Hey everybody, it's your host A .R. and I am
beyond excited for what we have coming up next
on the Diplomacy and Discourse Podcast. This
week we dive into one of the most explosive and
sobering reads of the year, Putin's Sledgehammer,
the Wagner Group, and Russia's collapse into
mercenary chaos by Candice Rondeau. This is not
just a book about Russia or Ukraine. It's a wake
-up call. It's about the collapse of accountability,
the rise of mercenary warfare, and how one man's
hunger for power destabilized global security
through a private army of extremists, criminals,
and killers. Candice doesn't just report. She
exposes. With deep scouring and razor -sharp
insight, she unpacks the story of the Wagner
Group in a way that will leave you speechless.
Don't forget to like and subscribe, share us
your thoughts, email us at diplomacyanddiscourse
at gmail .com. Now, let's get into it. All right,
everybody. Welcome back to Diplomacy and Discourse
podcast. I'm your host, AR, and today's guest
is someone whose work I've come to recently admire.
Not only for sharp political insight, but for
her courage to dig where others won't. Joining
me is Candice Rondeau. a renowned journalist,
strategic analyst, and scholar whose work has
been featured in The Washington Post, Foreign
Policy, The Guardian, and beyond. She's currently
a senior fellow at the Center on the Future of
War at Arizona State University and is the senior
director for Future Frontlines and directs the
planetary politics initiatives at New America.
Candice has spent decades investigating the intersection
of political violence, disinformation, and authoritarianism.
with a special focus on the post -soviet world.
Her latest book, Putin's Sledgehammer, the Wagner
Group, and Russia's collapse into mercenary chaos,
is a gripping expose that pulls no punches. It
examines how a rogue mercenary army, once a tool
of the Kremlin, grew so powerful it threatened
to overshadow the Russian military itself. This
is a story of war crimes, disinformation, betrayal,
and the death of state accountability. And Candice
documents it all with fearless precision. Candice,
welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you.
Oh, it's so great to be here. Thank you. And
thanks for that really kind introduction. So
what sparked your interest in the Wagner Group?
And how did it how did this project evolve into
Puth and Sledgehammer? Yeah, you know, there
are so many different little things that kind
of led my led me into this trail of trying to
sniff out the Wagner Group, what it was about,
I guess. maybe three threads that are important
to mention. The first is I have been looking
at and studying and thinking about all things
Russian since I was 14 years old in high school,
stumbling through the Russian alphabet, trying
to figure out and make sense of Cyrillic. I studied
Russian history and culture and language as an
undergrad and then stumbled my way into a career
in journalism. which oftentimes was really animated
by the desire to become like the next bureau
chief of of like Moscow for New York Times or
Washington Post. That was like my fantasy. I
didn't get that far. I actually ended up in Kabul
for the Washington Post. But still, that's like
one of the big threads is just the experience
I had studying Russian. I lived in St. Petersburg
in 1990s. And I guess one of the kind of connective
threads here is that it was exactly when Vladimir
Putin was kind of rising to power. He was then
deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and a little known
to most of the world at the same time, Yevgeny
Prugosin, who was this sort of CEO and Presario
of the Wagner Group mercenary army was also kind
of coming into his own at the same time. So all
three of us were there in St. Petersburg, living
probably only like blocks from each other. So
that was kind of, when I started kind of looking
at trying to write about and report on the story
of the Wagner Group, I was like, oh shit, part
of my language. But that's kind of weird that
we have that in common. And I don't really much
remember anything about Putin at that time, but
what I do know is that he obviously has been
very influential in reshaping Russia. And for
most of my career, I have been in and out of
trying to report on or understand Putin's Russia.
And the Wagner Group came up really as a kind
of question about Russia's ambition to reinvent
itself on the world stage. So what is, can you
go back into history on the Wagner Group, how
it started, why it evolved into the way it is
now? Yeah, so we have to kind of dial back all
the way to the 1990s, early 1990s. Many people,
you know, of a certain age will remember that
this, you know, cataclysmic events happens, you
know, all across the Soviet Union, where, you
know, Republic by Republic, begins to rebel against
Soviet authority. It kind of spreads almost like
a wildfire in the Baltics first, breaches Ukraine,
part of the caucuses. And what is precipitating
this is economic freefall in the country that's
caused partially by the Soviet Union's long -term
involvement in Afghanistan. And it's that war
that leads to kind of the economic collapse of
the country and this long -standing race with
the United States at the end of the Cold War,
you know, the so -called missile gap race and
the race to escalate the capacity to foment nuclear
war. So fast forward a little bit to, you know,
let's say 1992, 1993, and a couple things are
happening. One, the country is really shuddering
from this huge political and economic shock.
And people are poor as hell. You know, retirement
accounts are dried up. I mean, just there's no
food. But the one group or social cast that does
have access to food and money is the Russian
mafia, which at the time in the early 1990s was,
you know, next to the KGB, the most powerful,
you know, organized movement inside of Russia.
And in fact, there was kind of a marriage of
convenience that happened in the early 1990s
between the KGB, which later became the FSB security
service, kind of like the Russian FBI, and Russian
organized crime groups. And lo and behold, at
the same time, while this is happening, a bunch
of veterans from the Afghan war are returning
home. And guess what? They're out of work. And
they're out of work at a time when the Russian
military is trying to find its footing, and the
government is privatizing everything. And this
is the moment we first see the appearance of
private security companies all across domestic
Russia, so Moscow, St. Petersburg, big cities.
