145. Putin under threat as Wagner mutiny

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1:20Welcome to The Rest Is Politics emergency podcast with me Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. We've got Alistair in his kitchen about to go to a wedding. He's going to get a real trouble from the family. If they find out, he's got half an hour before he's got a rush off for his wedding. But what's happened and the reason we've hit the emergency podcast button is the developments in Russia and Ukraine. Absolutely astonishing. Proshkin, who is the sometimes called Putin -Chef, and who's this very sinister figure who was in jail for nine years, essentially part of Russian criminal gangs in the 1980s, runs this group called The Wagner Group, which has provided 25 ,000 of the fighting soldiers in Ukraine.

2:07And he has now turned around and effectively launched something between a mutiny and a coup d 'état, where he's announced that he's captured the largest Russian military base, Rostov on Don, on the front line, and is demanding the dismissal of the senior military commanders. What do you make of it all that? What's your sense of it? It's very, very hard to know what to make of it. He's a fascinating character. He spent a lot of time in jail in the past, bit of a crook, got close to the very oligarch class. He became known as Putin -Chef because he was... There are actually pictures of him. I remember him serving George Bush at a dinner with him.

2:47He was actually the guy. There's a picture of him leaning over Bush, as Bush is talking to Putin. There's another picture of him leaning over Putin as he's serving him food. That's why I became known as Putin -Chef. Then got into this space, this mercenary space, which we've talked about this before. I've talked about it in relation to Jacob Riesmog's dad's book, The Sovereign Individual, where he predicted this idea of mercenary armies becoming as important as state actors. I wonder if this is the first case of this being played out. The truth is, the Russian -controlled military is way bigger than what this guy commands, but at the same time, the very fact that he has for whatever reason decided.

3:37He's had long -running arguments with the Defense Minister, Shogu, and with the head of the Armed Forces, Gerasimoffee's constantly slagging them off. He did a pituitive social media post on telegram recently, where he basically was effing and blinding or whatever the rush of effing and blinding is. He was in pictured in front of corpses of his troops, many of whom, if you remember, were let out a prison to fight and were told that if they went and fought, they wouldn't have to go back to prison when they came back. Whether this is the classic thing of the detainee sitting at the top, allowing people below him to fight things out, but the fact that Putin had to do that address to the nation today, looking very sober.

4:17I think he was wearing a black tie even, and essentially saying, this is an act of treason, this is a stab in the back of our country, we'll crush these people. Yeah, you've now got two armies going around the place. So how the hell, this is a real boon for Ukraine, that's for sure. It's unbelievable, and there's been wonderful social media stuff, which we'll share with listeners of Ukrainian's trolling. There's a great shot, which begins with quite a serious Ukrainian soldier with a big beard in his camouflage uniform, looking at a screen, and then it cuts to a massive bag of popcorn next to him.

4:52He's basically sitting there just eating popcorn, watching Putin's speech. The general idea of the joke is that the Ukrainians are just going to sit back and watch the Russians tell themselves to pieces. One of the things I've noticed talking to people this morning is that this being Russia, there are an enormous number of conspiracy theories going around. People in Moscow are terrified. They don't know what to make of it. Some of them initially thought that this was all fake, and that Putin had organized this with Proshkin as a way of getting rid of his senior generals, so he was encouraging Proshkin to speak out, and that were given the excuse to clean house.

5:30But it looks less and less likely that that was the case because it's very difficult not to see this now as something that makes Putin look really weak, undermines his credibility, and it's almost impossible to imagine him meeting Proshkin's demands when he's got 25 ,000 armed men seizing him a luxury base, claiming their thinking of marching on Moscow, which is 660 miles away from Rostov, so taking a bit of time, unless he gets rid of his army high command. How can he get rid of his army high command without looking as though he's just given into mutiny? The truth is that Proshkin has been very, very critical of the overall military strategy at various points throughout, and look, there's some thought that he actually sees himself as the Putin successor, definitely sees himself as being a better military commander than the people who are actually supposedly in charge.

6:24But if you think about it, having this mercenary army where the loyalty to flag and country, I don't care what anybody tells me, is likely to be less than if you were fighting for your own flag and country. It's an untenable situation unless the people at the top have total control. And what you're seeing is this guy effectively saying, you're not in control of this, I am. And the point you're making about what people in Russia are meant to think, one, it'd be very interesting to see, I'm always interested to hear Steve Rosenberg on the BBC, because he of course is telling us what he thinks, but he's also having to track Russian media, so it's important to know what the Russians are being told about what's happening now, beyond the conspiracy theories, well actually even the state media are saying about this, because they presumably have covered Putin's statement in full, but he didn't name pregozion.

