always this concern about running a foul of one mafia or the another, and Putin and Prigozhin were part of that atmosphere right at that time. They're variously in their thirties, forties, and it's a time when any Russian guy with the right connections either to the security agencies or to the mafia or both, could rise pretty high, and both of them did. The connection is that when Putin gets more sort of dug in to running the city, he's in charge of casino licensing, he's in charge of business licensing. He's also in charge of managing this oil for food deal, and all of those things benefited Prigozhin basically, who was also in the casino industry.
(20:24):
He was in the grocery business. He was in the restaurant business, and so pretty early on, I'd say circa 91-2, they're being connected through these mafia ties and these state security ties. And over time, Prigozhin, he's got, as I think we all observed, he's got kind of a cheeky sense of humor, and he was rough, but also loyal, and I think Putin was the kind of guy, and still is the kind of guy that really appreciates a manly man who's funny and a little bit crass, but knows when to show up and shut up, and that's what Yevgeny Prigozhin was for him.
Andrea Chalupa (21:06):
In what ways was he funny?
Candace Rondeaux (21:10):
Oh, he had really kind of a gift of the gab, and sometimes it was a bit dramatic, and maybe people won't find this very funny, but I think there's something a little bit surreal about a guy who's never fought in the military, hopping into a jet fighter and challenging the president of Ukraine to a dog fight. He really had a sense of drama.
Andrea Chalupa (21:37):
He had a Trumpian wave like, I'm going to go to the McDonald's drive-through window.
Candace Rondeaux (21:43):
A hundred percent. You know what? This is the common thread between Trump and Prigozhin, and a lot of the people who surrounded Prego at the time was that they really had this idea of businesses, drama businesses, theater businesses, performance and putting on a show in order, and usually a show of gilded power. And I mean, very famously, as an example, Prigozhin in 2003 was selected slash voluntold to be the caterer for the 300th jubilee of the city, which was a really big deal because of course, the Soviet Union had seen the country really fall in disrepair, including St. Petersburg. He had all these beautiful imperial buildings, 17th century kind of wedding cake architecture that had fallen into disrepair. But Putin expended, no, he spared no expense in reconstructing the city, and he hired Prigozhin to be the chief caterer for this week long Jubilee celebration. And famously, he held this banquet at the Summer Palace, which is just fabulous place with beautiful fountains in Petropavlovsk, and there were ballet dancers. He rehearsed his team like a military drill sergeant. That's how people recalled it. He was a person who understood protocol and performance as power. Putin really appreciated that.
Andrea Chalupa (23:13):
Wow. Could you speak, I know Sledgehammer, Putin's Sledgehammer, the impact that he's had. Could you speak about the countries that he's active in? For instance, in Venezuela, which is an oil dictatorship, they had massive, massive protests including all these young people taking to the streets. They put in all these brilliant grassroots efforts to track how people were voting to show that they really did have the legitimacy of the vote on their side, and that the opposition leader won their most recent election, and then suddenly a plane arrives from Russia and protesters are being disappeared and Maduro just stays in power. Could you speak a little bit about all the countries that Wagner is active in and the impact that they've had?
Candace Rondeaux (24:01):
Yeah, so I mean, one thing I want to sort course correct on is that a lot of people associate those really intense days in Venezuela. The one thing that really stands correcting is just that this impression that it was the Wagner Group that was present in Venezuela supporting Maduro. In reality, there are lots of little Wagner Groups. I know it's kind of weird, but the reality is when we talk about the Wagner Group, what we're really talking about is the private security for big companies like Rosneft, which by the way, is one of the largest investors in Venezuela's oil industry. And that most likely is what you were probably seeing. Now. Again, there hasn't been a lot of verification in terms of who was doing what, but I think we can say with some certainty that the Wagner Group, as we understand it, as run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, was not present in Venezuela at any time in a substantive way.
(25:01):
However, there are paramilitaries that look an awful lot like Wagner. They wear the same camouflage gear, they've got the same covered faces, the same vibe. Those are the contingents that are attached largely to state run enterprises like Rosneft in some cases, Gazprom. In some ways. I like to think about the Wagner Group as the army of Gazprom and Stroytransgaz and Rostec, which are the three kind big companies that are state run, state owned. Stroytransgaz is in energy construction company does a lot of development of pipeline infrastructure. It is nominally private, but an actual fact is kind of a spinoff of a Gazprom series of assets, and it's run by one of Vladimir Putin's best friends, although he would like probably not to say that out loud.
Andrea Chalupa (25:50):
Which one?