And they're doing the things that you would normally
think of, providing bodyguard protection for
rich people and businessmen, doing surveillance
and protection of certain valuable properties.
At this stage, there is no private military contractor
service or, you know, there's no industry per
se. But what is happening is there's a merger
between the security services, between organized
crime, between these out of work veterans, and
then these kind of new rising private security
companies that are domestic in nature. Fast forward
to 2008, and now Putin is really in power. And
you know, the Russian military is still struggling
because of this economic challenge, still struggling
because of long -standing corruption. There's
a war in Georgia that goes okay for Russia, but
it really reveals a lot of the weaknesses of
the Russian military. And it's at that moment
that another effort to privatize another part
of Russia, most importantly, the military, sets
off this race to develop what is now what we
call the private military contracting, you know,
industry in Russia. It's out of that, plus, you
have Gennady Prigozhin's relationship, long standing
relationship with Putin, that we get some of
the first experimentations in expeditionary private
military contractors, like the Wagner Group.
So, has there been any jaw dropping things that
you discovered that would make the readers think
like, I can't believe Putin got away with this?
Does something with maybe the annexation of Crimea
too that occurred later? Oh, absolutely. I mean,
there are so many jaw -dropping moments for me
in the reporting and writing of this book. Some
of them unfolded literally as I was typing the
last chapters of the book. But I guess the one
I think that's really interesting is I mean,
you mentioned Crimea and the invasion, the little
green men appearing on the Crimean Peninsula
suddenly, mysteriously. And it was there that
we start to see this experimentation, this deployment
of small scale battalions of men with no insignia,
uniforms that are kind of weirdly not very easy
to distinguish, their faces are masked. And first
they're in Crimea, and then suddenly they're
marching across into Donbas. Nobody knows who's
in charge. And it's at this moment that we start
to understand that the Russian government is
very much behind this separatist uprising in
eastern Ukraine in 2014. But still, even then,
nobody knew sort of like what battalion was what
battalion. Everything had like sort of like,
you know, alias names. And you might remember
in July 2014, there was this huge event where
a commercial jetliner out of Amsterdam, a Malaysia
jetliner MH17 flew over Ukraine and was down
by some sort of fire, some sort of missile. And
it was at that moment that the kind of the roads
and the mystery of what was going on in Dumbass
started to become a little bit more clear. And
we started to hear kind of, you know, crackling
on the radios about a guy named Wagner. And it
was the experimentation that those experimental
battalion groups that was led by a guy named
Dmitry Utkin that had the name Wagner, callsign
Wagner. That's really the origin story. But what's
interesting is that from that moment forward,
2014, summer 2014, Putin was able to convince
the world that Russia had nothing to do with
this mercenary army. Okay. The book does draw
a link between the Wagner group and what you
said earlier, the erosion of the Russian state.
Do you believe Putin intentionally hollowed out
formal institutions to empower proxies like Wagner?
It's kind of a chicken and egg question, actually.
I think the hollowing out was a little bit of
sort of natural entropy that occurs when nobody
else can be in charge but mafia and security
services. Eventually what that means is if there's
only two social groups that control most of the
levers of the power in a country, then you're
going to get a howling out that's kind of just
natural. And by necessity, some of the bigger
institutions like the military are going to still
need talent, though, if things escalate to the
point where Russia has to go to war. And we saw
that happen in Chechnya, right? So some of the
early experiments in deploying sort of proxies
or individuals who claimed to be one thing but
were another really started with some of the
fractiousness in the Caucasus in the mid -1990s.
particularly in Chechnya and Georgia, and some
of the experimentation with using kind of ghost
armies to further Russia's aims really started
to play out much more aggressively after the
Russo -Georgian War in 2008. And yeah, I mean,
I think the hollowing out progressed in large
part because then The Kremlin started to expand
this circle of people who could benefit from
this systema, as they call it in Russia, which
is the system by which corruption and organized
crime and abuse of security services kind of
mixes together. And it's through systema that
you start to see the expansion of what... Should
be private started to be kind of absorbed by
the state through proxies like you have any progression
Have you observed any sort of dangerous for lack
of better words dynamics between Interactions
with Trump this term versus Trump's first term
and even if there is something with between Obama
and and and Biden to has there any similarities
and and differences between that Well, I mean,
it's an interesting segue. I mean, if you need
to draw like a line between sort of how authoritarianism
has unfolded in Russia and the way in which we've
been dealing and wrestling with this kind of
murky narrative about Donald Trump, his connections
to Russia, the ways in which the Trump administration
in his first term attempted to hollow out institutions.
and is now very aggressively in his second term,
hollowing out institutions. Yeah, there's a lot
of threads to draw on there, but I think what
I can say is that it has been really fascinating
to watch how some of the narratives that authoritarian
governments, particularly those like Russia,
have seeped into the body politic of the United
States and really become a polarizing factor.
We're now speaking in August of 2025. And once
again, the story of Russia and Trump has kind
of come to the fore, largely of his own making.
For a while, I think it kind of had laid dormant
since the 2016 presidential election, where there
was allegations of Russian interference in the
election on behalf of Trump, or at least in sort
of putting a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump.
And now it's come to the fore again, in an effort,
seemingly by Trump and his administration, to
criminalize even asking the question about whether
there was interference. Yeah, because, you know,
Obama dealt with, you know, what occurred with
Georgia, and then also in the annexation of Crimea.
