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
And then, ultimately, Shoigu and Ferguson, at this point, hate each other's guts. And the Ministry of Defense then, kind of like their final...
of counter-attack on progosion is they get the kremlin to agree that all soldiers fighting in ukraine on behalf of russia have to sign a contract with the ministry of defense on those who fight on the front line those on the front line yeah and so for progosion you can imagine he's this big guy now in Russia, he's got thousands and thousands of men ostensibly under his command.
And he recognizes that this is making him political, too. And so all of a sudden, the Ministry of Defense is taking those men out from underneath him. And I think for him, what he saw was the writing on the wall, that at the very least, when I no longer have Wagner Group... It means that I'm going to kind of disappear into obscurity, which he wasn't able to do at that point.
He couldn't just retire and be quiet. He was incapable of that. But also without those men, he doesn't have political leverage anymore, and it could result in his ultimate demise. And so he has to figure out a way, how do I convince Putin to choose between me and Shoigu, because Putin is choosing Shoigu right now.
And so the decision is made that Wagner is going to turn back from Ukraine into southern Russia. And they're going to capture and kill the Minister of Defense. Wow. And so on June 23rd, 2023, Wagner crosses back over. Prokofiev claims that the Ministry of Defense hit them with a rocket attack. which seems to be out of the case.
But it's the pretext. Absolutely false attack. But the pretext is now that we're going to go arrest Shoigu and another general, Gerasimov. And so they go back into Russia and they surround and take over Russia's southern military command in Rostov. And they're looking for Shoigu. But Shoigu has already escaped. And so the generals who were there, they tried to talk Prigozhin down.
And he also thinks too or is hoping in the back of his mind that all of that popularity that he had from being on social media and being on Russian TV on the front lines of Bakhmut means that the soldiers in the Russian military itself are on his side too.
And so he goes, and they've taken the military command, and the generals who are there are trying to talk him down, and they're not able to do it. And so Progozhin announces that they're going to have a march for justice on Moscow. And the column of Wagner, the Wagner column turns from southern Russian military command and starts heading up the highway to Moscow. And
mean this is i mean i think everybody was glued to their tv screens to see like wagner uh a column heading on moscow and the mayor of moscow they started digging up the highway around moscow to prevent uh their you know their potential arrival uh wagner shoots down i think a number of helicopters and and planes about 13 people are killed
But each time, you know, he's getting... Provozhin is getting closer and closer to Moscow. And he's also kind of going into empty space. And so now he's trying to communicate to Putin that all he is trying to do is take out his rivals, Shoigu and Gerasimov. He's not trying to overthrow... Putin himself.
But the issue is, the closer he's getting to Moscow, the more he could accidentally be unleashing a coup, because it's going to be such a destabilizing moment. At some point, he's trying to say, I'm not overthrowing the government, but now it's getting close to looking like he might overthrow the government if he gets into Moscow.
Behind the scenes, the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is negotiating between Putin's side and Prigozhin. Eventually, he gets Prigozhin to agree to halt the march. I think for Prigozhin himself, he was a little bit relieved because he was realizing that events were...
going out of his control by... I mean, they were hardly in his control beforehand, but the closer he was getting to Moscow, and they got within 150 miles, things were really starting to get out of control, and he backs down. And you could make an argument that the guy who had...
You know, an insane risk tolerance, you know, from going after, you know, going against Americans in the Battle of Kasham and, you know, risking his neck saying he's going to take Bakhmut like this was perhaps the one moment where he should have doubled down and gone all the way to Moscow. But he chose not to.
And that sealed his fate, ultimately, three months later.
Because that's how you make big money in Russia is by skimming off of the state budgets. So everything is a battle over the flow of budget. Because the more budget that comes your way, the more you can mine your own plots.
And so one of the ways that people were making money in Donbass in 2014, 2015, is you're a commander and you tell the Ministry of Defense, oh, I have 200 guys under my command. The Ministry of Defense pays your salaries, but you actually have 150 or 125 guys under your command.
I think a lot of people would put it on the FSB, which is the Russian successor to the KGB, which handles domestic threats for Putin.
So everything became subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. But the thing was, as we were talking about, the relationship between Wagner and the state was also different in each place. And so in Syria, like when Marat was there, you know, they get everything from the Ministry of Defense. They're probably paid through the Ministry of Defense. They're working very closely.
They have Russian air power that support. I mean, this is like a Ministry of Defense operation. when you get to like the Central African Republic, there's not as much support from the Kremlin. And so... Some kind of autonomy. There's a degree of independence. They're opening up breweries, like Ministry of Defense doesn't want breweries, or they have these gold mines.
Showing 121–140 of 145 · page 7 of 8
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