What Just Happened in Russia This Weekend?
Paul Poast joins ‘Plain English’ to break down Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion and discuss the background of the Wagner Group
University of Chicago professor Paul Poast breaks down Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion, Vladimir Putin’s weakness, Russia’s military incompetence, and the long-term implications of Saturday’s bizarre 36-hour rebellion.
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In the following excerpt, Paul Poast explains the origins and purpose of the Wagner Group, which recently attempted a coup in Moscow.
Derek Thompson: Paul, I had to bring you back because this weekend is very confusing. It was very confusing. I think a lot of people woke up to the possibility that Russia was descending into a violent civil war with a private military force turning on the state, marching in columns toward Moscow. And hours later, just hours later, the mutiny was over and the leader of that mutiny, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is being whisked away to Belarus. So let’s start at the beginning. Tell us what we need to know about Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, which I’ve heard pronounced “Wagner” and “Wahgner” and “Vagner” by purported Russian experts. So I guess, first, pick your own pronunciation, and then tell me what happened. Who are these guys?
Paul Poast: It’s a great question, Derek, and you’re right. The events this weekend were so confusing. To start, yes, let’s talk about the Wagner Group. So my understanding is just, in terms of housekeeping, “Vagner” is the pronunciation because the founder of the group was not Prigozhin. He claims to be the founder, but the actual founder was Dmitry Utkin. And the understanding, it’s shady in terms of who these people were, but he was part of the military establishment and so forth. But he had a fascination with the composer Wagner, who of course was Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. And so it’s understood that maybe Utkin was a neo-Nazi, and so that’s why he named it this. So that’s the running theory. Of course, when you’re dealing with organizations like this, there’s always a little bit of shadiness of exactly what’s going on. But from the people who really study this, that’s the understanding of exactly the origins of this group.
So as you said, you could label it a private military corporation. That’s at least how it calls itself. I think it’s a little bit different than that in that they’re not the same as some of the organizations that we think of, BlackRock or others that the U.S. government has worked with. They’re really kind of very closely tied to the Russian government exclusively. And it’s become a useful means for the Russian government to be able to, if you will, have plausible deniability about some of the more unsavory things that they’ve been doing in the world over the past decade. So this organization came about in 2014, shortly after Russia took control of the Crimean Peninsula, and then started to become engaged in a separatist conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
Of course, that’s something that’s very important. Though I’ve been on the show a few times over the past year talking about the war that’s unfolding in Ukraine, it’s always important to remember that that is just the invasion that happened in February of last year. There’s of course been fighting going on in Ukraine going back to 2014. And a lot of that fighting was actually being facilitated by this group. And that was something that allowed Putin in particular to kind of have some plausible deniability about what’s going on. Like, “Well, no, it’s not Russian forces.” And then of course, if you have members of this organization who are being killed, well, they don’t count in the official casualty count. And so it’s really become a useful instrument by which the Russian government, the Russian military, and specifically Putin has been able to carry out operations, not just in Ukraine, but also in Syria and throughout Africa. To be able to have Russian involvement, but do so at kind of an arm’s-length relationship that it’s like, “Well, it’s not directly the Russian military.”
Though, the Russian military equips them, and a lot of the individuals who serve in it, work in it, come from the Russian military. But it’s not technically the Russian military. And so it’s a little bit of a vague way of describing it, but it gives you a sense that it’s not the same as a private military contractor that we’d typically think of. It’s not the same as a mercenary organization, just, they’ll work for anybody, and whoever hires, they’ll just immediately turn and work for the United States if we offered them more money. They don’t work in that way. They are very much tied to the Russian government. And again, their goal is to kind of provide this kind of distance between what the Russian government wants done and their actual presence. Now, what exactly have they been doing in Ukraine? Well, I mentioned they’ve been involved in Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine, since 2014. But ever since the invasion happened last year, they’ve taken on a larger role in terms of actually carrying out the fighting.
And the reason why is related to things that you and I have talked about previously on this podcast, which is that this fighting has not gone according to plan for Russia. And of course, the last time I was on the podcast was back in the fall. That was shortly after the major offensive that Ukraine had launched that had generated a lot of success for them. And then the question that we ended that conversation on was, well, how’s Putin going to respond? Well, of course, he did respond with a major mobilization call and then kind of digging in on the lines that they hold. But it’s gotten harder to be able to bring in personnel to continue fighting. They’ve had a lot of casualties. And the Wagner Group has proven very useful in this regard because they’ve been able to bring in individuals from prisons. They’ve been able to bring in some of these individuals, criminals, if you will, to be able to fill in the ranks.
People who are willing to just say, “Sure, I’ll sign up. It doesn’t matter if this is a—I don’t have any nationalism about this. Just pay me, and I’ll come and I’ll fight.” And so the Wagner Group has been able to help fill in that gap. The area where they’ve been playing the biggest role, most notably over the past six months, has been in particular the Battle of Bakhmut. And the Battle of Bakhmut, of course, is this meat grinder of a conflict that was going on for months in Eastern Ukraine, one that I’ve talked to other people about as being analogous to some of the fighting we would see in World War I. Trench warfare, efforts by both sides trying to make movement and launching offensives and counteroffensives with very little movement. And in the end, Russia actually won that battle. They gained control of Bakhmut, but it was very much identified as a Pyrrhic victory.
Massive casualties suffered by both sides, but in particular by Russia. But the key is that most of those casualties were suffered by the Wagner Group. They were suffered by individuals fighting through the Wagner Group. Even as people were saying, “Oh, well, Russia is incurring all these casualties at Bakhmut,” it’s like, yes, but they’re using the mercenary organization. They’re not using their elite troops to do this, they’re using the Wagner Group to do this. I think that that was something that contributed in two ways to what we then saw this weekend. The way it contributed was twofold. No. 1, they did win, and that gave a lot of notoriety and, if you will, confidence to this group, and in particular Prigozhin. And we could talk more about who exactly he is in a moment. Secondly, though, they did win, but they actually weren’t thrilled with how the fighting went.
Prigozhin had been very vocal about feeling he was being undersupplied. And he wanted to see a change in the relationship regarding how they were being treated by the Russian Defense Ministry. So you already had these tensions coming out of the Battle of Bakhmut. Well, I think that came to a head this weekend, in particular because the Russian Defense Ministry, maybe due to kind of these issues, was looking to try to change the relationship. They wanted to kind of move away from this arm’s-length relationship and bring this organization, the Wagner Group, as well as some other organizations, formally into the Ministry of Defense. And Prigozhin, the Wagner Group, said, “No, we don’t want that. We’re not going to do that.” And then he went as far as to say, “In fact, they’re not even trying to change the terms of the deal. They’re going to try to eliminate us.” And that was what then led him to want to launch what happened this weekend.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Paul Poast
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