7:21It felt almost like he was saying there's something going on in here and we're over here and we're having to deal with it, but you could tell from his body language and I can remember from meetings with Putin, although he looks very, very calm all the time, he has this sort of tightening of his face and his cheek muscles go and you can always tell when he's very, very, very tense and in funny sort of way, I looked at it first of all, because I'm useless and Fiona's not here at the moment, I couldn't get the sound to work up my laptop. And so actually I couldn't, I saw him first without sound, I watched him and he looked really, really, really tense and angry.

8:02It's very weird isn't it? At the moment there, as you say, Putin is not name pregozion and pregozion is not naming Putin. Progozion has named, as you said, the defense minister and the chief of the army who he called a bunch of fat cats sitting around at home. This has also been a very weird moment. So pregozion is a very wealthy guy, runs this amazing network of grocery stores, restaurant businesses catering, but he's clearly found a new lease of life being right out there on the front line with his troops and sees himself, so I'm reinventing himself to general. On the private military companies, one of the things I think we haven't been covered as much is that the Weichner Group is just one of 10 major private military companies now operating in Russia and on the front line.

8:48The defense minister himself has his own private military company. And in a sense, Putin has the equivalent, this thing which has been described as the national guard. It's not really the national guard, it's what used to be called Oman and the interior ministry troops combined. So it's called Rosgavadia. And this is nearly half a million people that Putin is relying on, separate from the ministry of defense, to protect him. They're his relying on their Protorian Guard in Rome to try to stop it happening. Yeah, and how often do the guard turn against the emperor in history? I would have said at the start of this, I don't know because I don't know their relationship, but the sense was that pregozion was there and given so much power because Putin did see him as completely one of his.

9:42And yet since then, we've had this clear fallout, he doesn't call out Putin, as you say, but in calling out the defense minister on the head of the armed forces, he's effectively calling out Putin. The other thing that I think is interesting, this is clearly the places where he's directing this mutiny attempted coup, call it what you will. They are very, very strategic places. The first place, you know, Rostov on Don is the headquarters of the Russian Southern military district command. So they're the ones, if I'm right, that I think I'm right on this. They're the ones that will probably be most directly engaged in the direction of the handling of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

10:22100%. So how does that work out? And so from the Ukrainians' point of view, this is incredibly beneficial. I think there's going to be a big decision that the Ukrainian commanders have to make. There will be some people saying, mount the counteroffensive now. These guys are so distracted, they're all fighting each other. This is the time to break through, drive all the ways through to Crimea. There are going to be other people saying, don't do it now. Let the Russians tell themselves to pieces because if you mount the counteroffensive now, it will just re -unify the Russians and give them a reason to pull it together.

10:55And I think at the moment the Ukrainians are on the second path there, as it were sitting back in that great video, eating popcorn and watching the Russians do it. Well, they make some tactical advances. So they've just recaptured back Mutt, which was this horrible and at tens of thousands of people killed in trench warfare of the Russians, just narrowly seizing that and looks like they've lost that again. So I think we can expect the Ukrainians at the very least to be taking tactical advantage of this all the way along the front line over the next few days. Zalensky has posted on his telegram account.

11:28And one of the things I really admire about Zalensky, whatever is happening, he always essentially says the same things. It's called message discipline. He's got such message, well, his message discipline and adaptability. It would be so easy for him to sort of go out and say really big dramatic things. And he's basically just said, anyone who chooses the path of evil destroys itself. That's what I call a big strategic message. Russia's weakness is obvious. Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government, nice personal insult. And now there is so much chaos that no like and hide it.

12:04And all this is one person, although he's not able to lead to anything else. In other words, he's basically, I guess he's looking at somebody like Pregozion and saying, right, I may despise you, I may despise what you do, but I'm going to make this all about Putin because this now is about trying to divide opinion within Russia. And people will, I mean, you've now got the military out on the streets of Moscow. Of course, they're obviously worried about where this goes. Yeah, yeah. The people on the streets of Moscow, the sort of Praitorian guard lot separate from the defense of the ministry. It's Putin trying to try to hunk her down.

