John Lechner
speaker
145 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
John Lechner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, so as Murat was telling you, Wagner really began in 2014. And Murat, as he was saying, he joined the company, as they call it, they only on the inside call it the company, Wagner Group Group. itself as an entity never existed. It was sort of just a nickname that was given to it.
Wagner initially came out of the war in eastern Ukraine. And its founder was a guy, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who Murat has mentioned a couple of times. This is a guy who was born in the 60s in the Soviet Union and sort of grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. He was a petty thief and kind of a small-time gangster in his teenage years.
And he goes away to prison at the age of 18, if I remember correctly, for assault and robbery. He and his gang were on a street in Leningrad, which became St. Petersburg. And they, Prokofiev came up behind a woman and strangled her until she almost died. And then they robbed her and he was caught and sent away for nine years.
And when he gets out, the Soviet Union is collapsing around him, and he returns to his native St. Petersburg, where first he falls in with some gangsters again in the 90s, which Murat had kind of alluded to previously with these various crime bosses and things. And so he falls in with some crime bosses himself, and they set him up as a manager of some grocery store chains.
He eventually turns that into becoming a restaurateur of some very fancy restaurants in St. Petersburg that a younger Vladimir Putin enjoyed. And he leveraged those relationships to eventually getting the job of providing meals to the whole Russian military and the Russian school system.
Well, as you'll see, kind of... As we go through the story, he manages to connect with Putin. Putin likes him. But he's never able, he would always say that he was about one handshake away from Putin. And so Putin gets to know him. He kind of likes him because he's uncouth. He kind of has that sort of rough personality.
kind of attitude, which is somewhat refreshing given kind of the bureaucratic elite that are surrounding Putin. And so Prodozhin eventually gets this job to provide the meals for the Russian military. And so that takes us to around 2014 or so, when Well, we have to go back a little bit further.
So while he's doing this work as a contractor, he also is looking for different ways that he can look good and get on Putin's radar. One of the ways he does it is there are massive protests against Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. And so Prigozhin puts together this kind of documentary that shows how all the protesters are fake, basically supported by the West. And he finances it himself.
It's not like Putin is doing this, but it's a way to virtue signal and show, hey, I'm furthering the cause of Putin's cause and Russia's cause more broadly. And so Prigozhin, As I said, Putin is coming to the presidency again in 2012. There are massive destabilizing protests against it.
He navigates it and gets back into power, but pretty much fairly quickly thereafter, another revolution is happening, this time on Russia's border in Ukraine, what became the Maidan Revolution in late 2013. For Putin, he sees these two things as connected, right? It's the West basically trying to overthrow Russia, overthrow his own regime, and they're doing it wherever they can.
And so the Kremlin in early 2014 makes a decision to annex Crimea, which is a peninsula on the Black Sea that is part of Ukraine. It had beforehand been part of Russia during the Soviet period, but it went to Ukraine during the Soviet Union and Russia's Black Sea fleet is there. This is the only warm water port that they have and it's important. And so amidst all of this chaos,
the Kremlin decides to annex Crimea. They use special forces to do it, but then they also rely on these kind of like right-wing Russian nationalist chauvinists, kind of the folks in sort of Russia's own nationalist militant movement to provide some of the security on the peninsula for the annexation. And after its success, the Kremlin thinks everything's done and dusted.
But unbeknownst to them at the time, or something that was unexpected, was that amidst this revolution in Ukraine, there's also an anti-Maidan movement, especially in eastern Ukraine, in this region called Donbas, which is economically and culturally closer to Russia.
And so as Ukrainians are taking over government buildings to overthrow the government of Yanukovych, anti-Maidan protesters are taking over these buildings in Donbas, in Donetsk, and in Luhansk. And this puts Putin and the Kremlin into a difficult situation because unlike Crimea, they didn't want to annex eastern Ukraine, Donbas. It's not that important to Russia.
But Putin is kind of boosting his nationalist credentials by annexing Crimea. It gives a big kind of rally around the flag effect. And crucially, this is a rally around the flag from people who, these nationalists, these Russian nationalists and militant guys who were against Putin's rule in 2012 and were marching against him.
And so he can't be seen as letting these separatists in eastern Ukraine hang out to dry. But he doesn't want to risk further sanctions from the West, international isolation. And so the Kremlin has to think very quickly, like, how do we support but not support these separatists in eastern Ukraine?
And this is where Yevgeny Prigozhin, the guy who's providing the meals for the Russian military, becomes acquainted with another guy, Dmitry Utkin, who is a former GRU officer, Russian military intelligence. He fought in Chechnya. He was stationed near Estonia. And he had just come back
and almost got in big trouble for this kind of misadventure with a Russian PMC in Syria, these two guys come together and they sign an agreement whereby Utkin will provide the tactical knowledge, provide the men as contractors, and Prigozhin will provide
the political backing and the financial support for this mercenary group that is very closely, if not basically, as Murat was saying, a Ministry of Defense project that they send into eastern Ukraine right across the border to support the separatists.
How did they recruit their fighters? So as Murat was saying, I mean, it's word of mouth, basically. And I think Murat will tell you later as well. The initial group of Wagner, which came out of this PMC that had the year before gone to Syria. So before Wagner, there were a number of kind of what we would think of as Western-style PMCs that had popped up.
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