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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
is kind of technically supposed to with his forces be subordinate but he also has a mind and ambition of his own and he can occasionally uh get in front of putin himself and you can imagine what he's saying about the people that he doesn't like in front of putin so you know imagine you know you're uh you're the boss of an employee but the employees that is the ceo right i mean you know that there's another channel
that goes up if you try to boss them around. And so even though the Ministry of Defense and Wagner are cooperating in Africa quite a bit, there's still that interpersonal tension. And so when Putin makes a decision to launch the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, he gives you know, the planning of it over to the general staff in the Ministry of Defense.
And they want nothing to do with Progozhin. And so, their thinking at the time is that this is going to be a quick, easy victory, and we can do it, kind of in their mind, by the book, without having to use guys like Progozhin. And so, in the initial month or so of the invasion, Wagner is actually left out. And Progozhin is pissed about it.
He's calling up the guys in the GRU, trying to figure out why his guys aren't in it, and then trying to get his guys into it. And meanwhile, the very quick operation to take Kyiv does not go as planned. And the Russian military is suffering setbacks. And so Progozhin now has his opportunity to get his guys into the war.
The thing about Wagner that I think Murat would tell you too is that in the intervening years, really since Chechnya and a very brief war with Georgia, not a lot of guys in the Russian military have real battle experience. Not a lot of people have been shot at. when Wagner comes in with its commanders, they start delivering some quick battlefield victories.
And so this puts Progozhin all of a sudden in this great position. He's able to come out of the shadows and he becomes a hero of Russia. He declares himself... Oh, he denied it always that he was... tied to Wagner Group, now he declares, I was always the founder of Wagner, and he's on state television. And as Murat said, this is a guy who already has a big ego, right?
And the way that he always gets around his rivals is by gambling big, like at Hacham. And so he starts also promising things that he's going to do, something that the generals would never do. And ultimately, what he ends up promising is that he's going to, basically, Wagner is going to take Bakhmut, this kind of middle-sized city, from Ukrainian forces.
And the way that he's going to do it is he gets exclusive permission for a time to go to all of Russia's prisons and recruit prisoners to the front line. And so he shows up, and he goes himself. I mean, he's a guy who does a lot of things himself.
Yeah, he wasn't allowed to have actual soldiers and so he gets the convicts. And so he shows up at these Russian penal colonies and they gather all the prisoners into the prison yard and he comes in in his helicopter and he comes in and he speaks in front of all of the prisoners and he says, you know, I have an offer for you. You can come and fight for me for six months.
And if you survive, you're a free man and your criminal record is expunged." And he tells them that my losses are worse than Stalingrad, which obviously resonates with Russians. And ultimately, about 50,000 guys sign up. And the tactic that Progozhin is going to use to take Bakhmut is the human wave tactic. And so these convicts, they get two weeks training.
Usually, I think, just inside the border with Ukraine and around Luhansk. And then after that, they're sent to the front. And basically, they're put in small units. And... Each small unit, one unit will go out, attack the Ukrainian position. Eight guys might be killed, but two guys get into the trench, and they do some damage before getting killed.
And before the Ukrainians have a chance to recover, another unit of convicts is coming through. And so it's a very inefficient way to wage war, but it is effective over time.
As you can imagine, it's a huge front line now, right, in Ukraine. In the beginning, the first phase of the war in Donbas, you know, it's a little section of the Donbas region. Now it's... you know, like a thousand kilometers long maybe or something. And so he's also engaged with the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians are sending some of their best guys to defend Bakhmut.
While for the Russian government, they're losing, in their mind, some of the worst people in society, right? These convicts. And so, you know, it's like a four to one ratio in terms of losses. but it's something that the Russians and Progozhin are willing to do for the reasons that Murat said.
But, you know, at this point, though, Progozhin is like an internet... Like, we all know who Progozhin is, right? During the Bakhmut campaign. He becomes, like, the face of the war itself. CNN is trying to reach him. The New York Times is trying to reach him for an interview. He's, you know, he's huge back home in Russia. He's, like, finally everything that he...
you know, his ego is matched now by his popularity.
But still, I mean, there's still a lot of enmity between the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and Prigozhin. And so at some point, inevitably, especially since Prigozhin is having all of this success like Murat mentioned, the Ministry of Defense is going to want to check him. And so the first way that they do it is they start cutting off Prigozhin from convict recruitment.
So he's promised to Putin, I'm gonna take Bakhmut, but his means of doing so now is disappearing. He needs a lot of bodies to take Bakhmut. The Ministry of Defense is cutting him off of those bodies. Not because they're against prisoner recruitment, they just start doing it themselves.
But the difference is, and this is always the issue for Prigozhin, is when he was doing it, he had the permission by like a wink and a nod from the presidential administration. When the Ministry of Defense does it, Russian Parliament officially makes it legal for them to recruit from prison. So there's always a way that Prokhorin can get screwed over in whatever he's doing.
So he's getting cut off. And so now he starts going public with the Ministry of Defense saying, I'm not getting enough ammunition. for what we're trying to do. And the Ministry of Defense is screwing over Wagner by not giving us enough ammunition that we need. And so, now this spat starts going very public over social media.
Showing 101–120 of 145 · page 6 of 8
← Previous
Next →