Putin powerless to stop Russians clinging on to Kremlin rebel | Mark Galeotti

In terms of the real void, I mean, it's fascinating with the one-year anniversary of his death, had all these impromptu memorials popping up all around Russia. And it's not because they actually think, oh, he was such a nice chap. It's that in death, the kind of legend of Prigozhin has become in some ways much more powerful. Now, who was Yevgeny Prigozhin? Those following the Ukraine-Russia war would be familiar with the Russian mercenary leader and oligarch who led the private military Wagner Group and was a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin until, abruptly, he wasn't. A new book traces Prigozhin's rise and examines the political climate that propelled a convicted gangster with no government office experience to the formidable role he came to occupy. Downfall's co-author Mark Gagliotti is a political scientist, historian, and an expert in modern Russia. And he joins me now. Hello, Mark. Hello, Dan. Hello. Thanks very much for being with us. Look, we'll come to the end of Prigozhin in just a minute. But first, let's consider his rise. He was an aspiring skier who turned mugger, ex-con, and hot dog salesman. How the hell did somebody like that become such a major figure in Russia? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, this is in some ways why we wrote the book, not in any way just to sort of forfeit this particularly nasty man, but because he's a case study in how in that totally chaotic, anarchic moment when the Soviet Union collapsed and a new Russia, whatever it was going to be, was beginning to emerge in the 1990s. Suddenly, all the old certainties were gone and you could have someone who precisely happened to have the right skill set, which includes the capacity not just to network and make friends, but also the capacity to intimidate people. Could Harley, a tiny little business selling hot dogs in St. Petersburg, all the way through to having a massive commercial empire, all courtesy of the fact that he knew the right people to cultivate and was actually, one has to recognize, a good deal maker at the time. It's remarkable. It's like an apprentice candidate's dream, isn't it? What was the process by which he did it? He basically went from being the hot dog salesman to running restaurants in which the Russia's elite would hobnob, and from there, what was the next step? Well, I mean, the next step was precisely his restaurants, as you say, had become a place where the St. Petersburg elite could get together and on the whole show their conspicuous consumption. It was a time when if you have money, you wanted to show it off. You, by definition, went to the swankiest, most expensive, most over-the-top places. What this meant is exactly he had the capacity to make friends and allies and business connections with all the people in St. Petersburg who mattered. Why that was crucial because one of them, and at the time not even the most prominent, was a deputy mayor called Vladimir Putin, with whom Prigozhin had had deals. Let's be honest, when we say deals, we mean corrupt ones when it came to opening casinos and things. And so when Putin then moved to Moscow and in short order became prime minister and then president, he took with him all his old mates from St. Petersburg. And although Prigozhin was never actually a friend, he was always a hanger-on, a crony rather than anything else, but nonetheless, it meant that Prigozhin could come to Moscow and had already his connections at the very heart of the new government. And so the group he set up, the mercenary group, Wagner, why was there a vacancy for that? Like most countries, Britain, America seemed to survive without semi-authorized mercenary groups doing our dirty work for us in different parts of the world. Why did Russia need one? Well, you've got to understand that it's not just how we actually are, but how Putin perceives us as being. He looked at mercenary organizations like the private security company, private industry company rather, Blackwater in the United States that then went through a whole variety of name changes. And instead of seeing it as essentially a money-making venture that happened to be based in the United States and therefore obviously had deals with the US government and provided troops for Afghanistan, Iraq, and so forth, in Putin's paranoid worldview, this was clearly a deniable tool of the Pentagon. And if the Americans had it, then he wanted to have one. And so back in 2013, they're thinking of setting up what was meant to be a private organization, but which would actually be an offshoot of the state. And they were looking for someone who could be the front man, who could actually be the dealmaker to make it work. And it's hard to be absolutely sure, but certainly we saw evidence to suggest that actually Prigozhin didn't want to do this at the time. He was making huge amounts of money with all kinds of sweetheart catering and other deals. But then when the Kremlin said, we want you to do this, ultimately Prigozhin depended on the Kremlin's favor. And so, you know, it was an offer he couldn't refuse. And therefore suddenly he found himself trying