Candace Rondeaux (25:51):
Oh, this is Gennady Timchenko. And Timchenko is another guy who also had long connections to Prigozhin and Putin as well. Again, Timchenko was a young, some people think he was in the KGB. He's denied that publicly. It's likely that he did have some family connections though, because he was the son of a military officer during the Soviet days, and eventually he found his way to the St. Petersburg Soviet Trades Council, where he learned a lot about trading in oil and gas and energy commodities, and most importantly, became kind of one of the chief purveyors of this oil for food deal that Russia struck with the West that was essentially meant to facilitate the importation of food in exchange for deeply discounted oil sales on the global market. In actual fact, most of the food never arrived and sort of fell off the truck, so to speak, and in some cases, most likely ended up in Prigozhin's grocery stores and in his casinos and his restaurants and so forth.
(26:54):
So Timchenko and Prigozhin and Putin, their relationship goes back a long way. And it is Timchenko who owns a lot of the oil and gas infrastructure, or at least is the major shareholder of oil and gas infrastructure that is taken over by the Russians in Syria. When you think about the Wagner Group, what you really have to be thinking is that this is an army primarily of the energy industry of Russia, and then also the arms industry, because of course, their biggest job was being delivery boys for Rostec, which is the big arms maker in Russia.
Andrea Chalupa (27:28):
So it's corporate fascism.
Candace Rondeaux (27:31):
Well, it's corporate violence managed by organized crime bosses.
Andrea Chalupa (27:37):
Dear Lord. All right. And so I have to ask you, we've always been told that Russia is the second most powerful military in the world. Some of the most respected security experts think tank fanciest folks in the think tank world were saying, Ukraine's gone. Russia's going to come in and take over Ukraine, and even Russia was saying, we're going to take Kiev in three days, and then everything fell apart. What happened?
Candace Rondeaux (28:08):
Three things happened. First of all, the West grossly overestimated that the cohesion and unity of force amongst Russia's conventional army. And...
Andrea Chalupa (28:17):
So the psychological warfare worked on the West.
Candace Rondeaux (28:20):
It did, but also I would say the West shot itself in the foot, right? I mean...
Andrea Chalupa (28:24):
That's why Gaslit Nation exists. That's literally the whole thesis of our show. Go on. Go on.
Candace Rondeaux (28:30):
Yeah. I mean, look, you have to think about it this way. I mean, I kind of use, my career is an interesting parallel. I am old enough to remember duck and cover in American high schools. I'm old enough to remember living under the shadow of nuclear war and fearing that, and I'm old enough to be one of those. I happen to be one of those people who in the mid to late 1980s was encouraged to take Russian so that we could understand the enemy. That's a whole class of people. That's a whole generation of people that now has either variously been fired from the federal government under the current Trump administration, or has over the years found their careers and their skills, not just in Russian language, but also culture and history to be denigrated for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that the United States spent almost 20 years focused on the Middle East fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and not fully understanding that even though that that was the case, even though the main enemy at that time was ISIS or the Taliban, the reality is there were larger geopolitical factors at play, and Russia was a big part of, right.
(29:41):
Russia never went away. It didn't stop being an important power and an influential power in the world simply by dint of the Soviet collapse. In effect, it transformed itself into kind of a mafia state that exports violence and fossil fuels basically kind of as its main bread and butter. I think the vast majority of the US intelligence service, just back into what was going on, let's say from 2000 to roughly let's say 2015-16, had their eye on a different ball entirely. And the number of specialists in the federal government, be it in the State Department or Department of Defense or some of the intelligence agencies, like the number of specialists who actually speak fluent Russian and have actually lived there and understand the political situation there. I mean, you can count them maybe on two hands plus, but that's about it. That generation is now either retiring or has been pushed out because the Trump administration sees the world in a different way.
(30:43):
So that's one reason for the misestimating of Russian conventional force and power. And the second reason is that in fact, of course, Russia has always struggled with the hollowing of its conventional forces for decades now, the sort of central plank of Russian military doctrine is that Russia needs an army of roughly a million. Otherwise, it can't compete with the United States and other NATO countries. It will not be able to defend itself unless it has roughly 1.1, 1.2 million individuals who are ready to call up and ready to fight online. The problem with that is, of course, they still operate in this mixed part, conscription part, voluntary contract service. So a typical Russian male coming out of high school will serve two years in the military as kind of an infantry grunt. They'll serve if their parents or their family members or their friends don't have a way to buy them out of it.
(31:36):
And it turns out the more middle class grows in Russia, the more people are able to buy their way out of conscription. And so the people who end up in the Officer Corps tend to come from really extremely poor socioeconomic conditions. They come from rust belt parts of the country. Some are of course patriots, but very few are of the class of people who are sitting in Moscow sipping champagne and eating caviar on a regular basis. So that's a secondary reason is simply that they did not have, and they still do not have the kind of troop readiness that is necessary for fighting a conventional war. Problems that also are problematic for the Army is that there's a lot of a drug addiction. There's a lot of alcohol addiction, and there's a lot of kind of ill health that is kind of a public emergency in the country that has never been fully treated.
(32:30):
But the effect is that they don't have enough military age males who can fill out those ranks to a million and get to the front line in lockstep form. So that's part two. And the part three was just the logistics. We all saw this 120 mile long convoy stretching from the western border of Russia into Ukraine. I don't know who thought that that was a good idea is to just sort of line up all of these trucks and tanks and infer fighting vehicles in one line and make them available for bombing. But somebody thought it was a good idea. Logistically, the Russian military has always struggled. This was true in the Soviet times. It rings true today. And the main reason is because of corruption. Essentially, you have officers not only sometimes stealing the salaries of their subordinates, but also selling off really valuable items like engines for repair wheels for big military transport trucks, you name it. If it's not pinned down, it can be sold. And so corruption was also a really big problem. I think that's why we saw that Russia simply was not able to sustain.
Andrea Chalupa (33:44):
And that's why Ukrainian soldiers always say, we're lucky they're so dumb and corrupt. And I want to also ask you about Prigozhin's coup, which we were all cheering on because we wanted to see the monsters get in the ring and fight each other to the death. And so Prigozhin basically became high on his own supply as a social media darling of Russian patriots. And he was always talking directly to camera in his viral videos saying like, where's my ammo? I need to fight this war. We're losing for all the reasons you just listed. And he was being cheered on across Russian Telegram by all the great Russian patriots who needed their big victory day parade in Kiev. And he finally took to the streets and launched this violent coup attempt and came within 250 miles of Moscow and then just stopped. So could you talk us through that coup? Was that genuine? Could that have been successful, and how was it ultimately stopped?
Candace Rondeaux (34:42):
So there's a real difference between a coup and a mutiny, right? A coup suggests that the object of the movement and the message is to overthrow the existing regime. A mutiny is an expression of dissatisfaction with the hierarchies handling of a particular situation. This was a mutiny. This was not necessarily a coup. It could have been a coup if conditions had been a little bit different. But I think Prigozhin envisioned himself as a petitioner. He envisioned himself as, first of all, somebody who was taken for granted by the Kremlin, who had sacrificed tremendously on the battlefield, who during the Bach moot battle lost probably close to 20,000 men. In the course of roughly nine, 10 months or so. The daily death count was about 200 a day. That's really phenomenal. You don't really see kind of battles like that. It's been decades really since World War ii, since we've seen that kind of destruction in human sacrifice.
(35:48):
So I think one thing that was happening with Prigozhin is he was kind of having a Colonel Kurt's moment where he just was, I think, overwhelmed by the destruction and the bodies falling around him, overwhelmed by the fact that there's this pounding artillery. I mean, he chose in many instances to go to the front line to be kind of part of the social media splash. At the same time, there were people that I think he genuinely was close to that were lost in battle, namely one in particular I can think of is a young commander who had fought in Bakmut, and they filmed a famous propaganda film, and he was killed in the battle of Bakmut, and I think Prigozhin was very affected by that. I think that was genuine. So he was going mad, but as you said, he was high on his own supply. He was drunk with power. There were media polls suggesting that Prigozhin would be an excellent replacement for Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, who was kind of viewed as a little bit of a weakling or kind of a desk jockey, basically.
Andrea Chalupa (36:55):
He'd never served in the military. All he did was just wear the uniform.
Candace Rondeaux (36:59):
Yeah, he would always wear these, yeah. I mean, he spent a lot of time genuinely dealing with emergencies, name a number of them. But Shoigu was not a military guy. He had never served for any particular length of time in the military, but he loved to kind of present himself as this big sort of military general.
Andrea Chalupa (37:18):
And I just want to jump in, and yet the West was still shaking in their boots over the guy.
Candace Rondeaux (37:23):
Yeah, I, again, that goes back to that sort of lack of understanding, that lack of knowledge, that lack of expertise, just not being available and not really being tapped into. But Prigozhin, he saw himself as somebody who was willing to do what Russian generals were not willing to do. And he famously called out Shoigu and Gerasimov for sitting in their, I think he said it was like in your mahogany paneled rooms, your mahogany paneled offices, and he was kind of a class warrior, right? He's a guy who was a street brawler who had spent time in prison. I think he talked about himself and felt he was a self-made man. And then these guys, the officers in charge were kind of just desk jockeys who were smoking cigars and drinking vodka and eating caviar as far as he was concerned and shorting him on ammunition.
(38:18):
But he also understood that they were coming for him. And I think in the backdrop is all these defectors coming forward suddenly on YouTube channels confessing that they had been part of war crimes that Yevgeny Prigozhin had ordered. There was a clear disinformation campaign and a campaign to smear him as something other than what he was a frontline hero. And I think he understood that that was likely coming from somewhere inside the Kremlin amongst his rivals. So that was a big motivation for his rising up. But also he understood that not winning Bakmut meant that he was going to lose his political relevance. And the last thing you need in Putin's Russia is to lose your political relevance. And I think that was a big motivation for charging forward with this mutiny against Moscow. When he talked to some of the defectors and some of the mercenaries who recounted that 24 hour, 48 hour period, many of them said they had no idea what they were being asked to do.
(39:19):
They woke up to orders that basically they were to march on Moscow. They did it, but not everybody understood what it was they were doing. And so there was some, I think, chaos even within Wagner's ranks at the time, and I think we kind of saw that happening. But he did. I think Prigozhin have a sense that he had a green light. There were a number of Russian military generals. One in particular, Sergei Surovikin, who was the chief of the aerospace forces, and then had been chief for the theater or operations of Ukraine for some time. He was very close to the Wagner Group, and so was Mikhail Mizintsev, another colonel who was also very close to Prigozhin and to the Wagner Group. There are a bunch of generals who were characterized as VIP Wagner members, and I think there's plenty of evidence to show that they kind of gave him the go ahead, gave him the nod, assured him that nothing would happen and that he could deliver his message to Putin in person. Obviously, that's not what happened, but it is interesting to know there really was very little resistance. Nobody came out in Rostov-on-Don and started shooting these guys. They made it all the way up to Lipetsk and almost unopposed, basically. And so what this shows is that there was a certain sense of collusion somewhere within the ranks. I think he stopped short because of threats to his family and mercenaries, particularly mercenary commanders, also received threats to their family. And it was sort of a stopping point for them.
Andrea Chalupa (40:47):
Wow. But it really did show that you pointed out people weren't coming out in the street with Putin flags saying, stop what you're doing. They're like, all right. This is interesting.
Candace Rondeaux (40:55):
Well, not only that, they were out there cheering him, right? You remember the scene, even when he decided to turn around, it was like all these crowds came out saying, we love you. They're shaking his hand. Here's a guy who has literally just upended the entire order of the world's second biggest superpower. And everybody's like, yay. It was pretty crazy. It was a crazy scene.
Andrea Chalupa (41:18):
And in terms of the plane exploding in the sky, what was that like two months later.
Candace Rondeaux (41:23):
Right? August, 2023.
Andrea Chalupa (41:25):
August, yes. How naive was he to stick around like that?
Candace Rondeaux (41:30):
Hmmm...
Andrea Chalupa (41:30):
He just think he was untouchable because Wagner was all over the world, across Africa, being the terrorist police force for Russian corporate interests and piracy?
Candace Rondeaux (41:43):
Well, on its face, his actions certainly suggested that he thought he was going to get a pass from Putin, right? Once the deal was cut where he decided to stand down his troops, and some were sent to Belarus, and then some were going to be absorbed into the regular military structure, it may have looked like that's what he was thinking, that everything was okay, and that Putin would make good on his promise for amnesty, for those who decided to stand down and lay down their weapons. In reality, very soon after the mutiny, he began to prepare his will began to transfer assets to his son, Pavel Prigozhin. He renegotiated the ownership and share ownership of dozens of different Shell companies that held these secret assets that had been gathered. So in reality, I think Prigozhin fully understood that there was a pretty good chance that he would be killed.
(42:41):
And there was lots of evidence to show that he was preparing for that moment. I think he also felt that he could save the day if he could pull off just one more deal in Africa, which is why he spent that last week before he was killed in that plane crash, hopscotching from Libya to Madagascar, Central African Republic and Mali. I think he sort of was hoping that if he could just convince the right set of dictators to keep going with the Wagner option as opposed to the Russian military controlled option, that maybe he could win Putin's favor back.
Andrea Chalupa (43:13):
Wow. And so one question I got after his plane explode in the sky, and this really speaks to Russian psychological warfare, how you just don't know what to believe when it comes to the Russians. People ask me, listeners ask me, did he fake his death?
Candace Rondeaux (43:32):
That's not the first time that that question has come up, and I don't think we'll ever really know what was the cause of the explosion? Was he really on board? But I mean, all signs point to him being on board, and he wasn't the only one on board. You had Utkin. You had a couple other commanders who were,
Andrea Chalupa (43:50):
And Utkin is the founder of Wagner, who's all tatted up with Nazi symbolism.
Candace Rondeaux (43:55):
Right? This is the neo-Nazi guy. The SS bolts on his neck. So some of the most important commanders were on that plane. Their relatives showed up for their funerals. Assets were moved around for them, as well as for Prigozhin. So one has to presume that if they're not dead, they're dead to the world.
Andrea Chalupa (44:25):
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