12:36I think you've also put your finger on something very interesting that which we should talk about more and more information comes out, which is the extent to which this has really been exactly what Zelensky has been trying to achieve that his use of social media, his use of propaganda has been about whipping up the conflict between Pregozion, Putin and the generals as much as he can. And this is really a kind of triumph of that kind of approach. I see other things that's interesting. So we know from history that the arm of Russian intelligence security strategy is very, very far that if it means wiping out people on the streets of the UK, they do it.

13:17They have been one of their big strategic goals since this whole thing started as being to take out Zelensky and they have failed. Will Putin be sitting there thinking, right, we have to take out Pregozion? And that's, so you've put your finger on it, Elsa, because in a sense, one of the things motivating Pregozion is that he felt they were about to take him out. So there had been a bungled attempt, it seems, by the FSB, the KGB's successes to try to abduct him. And then there was this attack. He claims against the Wachemak camps, led by an amazing, you know, rockets, helicopters, gunships and the rest, which was the final thing that triggered him.

13:59And that was an attack by Sergei Shogil against him, which triggered him to move and cease rostov. So I think Pregozion felt, or at least he's suggesting that his back was against the wall, that he was going to be killed anyway, and that he needed to move before the defense ministry and the intelligence services took him out. And it's at that point that these 10 different types of military unit, how they split, who goes with who, and who remains neutral is absolutely critical. Now, I think it's not likely, and this is me really, you know, I apologize, because the chance of this being right is going to go wrong quickly because we're early days, but it doesn't feel like a coup d 'état, feels like a mutiny and the difference is that the coup d 'état, you really have to get up to Moscow, you've got to grab the president, you've got to take the radio and television stations, you've got to take control in the first two, three hours.

14:51If you don't generally, the lumbering state wakes up and over the next few days crushes you. This is much more like a mutiny, but that will feel to put in and then the speech you were referring to, he talks about 1917 and that's something that really terrifies people because of course the Russian Revolution came out of a mutiny of soldiers on those fronts. And so that's why he's thinking 1917 and he's thinking mutines of the collapse of regime. The second city, where the Wagner forces have now reached and where they've seized the military facilities as well, is I don't know his pronounce, but Volonovich VORO and EZH, which is actually halfway between Rostov and Moscow.

15:31So that's, you know, and he's only got 25 ,000 troops that have been operating in Ukraine. But as you say, we've talked before about the reach of the Wagner group, all pretty much right around Africa. How many forces can he call upon more generally if he would try to build up? So just quickly on that, he seems to have demobilized at least 25 ,000, so he could almost double his forces by bringing back the people that he demobilized. And how many of the ones that he has would actually be loyal to him or thought, oh, no, I'm not getting involved in this. I went to fight for Russian off and not for this guy.

16:05How many of the Russian forces would be thinking, do you know what, I've had enough of this? Let's get involved with the guy. I mean, I think this is what Peter will be worrying about. It's actually where the where the chess piece is now, now move to. And you know, and then whether it extends to the population, that I think is the thing that will absolutely be terrifying. So certainly, you, Serovkin, who is the main commander up on the Ukrainian front, made this big statement yesterday, whether it was extraordinary, Serovkin's this kind of big burly sort of central casting looks like a cage fighter, a veteran of the Afghan Wars.

16:40And he gave this speech yesterday, grabbing a gun, saying, you know, you're going to stand down. This is rebellion against the elected president of Russia. But his troops haven't moved. And that's presumably because the mutiny of Wagner reflects a general sense from all the Russian troops that they haven't been properly supplied. They've been betrayed. They've been treated as cannon fodder. They're not getting their arms ammunition, food, casualty evacuation. So at the moment, the danger for Putin is that the Ministry of Defense troops seem at the moment to be neutral. Now, I still think the odds are against very, very strongly against projkin.

17:18I mean, if you were betting, it still seems to me that he's in a weak position. He's triggered it without doing a proper coup. He might be able to get from 25 to 50 ,000 troops. But everything now rests on this Praitorian guard of almost half a million people, most of them based around Moscow. He is a very, very, very emotional guy. You can see that in the way that he communicates. He's put out a message on his telegram on the official Wagner telegram channel as a direct response to Putin statement. And one assumes this is him. I don't know, but this is what they put out saying it is from him and in his voice about treason of motherland, the president was deeply mistaken.

