#195 Marat Gabidullin - Wagner Group Commander / Russian Mercenary
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Who is Marat Gabidullin and what is his background?
This is my first ever interview with an enemy combatant, a commander from Russia's infamous Wagner Group. There's a little bit of a language barrier with this one, so bear with us, because there is some very interesting information in this episode. If you can bear with the language barrier, I think you're going to get a lot out of this and learn a lot about Wagner Group, how they came about, their training, and the caliber of men that they had working there. Enjoy the show. Murat Gabidullin, welcome to the show. Thank you. Nice to meet you. John, thank you for being here. Wanted to bring you on here to fill in a couple of gaps with the language barrier. Sure. Murat Gabidullin. Born in Ural, you grew up in Uzbekistan and joined the Soviet military in 1984. Served as a paratrooper officer and commanded a recon company. Then joined Russia's Wagner Group, starting as a grunt, fighting ISIS in Syria and rising all the way to commander.
You worked closely with Wagner boss Prigozhin, advising the ISIS hunters in Syria and fought in the battle of Kasham in 2018 against U.S. in Kurdish forces. You then quit Wagner in 2019, authored a book about your time with Wagner, and since then you have moved to France, where you are now seeking asylum. This interview has taken place in Paris. Obviously, we couldn't get you to the US, so we came here to meet you. It's really weird for me to say this, but you are an enemy combatant. He fought in a skirmish in Syria against 40 US soldiers. Special Forces soldiers and I'm friends with a couple of those guys and heard their account of that battle. And then we ran into your friend, John Lechner, and asked to be connected with you.
So I just want to thank John. A freelance journalist, writer and researcher who's been in conflict zones across the globe. Author of the book, Death Is Our Business, Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Private Warfare. Expert on Russia's moves in Africa. their foreign policy, and private military companies. So thank you again for being here. Thanks for having me. I want to dive in on a little bit of the history of Wagner Group. And so how did it start?
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.
Some of my friends told me that in Russia emerged some kind of structure where I can start my life from the very beginning.
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.
So he became close with Putin through his restaurant tours.
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.
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