to set up a mercenary organization, something about which at the time he knew absolutely nothing. But the Kremlin said, so he did. Wow. Look, he gained a bit of international notoriety in 2016, at least more than he had already, during the U.S. presidential election, because he was behind a troll farm which targeted American voters, right? Yeah, because this was in some ways one of Prigozhin's greatest talents. You've got a whole bunch of people like him, all these aspiring minigarks, trying to basically catch the eye in the favor of the boss. On one level, Russia is a very modern, institutional, bureaucratized state like every other. But it just happens to have this little medieval court sitting on top, in which the real currency is Putin's favor. And Prigozhin was very good at trying to work out what Putin was likely to want tomorrow and provide it today. And therefore he had these troll farms that he was using for basically black PR in business terms. And out of both a certain sense of patriotism, but also because he knew that the Kremlin would like it, he started moving into these international operations, basically causing mischief in the United States. And the irony is, the more notorious he got in the West, the more his star rose in Russia as a result. Wow, yeah, okay. And look, by the time the war in Ukraine, at least in its latest incarnation, began, why was Wagner required there? Because am I right in thinking, until that point, Wagner troops had mainly been used far afield in Africa and places like that. Were they originally involved in the war on Ukraine? Or was that something that had to happen when the regular forces began to somewhat disintegrate? Yeah, it was very much the latter. I mean, at first, the Ministry of Defense had set up its own little mercenary company and they decided, no, no, no, we don't need Wagner, we're just going to use our own guys. But of course, then they had massively, catastrophically underestimated the Ukrainians. And so you had these forces that were decimated. And suddenly, it became, if we're talking about sort of economics of warfare, it became suddenly a seller's market for infantry. And Prigozhin had troops, and all of a sudden, the Kremlin needed them. So once again, Prigozhin steps in and does what the Kremlin needs doing. He pulls in a lot of troops, he starts recruiting even from prison camps and such like. And for a while, he's presenting himself and feeling like the savior of Russia, because he's able to throw in tens of thousands of extra warm bodies into the fighting at the very point in 2022, when the Russians needed the most. And look, he eventually, of course, grew disillusioned with Putin during the war and was responsible for an aborted coup. What was the catalyst behind that? Why did that happen? Essentially, for a long time, Putin had got involved in a political feud with the then Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu. And in some ways, it was absolutely a battle of contrasts, because Prigozhin is all about bluster and public threats and so forth. Shoigu, very accomplished, wily, behind-the-scenes political operator. And ultimately, Shoigu was winning. And it came to the point when the decision was made that all mercenaries would actually have to sign a contract with the Defense Ministry, which in other words meant it was a very hostile takeover bid by the Defense Ministry. Now, Prigozhin, if he'd been sensible, he would have just simply accepted it was a loss. He still would have been a multi-multi-millionaire and so forth. But no. There's something about Prigozhin's character and also the degree to which he had imbued the violent, macho, you-never-back-down kind of culture of what the Russians call the zone, the prison camp system, that he felt he could not let Shoigu win. And therefore, however risky, he had to try one last throw of the dice, which was his mutiny, which wasn't to try to topple Putin or anything. It was almost to try and prove to Putin just how powerful and useful he would be and to try and get Putin to back him instead of Shoigu. And of course, terrible miscalculation from his perspective. I mean, he must have known from the moment that that sort of coup crumbled that his days were numbered. There's presumably no doubt that the Kremlin was behind his killing, his assassination. There is no doubt. I mean, this is one of these areas of a slight dispute between myself and my co-author, Anna Ratunyan. She's a solid journalist and is very much, well, look, we have to be honest. There is no information. Me, I'm willing to hand-wave a bit more. Look, I am absolutely convinced that Putin was behind it. But I think that Prigozhin felt he had time. He felt he had a little window of opportunity to try and prove to Putin that he could still be useful. Because certainly in terms of if one looks at what happened between the mutiny and his death, he throws himself into his operations in Africa with redoubled enthusiasm. I think he's really trying to prove that, in fact, he can still be useful. But obviously, as it was, though, I mean, he knew that there was a sword of Damocles hanging over him. I don't think he or anyone realized how quickly it would