Trump, like you just said earlier, had, you know,
this issue with, you know, supposed Russian interference.
And then Biden you know with the with the invasion
of Ukraine and now Trump's sort of dealing with
this whole you know trying to get a deal out
of this. So then throughout you know Biden's
term and now even into Trump's we've seen Zelensky's
public courage in your book does reveal this
his hi his behind the scenes battle with Wagner
because we just. Us, the common listener, our
common citizen, we don't know about Wagner until
you expose this. So what surprised you the most
about how he's handled these shadowy threats?
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. And let me
just sort of emphasize it. Like what you just
laid out, A .R., is like this long thread that
goes from Obama to Trump to Biden and back to
Trump again. And Russia is there again and again.
This problem of Ukraine has been so central to
U .S. politics. and frankly has undone several
administrations. It has frustrated both Democrats
and Republicans in terms of just trying to tamp
down the conflagration that has been caused by
this conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It's
interesting that you mentioned Zelensky. I think
a lot of people see Zelensky now some four years
into this conflict with Russia and Ukraine. as
a kind of Churchillian figure, right? He's sort
of like the Churchill of our era. He's challenging,
he's kind of the David challenging Goliath and
really putting it to Putin where it hurts the
most. He was person of the year too. He was person
of the year. And I don't think anybody would
have expected that. I was in Kiev in 2019 on
the campaign trail. when Zelensky mounted his
campaign for the presidency. And the key opponents
there were Yulia Tymoshenko, who famously was
kind of this heroic figure, a little bit besmirched,
but certainly a heroic figure from the 2004 Orange
Revolution. She was very well known for her pushback
against Russian aggression and sort of creeping
Russian influence. in Ukrainian political culture.
And then there's Petro Poroshenko, who was this
kind of rich oligarch, you know, sort of chocolate
king of Ukraine. And these two were considered
to be the frontrunners because they kind of had
this incumbent sort of vibe to them, right? They
were established politicians. And here comes
this guy, a comedian, a filmmaker, a guy who
had a show that was pretty popular, you know,
that was almost surreal in his kind of narrative
line, because of course he's like, an average
Joe who becomes president by accident, and he's
from Dunbass. Unlike these other two who are
kind of not really from the center of the conflict,
Zelensky is. And I think possibly because of
that and his extreme charisma, I mean, he's just
a really charismatic figure. I've seen him a
few times in person. And his mastery of social
media, his understanding of media, Those things
combined to elevate him to the presidency in
the summer of 2019 at a time when there's actually
escalating conflict with Russia over a group
of sailors who've been taken hostage after a
conflict in the Sea of Azov. And I remember thinking
like, I don't know how this guy's going to survive.
He just seems out of his depth. And interestingly,
in researching the story about Zelensky's quiet
battle with the Wagner Group. I learned it was
almost precisely at the time that he becomes
president that he's confronted with this challenge,
where the security services of Ukraine have mapped
out this very elaborate conspiracy to take a
group of Wagner Group mercenaries into their
custody through a very elaborate scheme in Belarus.
that very nearly upends peace negotiations between
Russia and Ukraine at the time exactly the moment
that Zelensky is trying to win over Putin's trust.
And it's actually a weird little known fact that
that Wagner Group episode was, I think, very
much one of the main dynamics behind solving
this distrust between Putin and Zelensky and
escalating the conflict to a full -blown war.
Did Zelensky anticipate the Wagner mutiny shocking
the world? Has there been any warning signs that
perhaps you spot that others, maybe even previous
presidents, US presidents have missed? Yeah,
well, I certainly think that Zelensky was always
a bit concerned because you have to remember,
if you think back to early 2022, just after the
invasion got underway in Ukraine, There were
some reports very early on about a number of
assassination attempts. There was a joint list
of, like, 22 people who were in Zelensky's cabinet
and his government who were being targeted for
assassination. And the rumor was, or the reporting
was, that it was the Wagner group that was supposed
to carry out these assassinations. And it turned
out to be a completely different mercenary group
that had some network links to Wagner. It was
certainly uppermost on Zelensky's mind that the
Wagner Group was going to be a challenge. And
over time, of course, we saw Wagner Group march
across Donbas and take huge portions of territory
back from Ukrainian forces in a sort of back
and forth tussle that led to this pinnacle moment
in Bakhmut in the winter of 2022 and 2023. And
I think for me, You know, I think there are two
signal moments where I was like, oh, you know
what? Something's gonna happen here. I mean,
obviously anybody with that kind of personality,
Yevgeny Prigozhin kind of steps out of the shadows
and into the limelight, starts kind of grabbing
attention. He's in the news all the time after
being hidden for basically, you know, almost
two decades. And people now are assuming, of
course, that there is a connection between Putin
and Prigozhin. So all of that narrative is completely
blown up. But it's... It's when Prigozhin goes
public that you start to understand that he's
worried. He's worried about losing his empire,
losing grip on this, you know, mercenary army
that he's built and everything that's come with
it, including, you know, hundreds of millions
of dollars from laundering gold, diamonds, etc.,
taken from Africa, oil, gas from the Middle East,
from Syria, from Libya. And so it's the fact
that he actually steps out of the shadows that
kind of signals, you know, he's worried. And
then progressively we see this campaign of leaks
and attempts to damage him as he battles in Baku.
