Episode Info
- Season15
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
Bonus episode from the One Decision team: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the infamous boss of the Wagner mercenary group, claimed a big victory this week - that his fighters had taken substantial control of the contested city of Bakhmut in Ukraine, and that it had been “legally captured”. However, this is not necessarily good news for the Kremlin. Putin’s once close ally has been badmouthing the Russian military - complaining about bad tactics, logistics and poor planning by the Russian defence chiefs leaving soldiers hungry, ill-equipped and unprepared for battle. After a mysterious assassination of a blogger in a cafe Prigozhin owns, One Decision’s Julia Macfarlane and Sir Richard Dearlove discuss if the noose is tightening on Putin’s old friend, and at what point is he too much of a liability for the Russian leader?
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Mcfarlane: You're listening to an update from One Decision. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. Every week, we take an in-depth look at the big choices facing our world, decisions made in the past that have changed lives, and decisions that have yet to be made, but which may still affect us all. We drop full episodes on our channel every Thursday. But in the meantime, we thought we would call up our One Decision cohost, our in house spymaster, Sir Richard Dearlove, who used to run Britain's secret intelligence service, because there's been a lot going on in Russia this week regarding a certain longtime ally of President Putin who's becoming increasingly problematic for the Russian president. So, Richard, there's a decision that I think needs to be made this week regarding Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly known or perhaps still known as Putin's chef. He's been a long standing Putin ally for years and years and years, and he's also the head of the Wagner mercenary group. And he's increasingly falling afoul of a lot of the political leadership in Russia. And there's a question about how much longer is Putin going to allow Prigozhin to do things like publicly slandering the Russian armed forces. He has been showing up the Russian military in the fight in Ukraine. He's been doing a lot of work promoting his Wagner mercenary groups, and preliminary reports this week seem to suggest that Wagner mercenaries have been key in taking serious chunks out of Bakhmut, which is this very contested Ukrainian town that has become very symbolic, really, of the Ukrainian defense efforts. And we saw earlier in the week videos that seem to show Russians planting the Russian flag on an administration building in the city. Prigozhin then was speaking in a video statement. He said that Ukrainians were still occupying the west of the city, but that this represented a huge victory, not for the Russian armed forces, but for his Wagner mercenaries, which is something that will not be going down well in Moscow. And on top of that, we had that interesting, curious, targeted assassination in Saint Petersburg last weekend of this pro military blogger, a chap called Tatarsky. And he seemed to have been taken out by this bomb that was planted in a figurine handed to him by a young woman. But what is so interesting is that he was in a cafe that was owned by Prigozhin, and it was Prigozhin's cafe that was blown up. And so some people are taking this to be perhaps really a message to Prigozhin and making comparisons to the assassination of Daria Dugina that happened last year. I mean, Richard, why do you think Putin is tolerating Prigozhin? Some people say that he has got political aspirations of his own. Surely, that might be seen to be a little bit of a threat to Putin. And why hasn't he had a mysterious accident, been bumped off, fallen from a window, died in mysterious circumstances, like so many other thorns in Putin's side in the past?
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Dearlove: Well, obviously, can't answer that question why it hasn't happened to him yet. I mean, there's clearly a problem here. I mean, Prigozhin has been pretty critical of the Russian military, and there have been tensions that he's gone public about over military not supplying the Wagner fighters with ammunition at critical moments. And clearly, you know, they have been part of the sort of spearhead in terms of Russia's incredibly slow progress through this city of Bakhmut, which they've been unable to take completely, and therefore it's become like a symbolic, almost existential struggle. Look, Prigozhin, I think, is most concerned about his profile. So the fact that he stood at some place in Bakhmut and proclaimed that they've taken the town hall, yeah, maybe, but they certainly haven't taken the whole city. And I mean maybe there's a connection with this assassination in a cafe in St Petersburg which is owned by him. And it looks in some respects that Tatarsky, the individual assassinated, is another one of these sort of extreme ultra nationalist bloggers and commentators. I think there's something very odd going on, and maybe it is a power struggle for influence in, you know, the circles around Putin. And I'm sure Putin has, as it were, been able to exploit and use them as and when, and I think that's what we've seen with Prigozhin. But maybe Prigozhin is getting too big for his boots, you know, maybe there are people waiting to cut him down to size. I don't think one can give a definitive answer. And I thought the Kremlin spokesman who talked about spiders killing each other in a drawer, it's a rather graphic image. And I mean, frankly, I would be very surprised if this were a Ukrainian assassination. It somehow doesn't seem to make sense or fit the bill, and I would question, you know, why if they did. I think there's something else going on here, which one thing we must assume that there are problems and tensions in the Kremlin, particularly between the leadership, probably the military, given how badly the military has performed, given the stunning level of losses, given the huge loss of equipment. You know, all is not happy in the state of Russia. But what's the there's something going on, and, you know, we're not in a position to be able to interpret it in detail because we haven't got the information, we haven't got the intelligence. But I think one's looking at reverberations coming out from a situation which is probably complex and difficult to understand and somewhat internecine. And I think internecine is a good adjective because, in a way, you could see the war in Ukraine it's almost a civil war. I mean, okay, you know Ukraine's a separate country, but the cultural links are so close. And of course, the most vicious wars are civil wars. And I think there's something clearly going on which will break into the open at some point. When and how, we wait to see. So I think that's my interpretation of these rather extraordinary events.
Mcfarlane: I think that's spot on and I, you know, one never knows how to interpret the words of people like Prigozhin. And you mentioned that you do not think that the assassination we saw in Saint Petersburg was something that was done by the Ukrainians because that was another interesting thing because Prigozhin, he said that he thought it wasn't the work of the government in Kyiv, this hit at this pro war propagandist. A lot of people were confused and thinking, oh, hey. Is he giving cover to Zelensky and why is he doing that? But that's more likely to be about Russian officials and elites not wanting to give any kind of impression that the Ukrainians have the capability to carry out an attack that deep in Russia. Right? And you think it is definitely infighting,
Dearlove: or perhaps is there a Russian underground revolution that is manifesting? I mean, is that Well, that's going quite a long way, but, you know, there are quite a few people recently who've committed suicide in strange circumstances or fallen out of office windows in buildings that are rather high up. And, you know, when you begin to look at this as a whole, this doesn't look like accidents. And, you know, we know that political assassination, look at what happened to Nemtsov, is alive and well in Russia. And the Russian administration at the moment must be deeply stressed. They cannot be in any other state because things are going so extraordinarily badly. So I am not surprised that we are beginning maybe to see the signs of some sort of maneuvering, some sort of power struggle amongst people who are sort of have quite prominent profiles in terms of their relationship and their views of this, and I would say, civil war.
Mcfarlane: And it's your assessment that that had nothing to do with the Ukrainians and that that was Russian on Russian, blue on blue.
Dearlove: I think it's much more likely to be Russian than Ukrainian. And that's all I would say, but I mean that's no more than a guess and maybe an informed guess, but it's a guess. We'll find out. These things usually come out. The question is how long it takes.
Mcfarlane: That's it from this world update from the One Decision podcast. If you enjoyed this little conversation, why not check out our channel for our main offerings which drop every Thursday? Just search One Decision wherever you find your podcasts. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.