17:57We are patriots of our motherland. We've been fighting brackets unspoken, unlike Rasmussen, Shogu and our fighting now. And nobody is going to, as demanded by the president or the FSB or anyone else, nobody is going to admit our guilt because we don't want our country to live anymore in corruption, lies and bureaucracy. So it's and he's signaling one of the risks is also that he's whipping up not the progressive Russian left, but the right. There are people far to the right of Putin. People who think that the war should have been conducted in a much more brutal way, who will be looking to try to get that nationalist thing going.

18:37But probably not yet maybe topple Putin because I think there's a sense somebody I was talking to a great Russian expert earlier today called Cristonini who was our main man in defense intelligence for years and a great sociologist. And he was saying that it feels to him like the barrens moving against King John and the Middle Ages. They don't want to actually replace King John. They want to control him. So his year's nobody wants to be the president of Russia, but they want to control Putin. Procution is demanding that these people see him and he sits down and basically gives them a piece of his mind.

19:08It's very hard given what he has done and given what he has since said about what is done. It's very hard to see him back inside any kind of tent that has put at the top of it. 100 % and I think I mean we don't know yet what this means for the broader war. There are many, many scenarios. Procution could be curled quite quickly. This could spark the Russian military to pull their socks up and mount some more professional counteroffensive or it could collapse the country into a pseudo civil war. But what we do know is that this has revealed and this is what I think Zelensky is emphasizing again and again is just how sick the regime that Putin has created over the last 23 years is.

19:50It's a regime which isn't really controlled by oligarchs. It's actually controlled by people with guns. And as I say almost 10 different warring military units run by warlords and this sense of a fragile dictator with a collapsing economy whose only legitimacy is whipping up this nationalistic mad fantasy about NATO threatening them through Ukraine. All the sickness of that is now coming to a head. And I think this may mean that whatever residual support they're getting from the rest of the world is going to fall away. I don't think the Chinese are going to be impressed by this. I don't think that there are ourselves where.

20:31No. And the the rather sinister babyface looking guy with a long beard who the Chechen leader, Kadeerov, he's he's piled in as well now and has said that he's going to be sending forces to help Putin crush the rebellion. Whatever aims you're given, whatever promises have made you, the safety of our state and the cohesion of Russian society are the most important thing right now. And Chechen fighters from the Defense Ministry of National Guard have left for the zones of tension. Rebellion must be crushed if that requires harsh measures than we are ready. So pretty big weekend I would say. Pretty big weekend.

21:09Thank you for cutting into your wedding. We're going to have to keep watching this space. Yeah. Think could disappear in two days or it could redefine the whole course of the conflict and we'll have to keep on top of it. And you know, there was a time, Rory. There was a time when the British response to something like this would be fundamental in the whole world. We want to see it and hear it. So it was a bit dispiriting just to hear the usual the UK government's emergency committee is to meet to discuss the situation in Russia. There was an appeal for calm on all sides. And there is long standing advice to British citizens not to travel to Russia.

21:46Right. Right. Right. Now listen before you go Rory, can I can I. Yes, you want to pay tribute to a friend? Well, I do. We had some very, very sad news this morning. Margaret McDonough, who's been ill for some time, but she was a massive part of the new Labour team in the 97 election campaign. One of the most formidable campaigners I've ever met. I think I mentioned on the podcast before, is the person who actually came in to see me one day and said, what do you think of this as a song? And it was things can only get better, which became our song. She's had a brain tumor for some time. Thankfully, I say thankfully, she came to a special dinner we had for Tony Blair's 70th a while back.

22:33It was all the original team. And even though she was in a wheelchair, couldn't really speak properly, had a carer. It was fantastic that she was able to come. But sadly for most of us, that was the last time we saw it alive. So I just want to say Margaret McDonough really was one of the key people who helped Labour win that first election. And it was one of the most amazing campaigners the Labour Party ever had. It was very sad that she's died. And you would probably know her sister, Shavorn, who's an MP for Yeah, Mitchum and Moody. I'd say sorry, sorry to hear that out. Good. Well, you're now going to go off to a wedding.

23:05I would say that maybe that'll cheer you up, but I know that you don't really like weddings, but I'm just friends. So that's it. Yeah, anyway, we'll see you soon. See you soon. Thanks again. Bye bye.