He's raging against this and this is all happening
on social media. It's all happening on YouTube,
on Telegram. But the real moment... I think the
one that's sort of like, oh yeah, this guy is
going to go down, or at least he's going to burn
up his capital in some sort of clash, was when
in April 2023, and we're really in the middle
of the Bachmute battle now, things are not going
super well for the Wagner group, even though
there's progress. And there's a bomb that goes
off in St. Petersburg at his cafe. It was a cafe
that not many people knew was actually his. and
it was an assassination against one of his sort
of fanboy military bloggers who he'd lent the
cafe to. This was happening on Prigozhin's territory,
his home turf, a place that really only somebody
who knew him well would have hit to send a message.
And that's when you knew Prigozhin was probably
gonna go down. To kind of touch a little bit
more on the horrific war crimes, about three
questions around that. During your investigation,
has there been any moments that you discovered
that really, really disturbed you? Oh, yeah.
There's so many moments. I mean, the one that
really stands out and I do, I meditated on a
lot and I think about it does give me flashbacks
is one I write about in the book. And it was
in June of 2017. There was this video that appeared
online. It was kind of this viral video. it first
appeared I think on Telegram and then kind of
made its way around to Twitter and a couple other
sites. And the video was a really short clip
in some sort of desert landscape, you know, where
these guys in kind of gray, beige camo with their
masks on their face, you know, AK -47 rifles
in hand. were beating the hell out of a guy on
the ground. An unarmed civilian turned out to
be a Syrian national who had left the country
and come back to reconnect with family and then
somehow got sucked into fighting on behalf of
Bashar al -Assad's army through several militias
that were run by the Wagner group. And then he
somehow escaped. Nobody knew this, of course,
at the time, but this moment on camera was so
vivid, so graphic. They were beating him with
a sledgehammer while he was crying out in pain,
and later they dismembered him and beheaded him,
and then set his body on fire. It was like one
of the most horrific scenes that I had ever seen.
I've seen a lot of things in my time. I reported
on 9 -11 right after the collapse of the World
Trade Towers. I've been in Afghanistan and Pakistan
at suicide bombings. And I was up front for those
things. But this one, for some reason, just the
graphicness of it really stuck with me. And it
was the first war crime that I became obsessed
with trying to solve. Has there been any global
reaction from formal institutions in places like
Syria, Ukraine, Mali? to the atrocities committed
by Wagner, and is there any local resistance
to their presence? Yeah, that's a good question.
So over time we've seen, you know, Wagner appears
more or less officially on the scene in summer
2014, but there are other iterations of a kind
of Wagner light in 2013 that were in Syria, but
it starts to kind of accumulate. more mass and
power and momentum from roughly 2015 forward
when Russia officially announces its entry into
the war in Syria. It's at that stage that it
starts to spread, right? It moves from Syria,
they open a base in Central African Republic,
Sudan, and then there's the offensive in Libya.
The Wagner Group is basically catching fire as
a business enterprise for Russia. And along the
way, there are just countless war crimes that
are documented by human rights groups, witnessed
by locals. The place that stands out to me where
there was considerable resistance to the Wagner
Group's presence at first was in the Central
African Republic, where there had been an ongoing
civil war from 2012. And by the time the Wagner
Group arrived in early in late 2017, early 2018,
and began to deploy as kind of training instructors
for the local forces, you know, things were kind
of on fire. And there were pockets of resistance
all over the country. Eventually, you know, Wagner
did accumulate a lot of popularity while in Central
African Republic. But along the way, there were
a lot of atrocity incidents. One of the more
notable ones that everybody kind of knows about
is the killing of three Russian journalists.
who went there to Central African Republic to
document what was happening in 2018. While those
things were unfolding, the UN expert group on
mercenaries opened a couple of inquiries and
did a couple of studies looking at atrocities
linked to the Wagner group in all of these different
places. And of course, human rights group in
Ukraine have been very closely documenting the
activities of the Wagner group all the way since
2014. I remember visiting a place in Kiev and
talking to human rights experts there about sort
of what they had seen and it was quite evident,
you know, they've been linked to so many different,
you know, atrocity incidents and that people
were keeping track. We haven't seen anything
officially from the ICC, the International Criminal
Court. What we have seen and what we do know
about is there was an civil society organization
that lodged a pretty robust complaint describing
the Wagner Group's war crimes that are often
shown online on Telegram and kind of bandied
about in Mali. And this involved the killing
of multiple civilians who were unarmed all across
Mali. Brief that was issued. It's called an article
15 brief Described some pretty horrific crimes
and so far The International Criminal Court hasn't
really acted on it But there are there have been
since then calls in the Council of Europe for
a special tribunal for the Wagner group Do you
believe the West? adequately understands the
dangers posed by groups like Wagner or is there
still a tendency to view them as Like a Russia's
problem Yeah, I think there has been an evolution
of thinking in the West certainly about how the
Wagner group and proxy forces like it could really
pose a danger to stability and security in the
international arena some of those lessons have
been learned the hard way from You know some
instances of direct engagements between US special
forces and Wagner forces in Syria, for instance,
in early 2018. That was a very historic moment
when something like 200 Wagner forces were killed
in that engage. It was the first time Russian
-American soldiers had gone at it on the battlefield
since the Vietnam War. So the escalation risks
certainly were, I think, known and understood
by the US government, but the response was always
a little bit muddled. And Europe was extremely
divided on responding to the rise of the Wagner
Group. Some countries wanted to see Yevgeny Prigozhin
put on the sanctions list as early as 2014, 2015.