fall. And I think he still hoped that one way or the other, he could get one last deal made and get out from under it. And look, since he was blown up on his jet, has he left a void? Is there a Wagner-shaped void in Russia now? Or has someone else risen to replace him? How does it work now? Well, essentially, I mean, yes, there are still mercenary organizations. But really, they're now much more tightly under the control of the state. One lesson Putin has learned is exactly, you don't let some kind of sort of thuggish miniguard build his own private army. And now they're essentially, although there are these mercenary organizations, they're basically all run by military intelligence. But on the other hand, in terms of the real void, I mean, it's fascinating with the one year anniversary of his death and all these impromptu memorials popping up all around Russia. And it's not because they actually think, oh, he was such a nice chap. It's that in death, the kind of legend of Prigozhin has become in some ways much more powerful. He's become this kind of image of the true Russian patriot who rolled up his sleeves and did what the country needed, but who was also willing to speak truth to power. So there's a funny kind of Prigozhin icon that is feeling, I think, a Russian need because they do feel dissatisfied, but they have very few heroes that they can use to express that dissatisfaction. Wow, okay. You've written about Russia's strategy of creating inconveniences for the West, which I suppose in some inclinations, certainly with his sort of troll farms, Prigozhin seemed to embody or at least embrace. Tell me a bit more about that strategy and the way in which it's conducted. I think what we're seeing, this is just based on obviously sort of context in Russia, but also the sort of chatter one can pick up, is that from the Russians' point of view, they're feeling almost a bit exasperated in that they feel that they haven't really managed to properly start to drive a wedge between Ukraine and the West. And their view is, look, at the moment, things have become too easy for the West. Metaphorically speaking, they write a check every month to Ukraine to keep the war going. And this costs billions of pounds, euros and dollars every month. But nonetheless, people don't necessarily think of that as a, oh, well, that's why there are still potholes in my road, or that's why this housing block hasn't been reclad or something. So I think what they're trying to do is to start a campaign of what we could think of as very low-level sabotage in order just to make our lives more inconvenient, more willing to therefore think, well, actually having support for Ukraine does have costs for us. I mean, I was talking to some Nordic parliamentarians recently, and they all of a sudden started creating their own nightmare scenarios. What would happen if, for example, this particular ferry route was suddenly no longer working, particularly for a day? You think if you, let's say, can disrupt commuter trains just for one day, how many people's lives do you touch? So it's this sort of strange moving away from the grand narratives of we will use nuclear weapons to a new narrative, which is just, what happens if the ticket machines all start getting messed up because of a cyber attack? This is a new risk we face. Well, I mean, this very morning, there's news of an airport in Stockholm being temporarily closed when drones intruded into its airspace, and police are suggesting that they have come from Russia. It seems like the same sort of thing, as you say, a strategy of inconveniences. Look, on the war in Ukraine generally, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said just the other day that the UK is determined to see Ukraine win and will stand with them as long as it takes. What do you think win means these days? I mean, does it mean Russia retreating and returning all territory that's been taken, or do we have lower hopes? Yeah, look, that is one of the most important questions. And the honest answer is there is no agreement. We have shied away from any kind of public debate, either at home or between Western allies, about quite what winning and losing means. And therefore, actually, if you talk about winning in Warsaw, you probably got a very different perspective from what it means in Paris. Generally speaking, I mean, I think what we're now seeing is it's beginning of a polarizing debate in the West between those people who say winning means absolutely deriving the Russians out of all or most of Ukrainian territory, sometimes a little hint that, well, Crimea might not be covered, and a Ukraine that is entirely sovereign, which is, after all, its entire right, and others who have a rather more minimalist line that just simply says, look, the killing has to stop. If we can sort of salvage most of Ukraine and build up that Ukraine so that it's actually a prosperous democracy, that will surely count as a win and a defeat for Putin, even if he's still sitting in control of chunks of Ukrainian territory. But the point is, no one really dares open this discussion because as soon as it happens, the divisions, the fault lines in the West begin to become obvious.