The History of Russia's Mercenary Wagner Group & Its Leader Yevgeny Prigozhin

in addition to Dennis P Lush and Kiev we're joined by Kimberly Martin professor of political science at Barnard College Columbia University has been working on the Wagner group for years as Dennis pilosh talked about the far-reaching or the far-reaching tentacles of the Wagner group and I'm wondering if you can talk about for an American audience is this like Blackwater um talk about its Origins give us

a description of who uh what the Wagner group is and its Founders relationship with Putin thank you Amy those are such important questions the Wagner group is not really a private military group in the way that we think of them as in the west it is instead a Contracting mechanism that has been used by the Russian military intelligence agency since 2014 for various purposes around the

world um it was first used in eastern Ukraine in 2014 at that time pagosian was not yet associated with it it then took on Contracting obligations in Syria as an infantry group and it was about that time that pagosian took it over there is some evidence that he may have taken it over in a violent raid from its founder Dimitri utkin at that point in about

2017 2018 Russia began to deploy the Wagner group in various countries in Africa in Sudan in the Central African Republic in eastern Libya to support the warlord there halifah haftar there was an attempt to deploy at some places that didn't work out so well well recently we've seen it go into Mali and there are rumors that it also may be going into Burkina Faso and to

Chad and what we have seen about it is that it is an extraordinarily flexible Contracting mechanism well we just heard about all the terrible human rights violations and murderous activities that Wagner has in fact committed it has not done anything worse than the uniformed Russian military forces have done and so I think we have to keep in mind that the uniformed Russian military forces have been

absolutely abysmal have never followed the Geneva conventions in terms of their attacks on civilians in Afghanistan in chechnya in Syria and so Wagner does horrible things but it's essentially manned by people who are coming primarily out of the Russian security forces and it's very flexible it has Pilots working for it that can engage in air attacks it can be infantry it can have very high level

highly trained highly disciplined snipers as it did in Libya and so it's it's not something that's separate from the Russian state it never has been and this leads us to the question of who pregosian is pregosian has made himself seem more important than he actually is he has never been Putin's friend he has always been Putin's servant he started out life being sentenced to 12 years

in Soviet times and what was then Leningrad for Common Street crimes robbery and burglary he got out of prison two years early which means at that time from everything we know he probably made some kind of a deal with what was then the KGB what became the FSB the internal Russian security services at the time that he got out Putin was the deputy mayor of what

was then Saint Petersburg Putin was responsible for overseeing all the Contracting that occurred as capitalism was coming to Russia in Saint Petersburg and so that means that Putin was is responsible for overseeing the establishment of pagosian's hot dog stand his grocery stores and then his restaurants and when Putin was entertaining guests in St Petersburg he would bring them to pagosian's restaurants and then when Putin went

to the Kremlin he brought pregosian with him to do catering in the Kremlin and then to have the catering responsibilities for the Moscow public school system and to do some military catering and then military cleaning work all before he became the person who was responsible for military Contracting pagosian has no combat experience he is the middleman he is the contractor and what Russian social media sources

have been saying recently is that people believe that the reason that pagosian has been kept on is that he has a long-standing relationship with the same organized criminal groups that Putin was associated with in Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s and pregosian knows who to pay paid off when contracts happen so we have to keep in mind that everything is more expensive in Russia than it

is in the west because everybody has to take their top off the contract and apparently one of pregosian's roles has been to figure out who was to be paid what amount of money on all tracks that were involved with the Russian military and what seems to have happened is that pagosian's head got too big he was being protected by Putin and so he believed he was

more important than he actually was and this was just the latest step in a long-standing feud that he'd had with the Russian defense Ministry and what we've seen is that he essentially got stopped in his tracks we don't know what's going to happen to him one thing we have to keep in mind about everything we've seen in the last couple of days is that everybody we're

analyzing is very skilled in disinformation and deception and what we're seeing on the surface may not be what's happening uh really in the background and you believe can you see pagosian going to Belarus also the role of lukashenko in all of this and finally on the issue of what has been agreed to now there are some who are saying this came to a head because by

