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
They have state backing, but Pergosian is also out there with his guys basically doing business development, right? If you have a PMC, where are you going to market your services? You have to go to Africa at some point. Otherwise, you should fire your B&D guy. And so already in 2017, Progozhin is sending his guys out to drum up new business.
They first sign a contract with the Sudanese to provide training and they get access to mining concessions in Sudan. Then they show up in the Central African Republic where There's really no other kind of competition from other Russians. And so Progozhin is able to provide training.
He offers his like information warfare because he has the troll farms, which were kind of very famous in the US during the 2016 elections. And his guys go out and they try to start breweries and they go into gold mining and what have you. They act, as Murat was saying, very independently of the Kremlin because... These places aren't that important to Russia.
And so in the places that aren't important, he has to figure out his own ways to finance these operations. And so they go from the Central African Republic, they're in Libya, back in Haftar in his bid to take Tripoli in 2019. Then they show up in Mali, where they sign a deal with the Malian government to go after various jihadi groups.
And then ultimately, they are initially left out of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and only get brought in when the Russian government's in trouble.
Yeah, but I think that it's not... Because people always ask, you know, is this a private thing or a public thing? And the answer is both. And I mean, we're in Paris right now, but when I'm sitting in Washington, D.C., I try to explain to people, like, this is the capital of public-private partnerships, right? Lockheed Martin is a profit-driven company.
They will frame whatever they're doing as furthering America's national defense and security, but they're also profit-driven. And so what Prigozhin was very good at was selling back to the Kremlin this dream of kind of Russia's expansion abroad. And he could sell it back to Putin, these different initiatives that were also just happened to be, you know, potentially profitable to him.
And so, as Murat is saying, when Russia first intervenes in Syria, One of the reasons that they're doing it, actually, it's after the annexation of Crimea, and they recognize the importance of Syria at that time for the U.S. and for the West, because this is, if you remember 2015, this is when ISIS is really at its height with the territorial caliphate, and the U.S.
has already intervened, gone back in to fight ISIS. And so the Russians think that If we go in backing Assad, we can kind of force the U.S. into a joint counterterrorism operation against ISIS that will force them to kind of basically start talking to us again. And so they come in and they're backing Assad.
But as Murad's saying, Assad's government, I mean, the forces that he has are incredibly powerful. unmotivated, I mean, for obvious reasons, given his rule and the rebels, not just ISIS, but all the other rebels fighting against them are a lot more motivated. And the Russians initially wanted it to just be an air campaign. But I mean, as you find out pretty quick, like air campaigns alone rarely
work for anybody. And it was clear that Russian air power with Assad's forces on the ground was not going to work. They were not going to take the territory back from rebels. But they face an issue at the time, which I think you speak to as well, where this is kind of a faraway intervention for Russia.
And they haven't figured out yet if they want to have actual Russian troops on the ground and what Russians will think, the Russian public will think, if Russian soldiers are going home in caskets. And there's a sense that they're going to be against this and say, why are we here in Syria? And so one of the reasons that Murat and Wagner were able to get back in
is that the Russian military didn't have to report casualties for Wagner.
Yeah, it was an effort.
It was an effort because, in part, there's always a lot of reasons why things happen, but the timing of their intervention, because if you remember, Syria started going into civil war right around the time of the Arab Spring. So this is already like five years before that.
the Russians didn't have any particular love for Assad, despite the fact that there was a Russian base in Syria and kind of some history going back to the Soviet Union. What really explains the timing of why they went in was this sense of isolation that they felt after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 in Ukraine. And it was this effort
to basically get themselves onto the world stage again in a crisis that they thought was existentially important to the West, which was the defeat of ISIS. Of course, also when they show up and they're on the ground, Assad also has different ideas for what he wants the Russians to do, and ISIS is less of a concern to him. than a lot of the more secular rebels elsewhere as well.
And that he wants the Russians to go after those guys. Whereas the Russians want to go try and meet up with the Americans as they're closing in on ISIS, as the territorial caliphate is kind of crumbling down.
Like, why did Progozhin want to take these Conoco facilities? And so in 2016, Murat and Wagner, they capture Palmyra from ISIS. And Murat has, I think, some of the medals from that time period that they'll show. But after the capture, the Russian military sends Wagner home again.
And then a few months later, ISIS recaptures it, Palmyra, and Wagner comes back in. But this time, Prigozhin has signed a deal with Assad's government. And part of the deal is that Wagner will participate in the counteroffensive. And Prigozhin and his companies get a 25% share of the proceeds of the oil and gas assets that are recuperated.
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