Some wanted to see his compatriots and his businesses
put on the sanctions list. But it wasn't really
until 2022 that there was this kind of precipitating
cause, the invasion of Ukraine, that really forced
and catalyzed actual policy action. Fast forward
to 2023, 2024, we've now seen some additional
understanding, I think, take place in the sense
of the Wagner Group is this arm of Russia's military
that's on a very long leash. So long, in fact,
that it's even difficult for the Kremlin to kind
of rein it in. And we saw the prosecution of
a Wagner group affiliated soldier in Norway recently,
sorry, in Finland recently. And then we've also
seen the potential for a case in Norway. And
we've also seen actually some other Wagner group
affiliated. Operatives in Poland also come under
scrutiny and in the UK as well. So the wagon
group might be dead as a kind of as an actual
organization, right? Since the implosion of the
wagon group after mutiny in 2023, but the brand
still lives on and apparently somebody in Russia
in the Kremlin still thinks it's useful. Do you
think the wagoner group is just unique to Russia?
Do you think also they're sort of like other
states, like the US or China, pursuing similar
shadow strategies through privatized violence?
Well, I mean, you know, we're talking right now,
AR, and we've just learned about, you know, this
apparent story involving potential associates
of the Trump administration or Trump himself
who have been caught out in Greenland. Trying
to Foment some sort of influence campaign there.
Yeah, they seem to be also special operators
We don't really know much about the story yet.
But what it what seems likely here is is that
Strangely the Trump administration has taken
a page taken a page from the Kremlin playbook
and tried to roll it out in Greenland and kind
of you know Put its own Wagner group like organization
into play China does have you know, of course,
and does use private military security forces,
but usually on contract from other countries.
So notoriously, for instance, a lot of Wagner
operatives have worked on contract on Belt and
Road initiative projects in places like Pakistan
or Afghanistan, Central Asia. And so, you know,
there has been some experience and some crossover
there. The place where people like to kind of
make the comparison is in the South China Sea
where you have these kind of what they call little
blue men who act as proxies in the waterway battlefields,
you know, over the South China Sea. So, but nobody
has been as successful as Russia in kind of transforming
this narrative of historic political collapse
into a revival of an empire, right? I mean, that's
kind of the sweep of what Wagner brings to the
table is really, it's magic secret sauce. Okay,
we talked about Wagner, what they were, or who
they are, their influence across Russia's actions.
And like I mentioned earlier, there, we just
I don't feel like the the average voter American
voter American citizen just doesn't know much
about Wagner, we just see what we see on social
media or mainstream media. So for the everyday
Americans trying to understand this conflict.
What is the single most important thing about
Wagner Group that they need to know, if there
is just one? There could be more. Maybe the top
takeaway is the Wagner Group is a barometer for
how committed Vladimir Putin is to extending
the reach of Russia beyond its own borders. When
you expend that kind of money, billions of dollars,
to raise up a ghost army that's deployed around
the world, that commits, you know, we don't know.
probably hundreds of war crimes and atrocities,
but then documents them online and trots them
out on social media apps like their trophies
or medals or badges of honor. We should all be
really worried about a country as adversarial
to Western interests as Russia because the wagon
group, what it really tells us is Putin is prepared
to go to any kind of extreme. in pursuing its
ends. And that militarism in Russia is going
to be a long -standing issue. Even if tomorrow
Donald Trump magically is able to suture together
a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, Zelensky
and Putin shake hands, the one thing that will
not go away is this. high octane militarism that
really fed the rise of the Wagner Group. And
that is going to be a perennial problem in Russia
that is going to be kind of a challenge for the
West to manage for a long time to come. To go
off of that, Trump's interaction and Trump's,
you know, attempt at peace negotiation during
his term to achieve just any sort of settlement
agreement. You had mentioned that Trump has a
complicated relationship with the Russian power
players. So what concrete examples illustrate
this connection that us voters, us citizens should
understand? Yeah, well, let me start with the
one that most people know or think they know,
but maybe, like, they don't know, right? Let's
dial back to 2015. Donald Trump is coming down
that golden escalator. He's announcing his candidacy
for the presidency for the 2016 elections. Everybody's
surprised. Most people shrug. Nobody takes it
seriously until it does get serious with the
primaries, not that many months later. He's a
loud, brash, bold political candidate, the kind
of which really the Republican Party hadn't seen
since Ronald Reagan ran for office. And at the
same time, The social media environment, the
internet and how we experience it just as everyday
Americans is totally changing. We're moving from
Facebook 1 .0, which is kind of glitchy, to a
little bit slicker Facebook 2 .0. More and more
people of different generations, different backgrounds
are using social media. And it's there that the
roads between Russian influence, Trump's connections,
the wagon group, and you have getting precocious
meat. With this massive social media influence
campaign, where the Internet Research Agency,
which is, you know, aka the troll farm, is deployed
to foment this kind of faux polarization between
different parts of online America. Many people
remember like Black Lives Matter was just getting
its start then. And so, you know, Internet Research
Agency would start these Black Lives Matter groups
and then spew all this pro -leftist really extreme
kind of rhetoric aimed at, you know, inflaming
opinions on the other side, the pro -police,
you know, back the blue forces, right? And we
saw those clashes play out not only online, but
the Internet Research Agency was able to get
people to be, to show up for rallies where it
was like, support Trump down with Clinton, you
know, and all of this was sort of manufactured
online with for just a couple hundred thousand
dollars. And that was, you know, Yevgeny Pugosian.
That was the man behind the wagon group was the
same man who was behind fomenting this social
media campaign, by the way, which also targeted
the UK and was is largely credited for being
extremely influential in swaying the campaign
and the and the Brexit vote. that followed just
soon after that. And of course, there are many
other instances that you can look at where the
internet research agency was deployed around
the world to either foment polarization and discord
in democracies or encourage a kind of pro -authoritarian
stance. So that's what Americans really need
to understand is that there's a lot of connectivity
between Online proxy warfare via Facebook and
Twitter and YouTube and social media and real
world proxy warfare where you're shooting guns
and trying to take territory and seize the initiative
from a rival state Yeah from 2015 onward. It
seems like there was sort of this For a lack
of better words civil war between just divided
groups. You said people You know came one point
black lives matter people supporting police and
then it sort of is like kind of like a cloud
Just getting more expansive expansive expansive
over time up till now to before I answer before
I ask this one question To go on per goes in
just a little bit his his rise and fall What
does that whole story reveal about the loyalty
and betrayal? in Putin's inner circle. Is it
like sort of like this kind of tornado or like
cloud forming, where it's just getting bigger,
bigger, bigger, splitting, sort of like that
analogy that you mentioned? Yeah, every time
I like, I think about Yevgeny Prigozhin and his
relationship with Putin, it's a little bit kind
of like how I think about the conversation between,
you know, James Comey and Donald Trump. It's
like, I hear that song, Kendrick Lamar, loyalty,
loyalty, loyalty. It's all about like, you know,
what would you do for the ones you're loyal to?
And the pre -Gosian story is just like 100 %
about that, you know, omerta, mafia, deep cuts,
loyalty. I'll hide your secrets, you scratch
my back, you know, I'll do for you what nobody
else will do. And you're going to make sure that
I'm okay. That's the relationship with pre -Gosian
Putin. It's complicated, you know, it's not like
they're best friends. But Putin knows that among
the many people in his inner circle that will
keep his confidence when he's sitting at a table
full of diplomats or a table full of heads of
state, it will be Yevgeny Pugosian. When he wants
somebody to spy on those people at that table,
it will be Yevgeny Pugosian. And their relationship
becomes one of master and servant, a little bit
kind of like, you know, king and sort of top
butler in a way. But in this instance, top chef.
That loyalty is so key. And it also is the recipe
that ultimately kind of brings Prigozhin down
because, you know, Prigozhin expects because
he comes from this kind of criminal background,
right? He spent 10 years almost in prison for
thuggery and robbery and assault. He expects
that the rules, the mafia rules, are the ones
that are going to keep everything on an even
plane. What he doesn't realize is it's Putin's
rules, right? It's the master's rules that ultimately
determine what loyalty really means. And they're
both feeling a sense of betrayal by the end of
their story. Thank you for expounding upon that.
Okay, so before Trump's rise in the second term,
And even up till now, we just hear a lot about
peace negotiations. But based on your research,
how does the Wagner factor put into Putin's plan
B? And please explain that to even while diplomats
are talking. Yeah, if you would ask me this question,
A .R., like maybe a year ago before Donald Trump
was reelected to office, I would have said that
the Wagner Group's atrocities would factor into
the end game for negotiations between Russia
and Ukraine. No depth, right? Because I've met
enough Ukrainians who have been at the sticky
end of Wagner Group operations to know that people
are not going to forget very easily what happened
in Ukraine. And they will long remember Wagner
Group's role. I'm going to point to one, OK,
that some people may remember, but probably is
a little obscure. And this was the battle for
the as of stall steel plant, which was really
epic at the beginning of the war. And the Wagner
group was there on on site. Part of that battle,
there was a whole movie that Prigozhin made about
it, a lot of propaganda. And they were responsible
for managing the prisoner exchange and detainees
that came out of the deal between Russia and
Ukraine that resulted in a ceasefire briefly
at the Azostal planet. And many human rights
activists in Ukraine and frankly in Europe have
pointed to that moment and one that happened
soon after that was the firebombing of the prison.
where you had a couple hundred Ukrainian detainees
who were incinerated, basically. Some survived,
but it was a really massive casualty event. So
there are just so many instances like that where,
again, I would have said a year ago, Zelensky
is never going to be in a position to be able
to say, yes, we're going to write that one off.
And the Wagner group doesn't really matter. and
the atrocities that they committed didn't matter.
Now, it's interesting that here we are now. Trump
is trying to negotiate with Putin, Zelensky.
The question of human rights and atrocities really
hasn't come up. Now, the question of children
who have been taken from Ukraine into Russia
or into Belarus has come up repeatedly as a negotiating
point. But I think it's really interesting that
somehow even Zelensky has kind of shifted the
priority list in terms of reparations and recompense
for atrocities committed, and justice and accountability
for atrocities committed in Ukraine, not just
by the Wagner Group, but other organizations
and other outfits that have been operating there.
To touch on Zelensky just a little bit further,
as you watched him come into power, evolve as
a wartime leader, has there been any moments
that showed you that he truly understood the
Wagner threat? That in a way that his advisors
didn't. Yeah, there is this signal moment. I'm
not sure. I think that there was a real debate
specifically over Bachmut within the Zelensky
administration. And you might remember General
Zaluzhny was then in charge of military operations
for Ukraine. He's kind of an older, you know,
Ukrainian. officer with a little bit more experience
from the Soviet times. Some people kind of cast
him as a little bit old school. And he became
quite determined to clash with Wagner at Bachmut.
In the meantime, there was this, I think, internal
debate amongst Zelensky's advisors about whether
that was a good idea. At the same time, you know,
there was this backstory of Wagner and the hostage
thing that happened in 2019, right? And then
this other threat from Wagner as a potential
assassination threat to Zelensky. And I do think
that the battle of Bakhmut, I think there was
a lot of debate, but maybe Zelensky missed his
chance to quash that debate and actually turn
the tables. Because I think many people look
at Bakhmut as a signal failure on the part of
the Ukrainian military in terms of the strategic
losses there and the actual value of the actual
territory. I have just questions clustered into
two sections, and then I believe we can wrap
this up. For people who think mercenaries are
just guns for hire, what's the bigger game Wagner
is playing that threatens global security? Well,
I mean, guns for hire is not necessarily a good
thing if guns for hire are not accountable to
the clients that sponsor them. And importantly,
if they don't... adhere to international and
local laws, that's always a problem. Nobody wants
guns for hire out there. I mean, what's the difference
between guns for hire that are called mercenaries
and guns for hire that are organized crime mafia
bosses, right? Like, I mean, not a lot. So just
number one at base, guns for hire are problematic
because they're often difficult to control and
often difficult to hold to account. And you don't
really want that in any environment, least of
all an environment where there are warring factions.
And often that's of course where they're the
most useful. The second issue with mercenaries
that people need to understand and organizations
like the Wagner Group is they do a lot of laundering
of money, oftentimes. Oftentimes some of their
payment and the recompense comes from very shady
arrangements between either states, or state
enterprises, or big corporations that help states
survive and kind of elevate the economies of
states who can't otherwise do business in a given
territory, but want to do it because it's going
to be really lucrative, and mercenaries paper
that over. So kind of dangerous, right? Because
when you don't know where money's coming from,
it can have a lot of dark influences. And the
other, I guess, is people need to understand
But mercenaries are addicted to the lifestyle
too. And the addiction isn't just to that freewheeling
adventurism, it's also an addiction to the violence.
And we all have to ask ourselves, is that okay?
When does that become a problem in a setting
where people are trying to figure out a way toward
peace? Yeah, okay. Still on this kind of topic
of like the future of wartime. or warfare in
governance. So seeing that you studied Putin
for years, and could there possibly be just another,
you know, state actor might be replicating the
same thing. What does his reliance and or, you
know, mentioning other people, other people's
reliances on mercenary fighters, which tell us
about who those people really are, like the Putin
and other state actors behind a strongman image?
Yeah. So the one takeaway I have from studying
the wagon group, Putin, the rise is the people
who are close to Putin, many of them are former
KGB agents, right? They kind of view the idea
of military power as something where you just,
you know, people are expendable. You know, people
who fight on behalf. of Russia are expendable,
people who are at the other end of Russia's targeting
are expendable. And so that's one is that their
attitudes toward human lives are pretty callous.
They just, they don't care and they're willing
to exploit the vulnerability of a population.
In this instance, oftentimes veterans who are
out of work and kind of out of sorts. to turn
that around and use it as a weapon of war, essentially.
And that says a lot about what they think about
their own people. It says a lot about what they
think about the lack of capacity within their
own conventional military to execute strategic
aims on behalf of Russia. It clearly, I think,
shows that a dissatisfaction with the way the
Russian military is run, million -man army and
you need to raise this other kind of paper proxy
army, you know, to the tune of pennies on the
dollar compared to what you might pay for the
military. What that says is that Russia can't
do what it needs to do without way overpaying
for military services. It doesn't have enough
men. It doesn't have enough political will amongst
its population. And importantly, it doesn't have
the staying capacity to fight a war against even
a smaller neighboring state like Ukraine and
actually win it quickly without the assistance
of mercenary forces. That's pretty telling. And
instead of looking at Russia as this kind of
giant rival to the United States, second largest
military in the world, we might need to reassess
our understanding. of Russian capacity to fight
wars. Are we heading into a new era of mercenary
-dominated conflict? And if so, what does that
mean for international law or peacekeeping? We
are definitely in a new era of conflict, where
we see the rise and proliferation of mercenary
forces. Some are on a much smaller scale than
the Wagner Group. Even now in Africa, we've seen
you know, Romanian or Indian mercenary forces.
We've seen all kinds of things happening. We've
seen Americans in Venezuela trying to foment
a coup. I mean, we've seen all kinds of things
where privatized, contracted mercenary forces
have been deployed to project power, to extend
the strategic reach of states. In some cases,
it states who are aligned with certain industries.
And I think one thing that we really have to
look out for is the ways in which the changes
in the fossil fuel industry could actually accelerate
the resort to proliferation of mercenary forces.
The more there is this kind of tension around
the switch from fossil fuels, oil and gas, to
potentially battery powered technologies and
renewables that rely on critical minerals, the
more we're going to see, I think, a real tension
in the industry to kind of maintain its hold
on the infrastructure and territory that it's
built over many, many years. And that is one
reason for the rise of the waggon group, for
sure. It's just the oil and gas industry. And
I wonder, actually, if there won't be a moment,
maybe in the next 30, 40 years, when there are
more electric cars on the roads, less fossil
fuel cars on the roads, if then critical minerals
that are located in Latin America, that are located
in Sub -Saharan Africa and parts of the Pacific
don't become the new vector for mercenary operations.
Do you think AI or digital surveillance plays
a role or will play a role in the future evolution
of groups like Wagner? That is a very good question.
What we have seen is that what the wagon group
offered wasn't just mercenary services. It wasn't
just muscle, right? It wasn't just military muscle.
It was also political subterfuge online. We saw
that with the, you know, political influence
campaign in 2016 in the US presidential elections.
And we also know that there's a lot of overlap
or kind of integration between mercenary hackers
for hire. and those on the kind of more pointy
end of the spear in proxy warfare. And I do think
we're going to see a fusion of that. And I do
think that hackers in general are going to use
AI to do all kinds of nefarious things, because
they won't have to think really hard. They'll
just type some prompts to develop the kind of
code that would exploit a zero -day gap and vulnerability.
Yes, in a kind of indirect way, I think there
probably will be some integration. And just to
go off of one more cluster of questions in one
group on the process of getting this information.
Halfway through the book, I suggested to a friend
to read the book too, and she got it. And she
made me, it would bother her if I didn't ask
these two questions. So this is on behalf of
her. What were the biggest journalistic or safety
risks you encountered while researching and writing
this book? I get asked that question a lot and
I don't like talking about it too openly because
then you make yourself more vulnerable. I will
say reporting on Russia always makes everybody
nervous. Like if you ever spend time in Russia,
if you know kind of the maximum Moscow rules,
which is like don't... don't talk unless you're
walking and you're outside and you're far away
from any microphones that might pick up your
voice. Yeah, I mean, you're always paranoid,
right? And I certainly have been always paranoid
about my security, about penetration, about hacking.
My phone was hacked once. You know, I pretty
much suspect it was probably Russians. Pretty
good evidence for that, I would say. And that
was early on in my research, even before I started
working on the book itself. So I always worry
about, you know, information risks for sure.
On the other hand, I have lived and worked in
lots of kind of crazy places, including Afghanistan,
including Pakistan, and I've seen a lot of stuff.
And I don't want to sound callous or like I'm
inured to the possibility of risk, but how much
more risky can it be for me than it is for the
many, many civilians who are exposed to everyday
hazards in places like Gaza, places like Ukraine,
in places like Afghanistan? Sure, sometimes I'm
paranoid about it, and I know my family is too
sometimes, but you know, these are the risks
that come with the job. Yeah, yeah. As I mentioned
to you before the recording, I mean, being halfway
around the world, across the world, definitely
share some similarities with that. So the second
question is, how did you gain access to some
of the more sensitive or classified materials
and sources? And if you don't need to, if you
don't want to wish to expand on that, that's
completely fine, too. No, I mean I do work in
the open in fact like really Unlike a lot of
folks. I really I really believe in transparency
and showing your work and talking about kind
of your methods one If anything, you know, it
protects you from any kind of you know false
accusations about your own ethics and your integrity
Yeah, but but to I think it really I think it's
important for other journalists other activists
researchers to understand if you want to do you
know hard things, ask hard questions about hard
places that are difficult to reach, you're going
to have to get really creative. So early on when
I'm starting to research the Wagner Group, and
this is around 2018, I took a course with Bellingcat,
which is an open source research collective.
They use a lot of online techniques to piece
together kind of the footprint of people online,
as well as kind of look at and reconstruct events
from digital. breadcrumbs, and they're super
famous for that. So I took a course with them
and I learned a little bit about how to use those
tools to better understand this wild world out
there where Russia kind of does this nefarious
stuff. And that was hugely important. But the
second thing that kind of distinguished, I guess,
my work from maybe Bellingcat and the work that
we've done at Future Frontlines, the organization
that I run at New America, is we combine those
techniques of open source with big data analysis.
So we started to kind of experiment and explore
a network analysis of these large scale social
media groups where Wagner was like kind of the
central focus of the channels. And there we were
able to kind of piece together a sense of the
culture and the kind of the social movement aspects
of the Wagner group. And then the last and probably
the most important is We have always mined open
source, open data from, you know, from leaked
sources. Very, you know, long into the writing
of the book, an organization called C4ADS here
in Washington offered us a chance to examine
about 130 ,000 leaked files from, you know, getting
Pugosian's businesses. And that was super eye
-opening. It wasn't like, oh, this is all new.
It was more like, oh, yep. This confirms that,
right? Or this connects those dots that we weren't
able to really connect before. So those three
things, the kind of open source, kind of manual
stuff, old fashioned investigation, big data
science, and then getting, you know, exploiting
the documents were really important. And if there's,
if there is one misconception about Putin or
Wagner that you would like to, I guess, shatter
for readers, what would it be? The Wagner Group
is not a company. It's not a unitary organization.
It's not in any corporate registry. It's not
like Blackwater. It's not like McDonald's. It's
not like any other organization you could possibly
think of. It is a network of shell companies
and individuals who profit from those shell companies
linked to Russia's military security intelligence
enterprise. That's it. It's not a company and
it ain't private. Yeah, that's something that
that's a something that most Americans should
be aware of, if not all of them. For sure. That
is all the questions I have. I appreciate you
so much for coming on and answering all these
questions. Thank you, thank you, thank you so
much. Thank you. You ask good questions, thanks.
Appreciate it. Guys, don't forget to like and
subscribe. Links to her book will be in the description
below. And there's any parting words or last
words that you'd like to say. Please do so. Yeah.
Keep fighting for the truth. Awesome. Awesome.
Alright. Thank you, Candice. I appreciate you
again for coming out. And yeah, guys. Show her
some love. Support the book. Support her. Everything
will be in the description below. And yeah. Thank
you. Thank you.