July 1st shoigu was insisting that these military groups had to renew contracts the deal that's being made now that some of these men the fighters for Wagner could be incorporated into the Russian military you've also you didn't mention the deal that pagosian made to get convicts out of prison to fight in Ukraine right a lot of complex questions you raise and I'll try to address them

um first of all the only statement that we have about any deal being made came from Putin's spokesperson piscal and so it was a very general statement that was made we don't have any more information about that certainly nothing has been written down again what is coming across on social media and also a really good Russian independent Independence uh press Source called Medusa is that lukashenko

was primarily um uh playing a role in all of this he was an actor a prop who was being put forth as the person who was doing uh the negotiation when in fact the negotiation was probably Happening by various members of Putin's Administration uh what Medusa has said is that Putin actually refused to speak with progosian that pagosian asked to speak with Putin and Putin wouldn't

speak with him so it was various members of the Putin regime that were instead making this deal one of the names that some people have been putting forth is Alex Day Duman who is a lieutenant general who's had a lot of military experience a lot of security experience he was the chief of Putin's security guards at one point he's now the governor of the region of

Tula so it's not really clear what happened with the negotiation or what the actual parameters of whatever agreement was reached are but we can imagine all kinds of things happening with Belarus we can imagine first of all that this just gets forgotten that pagosian gets bumped off and disappears and we never hear from him again we can imagine him flying to Belarus and then flying to

Africa to take charge of his courses that are in Africa with the understanding that now he is to stay outside of Russia's immediate sphere of influence and never be seen again that way or we could see him going to Belarus with a group of his forces which is what the Wall Street Journal has suggested and now establishing a new Russian and presence in Belarus perhaps for

the purpose of helping lukashenka stay in power now that there has been this obvious instability in Russia we've seen that it is something that is giving some more hope to the opposition forces in Belarus and maybe the deal that was reached is that now pagosian will go to Belarus to help lukashenka stay in power by adding some to the Belarusian Security Forces but at this point

it's all smoke and mirrors we don't actually know what's happening and the most important thing to keep in mind is that pragosian as an individual has never been quite as important as people have made him out to be and he overstepped his bounds over the last couple of days and it is very unlikely that pregosian comes out somehow on top in all of this what it

has shown is that Putin has been willing to allow himself to look weak and so the the general sensibility is that even if it's not progression that threatens Putin going forward now people within Putin's Inner Circle are going to be emboldened in a way that they haven't been before because Putin did not come out of this looking like somebody who was strong who understood how to

deal with things and I would just point out before I stop here that it was not a bloodless event what the Russian military reported on Saturday is that 13 Russian Airmen mostly helicopter Pilots a couple who were flying fixed-wing aircraft were shot down by the Wagner forces as they flew overhead and that is something that the Russian military is not going to forget or forgive it

was not bloodless there was was the blood spilled by Russian military forces um and so I think we're just at the beginning of what's going to happen but neither Pagosa nor Putin came out looking very good and Dennis pilash and Kiev we just have one minute but Russia has the largest nuclear Arsenal in the world are you concerned that Putin who has clear really been embarrassed

by this would want to distract attention as he says he's moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus are you concerned about this in Ukraine uh we are mostly concerned both with this and also with the Fallout after the cahoka dam destruction that was obviously made by the Russian explosion from inside and now there are reports that said nuclear power plant station is the biggest one in Europe

has been also mined so this nuclear Leverage is clearly on the table but and the big problem is also about this General chaos in Russia because precaution is not the only oligarchy with an army of his own at his disposal and almost every major corporation starting with the fossil fuel Giant gasprom in Russia has its own uh private military company and then you have uh Regional

Governors with their military units as well so this can spill out to even more chaos but this also means it's a Miss of stability one of the pillars of Putin's regime has eroded completely I want to thank you all for being with us I want to thank Dennis pilash joining us from the capital of Ukraine cave he's a Ukrainian political scientist Kimberly Martin professor of political

science at Barnard College Columbia University and in Moscow Nina khrushcheva who is Professor of international Affairs at the new school great granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev