# Part One: A War Criminal Oligarch Is Shot Out of the Sky

An episode of [SAD OLIGARCH](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1691403387), 6 Sep 2023, 27 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/faaaf253-350c-49cd-b496-affd0104057a/f3f52e84-3242-44d3-a18f-b0740145ee50/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=0ef962d3-5337-4506-ba5c-affd0104672c

In what will be a two-part final episode of Sad Oligarch, we take a deep dive into the violent life and violent death of Yevgeny Prigozhin—an oligarch, a war criminal, and the head of Kremlin backed private military contractor firm "PMC Wagner". This was a man with many enemies, but who shot him out of the sky? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: Something strange is going on. Who is killing Russian billionaires?
[0:05] Speaker 2: Another Russian oligarch has been found dead. Report suggests that
[0:08] Speaker 2: he hanged himself, fell out of a window, slashed his wrists,
[0:12] Speaker 2: was poisoned, murdered, his whole failing.
[0:15] Speaker 1: Last year, more than a dozen Russian oligarchs died in
[0:18] Speaker 1: the space of nine months. Many of the deaths are
[0:22] Speaker 1: suspicious with links to the Kremlin. This is sad Oligach,
[0:27] Speaker 1: an investigation into these recently dead Russian billionaires. It's created
[0:32] Speaker 1: by me jake Hanrahan and my colleague Sergei Slipchenkov. Sad
[0:37] Speaker 1: Oligach is a H eleven production for Kulso Media and iHeartRadio.
[0:53] Speaker 1: Last month, on August twenty third, Yevgeny Progojin sixty two,
[0:57] Speaker 1: boarded one of his private jets and was parked on
[1:02] Speaker 1: the runway at an airport in the West African country
[1:05] Speaker 1: of Mali. Progoson had been seen three days prior in
[1:09] Speaker 1: a propaganda video for the Kremlin backed Mercenary firm that
[1:13] Speaker 1: he led, PMC. Wagner. In the video, he says, quote
[1:21] Speaker 1: for those talking about whether I'm alive or not, well,
[1:24] Speaker 1: basically I'm fine. Those words were soon to be a
[1:29] Speaker 1: very bad omen on board Progosion's jet was also the
[1:34] Speaker 1: founder of PMC. Wagner his name was Dmitri Utkin. Utskin
[1:40] Speaker 1: fifty three was a lifelong Neo Nazi with ESS's tattoos
[1:44] Speaker 1: etched into his neck and a swastika tattooed across his chest.
[1:50] Speaker 1: He named his Mercenary firm after Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer.
[1:56] Speaker 1: Wagner was also his call sign when he served as
[1:58] Speaker 1: a Special Forces of so In Russia's GIU. It will
[2:03] Speaker 1: probably come as no surprise to now discover that both
[2:06] Speaker 1: Progosion and Ukin were avowed war criminals, and Wagner prides
[2:11] Speaker 1: itself on brutality and the mass murder. Progosian's plane took
[2:17] Speaker 1: off bound for Russia. It's roughly a fifteen hour flight.
[2:22] Speaker 1: As the plane traveled across the world, Ukin and Progosion
[2:25] Speaker 1: went about their business making plans that would never happen
[2:30] Speaker 1: in broad daylight. As progosions jet made its way from
[2:32] Speaker 1: Moscow to Saint Petersburg, the plane began to nosedive. Footage
[2:39] Speaker 1: shows the burning jet plummeting vertically to the ground. It
[2:42] Speaker 1: crashed in the village of cusan Kino in the Taywa
[2:45] Speaker 1: region that's just sixty miles north of Moscow. Everyone on
[2:49] Speaker 1: board was killed, burned alive, were obliterated on impact.
[2:57] Speaker 2: Or go here.
[2:59] Speaker 1: Within hours, the was footage of PMC. Wagner fighters crying
[3:03] Speaker 1: at a makeshift grave for Progosion and Ukin. To truly
[3:08] Speaker 1: understand what a huge event this was for Russia, we
[3:11] Speaker 1: need to understand who Progosian was and how he made
[3:14] Speaker 1: history in the country. To do this, I spoke to
[3:18] Speaker 1: extremism investigator Pierre Vaux, who spent almost ten years research
[3:23] Speaker 1: in PMC. Wagner.
[3:25] Speaker 2: Progosion graduated from school in nineteen seventy nine when he
[3:29] Speaker 2: was eighteen, and within a year he was in prison.
[3:34] Speaker 2: So he studied at a boarding school for sports, and
[3:38] Speaker 2: he apparently excelled in cross country skiing. But pretty much
[3:43] Speaker 2: immediately after finishing school he was charged and given suspended
[3:48] Speaker 2: sentences for theft.
[3:51] Speaker 1: Suspended sentences didn't put Progosion off. He went on a
[3:54] Speaker 1: crime spree shortly after dodging prison for the first time.
[3:58] Speaker 1: He was involved in armed robbery, breaking into houses, and
[4:01] Speaker 1: various other criminal enterprises. This culminated in a horrific scene
[4:07] Speaker 1: when Progoson and three of his associates followed a woman
[4:11] Speaker 1: home to rob her. Instead of just taking her belongings,
[4:14] Speaker 1: though Progosion personally strangled the woman with his bare hands
[4:19] Speaker 1: until she passed out. After being caught for these crimes,
[4:23] Speaker 1: Progoson was sent to prison for a full decade, doing
[4:27] Speaker 1: time in a penal colony.
[4:28] Speaker 2: This is one of the signs that you see from
[4:31] Speaker 2: personal accounts of him is that he's generally reported as
[4:34] Speaker 2: being a sadist. So he spent the whole of the
[4:37] Speaker 2: nineteen eighties in a penal colony, and he didn't emerge
[4:42] Speaker 2: until he was released a few years early in nineteen ninety.
[4:45] Speaker 2: So this is exactly as the Soviet Union is collapsing,
[4:48] Speaker 2: and when he went in nineteen eighty is the sort
[4:52] Speaker 2: of height of Soviet stagnation and paralysis and very conservative
[4:58] Speaker 2: and staid, and when he comes to it's capitalist, free
[5:02] Speaker 2: for all, and he was he kind of thrived in
[5:05] Speaker 2: that environment. He was told this story about how he'd
[5:10] Speaker 2: sold hot dogs at the main market in Petersburg and
[5:13] Speaker 2: that they mixed the mustard in his mother's apartment. The
[5:16] Speaker 2: thing is no one else has ever corroborated that, so
[5:20] Speaker 2: it's hard to say how much of this sort of
[5:22] Speaker 2: rags to richest story is necessarily true.
[5:24] Speaker 1: Considering Progosion spent the first part of his life as
[5:27] Speaker 1: a violent criminal and then the latter part of his
[5:30] Speaker 1: life as a violent war criminal, I personally think it's
[5:34] Speaker 1: quite possible that this humble Beginning's tale about selling hot
[5:38] Speaker 1: dogs through the collapse of the Soviet Union is nonsense
[5:42] Speaker 1: or at best a half truth.
[5:44] Speaker 2: It looks like he was actually involved in the whole
[5:46] Speaker 2: load of different businesses around that time. So he was
[5:48] Speaker 2: working at a used car lot where he was apparently
[5:52] Speaker 2: ripping people off. He was working as helped run a
[5:57] Speaker 2: supermarket chain in Petersburg, and what he quickly got in
[6:01] Speaker 2: with was a couple of well known businessman slash gangsters
[6:07] Speaker 2: in Petersburg, and by the mid nineties they fronted him
[6:11] Speaker 2: enough money to buy his first restaurant. This is really
[6:14] Speaker 2: how he kind of entered high level politics. So he
[6:16] Speaker 2: bought this restaurant and he got an English guy, Anthony
[6:20] Speaker 2: Gear to be the sort of frontman for it to
[6:22] Speaker 2: give it a degree of class.
[6:24] Speaker 1: Now, this is of course a warped perception of Britain
[6:27] Speaker 1: from back in the eighties to the nineties. We're now
[6:31] Speaker 1: best known for throwing plastic chairs, getting hammered and birthing
[6:35] Speaker 1: football hooliganism, and we love it. But back then, the
[6:38] Speaker 1: thin veneer of British classiness was a thing more commonly
[6:42] Speaker 1: known and used for advertising. So Progosion has this pretend
[6:47] Speaker 1: British aristocrat type running the restaurant that he purchased through
[6:52] Speaker 1: a loan from his organized crime community. The restaurant was
[6:56] Speaker 1: at market Fancy, a place where rich people go to
[6:59] Speaker 1: eat slowly. They began to garner an elite clientele. After
[7:05] Speaker 1: establishing himself here, Bragojin opened another restaurant in the late nineties.
[7:10] Speaker 1: This was called New Island. It was situated on the
[7:14] Speaker 1: river in Saint Petersburg. An aimed to cater to the
[7:17] Speaker 1: rich and powerful. That worked so much so that the
[7:21] Speaker 1: head of the International Monetary Fund was taken there for
[7:25] Speaker 1: a luxury meal.
[7:27] Speaker 2: The key moment was in nineteen ninety nine where the
[7:31] Speaker 2: IMF's head was in the country while the Russians were
[7:35] Speaker 2: trying to get alone and they wanted He wanted to
[7:38] Speaker 2: find a restaurant to go to, and also wanted to
[7:41] Speaker 2: tour of the river and the waters in Petersburg, so
[7:44] Speaker 2: someone in the Russian entourage invited him to New Ireland,
[7:48] Speaker 2: and as a result of that, the negotiations were successful
[7:52] Speaker 2: and Russia got an IMF loan. After that, you start
[7:55] Speaker 2: seeing Russian leadership using this as a regular venue to
[8:00] Speaker 2: bring foreign guests to Putin brought over Jacques Shirak, George W. Bush,
[8:05] Speaker 2: the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshira Mauri on one of his
[8:08] Speaker 2: other restaurants as well. I found an interesting mention in
[8:12] Speaker 2: an old newspaper review of it. They had a portrait
[8:14] Speaker 2: of Prince Andrew on the wall as one of their
[8:17] Speaker 2: honored guests.
[8:18] Speaker 1: Legally, there's not much we can say about Prince Andrew
[8:22] Speaker 1: other than that he was a close friend of international
[8:25] Speaker 1: pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Oh and also that
[8:30] Speaker 1: he was accused of sexual activity with an underaged girl
[8:34] Speaker 1: from Epstein's circle of the abused and trafficked. Anyway, Progoson's
[8:57] Speaker 1: restaurant New Ireland became the go to plays for the
[9:00] Speaker 1: Russian elite, not just rich people, but also powerful rich
[9:05] Speaker 1: politicians who'd later go on to shape the country into
[9:08] Speaker 1: the authoritarian regime Russia has now become. This is when
[9:12] Speaker 1: Progosim first started getting close to the Kremlin and its
[9:15] Speaker 1: various tentacles.
[9:17] Speaker 2: Putin personally held his birthday party on New Island, so
[9:22] Speaker 2: he's doing really well at this point. He's got access personal,
[9:25] Speaker 2: very close access to top people. He then opens his
[9:30] Speaker 2: own catering company, Concord, and they get really wealthy contracts.
[9:35] Speaker 2: They start contracting and supplying all of the food for
[9:38] Speaker 2: schools in the area, and by twenty ten he's sort
[9:42] Speaker 2: of dealing with local police and eventually starts becoming the
[9:47] Speaker 2: major supply to the army. He's in a position where
[9:50] Speaker 2: he's getting loads of business in through contacts, particularly through
[9:55] Speaker 2: the government, also through the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which
[9:58] Speaker 2: is like the large of fire ambulance and stuff, and
[10:02] Speaker 2: at that point it was headed by Sergei Shoigu, who's
[10:06] Speaker 2: now the Defense Minister. There's an interesting sort of alignment.
[10:10] Speaker 2: It's the same people that he's been both dependent on
[10:13] Speaker 2: and in conflict with since the mid two thousands for
[10:17] Speaker 2: all this money. And it's really interesting reading interviews with
[10:20] Speaker 2: him back then, because even back in twenty ten, when
[10:23] Speaker 2: he was saying, Oh, our next big target, we want
[10:25] Speaker 2: to break into the army. He was very paranoid, and
[10:29] Speaker 2: he was report he was talking to the interview about, Oh,
[10:32] Speaker 2: there's all these parents protesting against our school food because
[10:35] Speaker 2: people as claying that it's poisoned.
[10:37] Speaker 1: Spoiler. Literally hundreds of kids did get food poison in
[10:41] Speaker 1: because the food from Progosions catering company wasn't up to
[10:45] Speaker 1: hygienic standards.
[10:46] Speaker 2: He's got this constant paranoia that he's being undermined by
[10:49] Speaker 2: business rivals who are orchestrating protests against him, and you
[10:53] Speaker 2: can kind of see he's projecting his own methodology onto
[10:57] Speaker 2: other people. At the same time, he was as intimidating
[11:01] Speaker 2: journalists who are investigating him.
[11:03] Speaker 1: And his companies.
[11:04] Speaker 2: Already, he built a huge empire, making millions and millions
[11:08] Speaker 2: and millions of rubles through this catering empire. But then
[11:13] Speaker 2: in late twenty thirteen, he suddenly starts popping up in
[11:17] Speaker 2: connection to the Troll Factory, the Internet research agency, which
[11:24] Speaker 2: obviously is most famous for what it was involved within
[11:26] Speaker 2: America and stuff during the twenty sixteen elections by paying
[11:31] Speaker 2: people to sit there writing comments on various newspaper comments
[11:34] Speaker 2: pages Twitter, read it anything you'd name it. They had
[11:37] Speaker 2: people pasting pro Russian arguments or making up narratives on
[11:42] Speaker 2: it at the same time. By the summer of twenty fourteen,
[11:46] Speaker 2: this is by when he finally admitted it, he started
[11:51] Speaker 2: funding and providing the shell companies for the Wagner Mercenary Group.
[11:58] Speaker 2: So Wagner was basically a reconstruction of a mercenary outfit
[12:02] Speaker 2: that had already existed since mid to twenty thirteen, which
[12:08] Speaker 2: fought in Syria, which was called Slavonic Core and I
[12:10] Speaker 2: say four It had one engagement and pretty much lost
[12:13] Speaker 2: miserably to j hll Islam and ran away from the
[12:16] Speaker 2: resort and was never returned.
[12:18] Speaker 1: To the country.
[12:20] Speaker 2: Most of its leadership got picked up by the FSB,
[12:23] Speaker 2: but then the leading commanders of it, which included Dimitri Utkin,
[12:28] Speaker 2: turned up as the head of Wagner.
[12:30] Speaker 1: Remember that's the neo Nazi founder of PMC Wagner, a
[12:34] Speaker 1: guy ironically later deployed to Ukraine to quote denazify the region.
[12:40] Speaker 1: According to Kremlin propaganda, Progosion's role within PMC Wagner began immediately.
[12:47] Speaker 1: He provided the use of show companies and various different
[12:50] Speaker 1: complicated networks of bank accounts to pay for Wagner's fuel,
[12:55] Speaker 1: medical equipment, body armor, and more. However, from the very start,
[13:00] Speaker 1: EMC Wagner was backed by the Russian Armed Forces.
[13:04] Speaker 2: The GRU actually hosts them physically and really controls everything,
[13:08] Speaker 2: but he provides the sort of contracting nexus to run
[13:11] Speaker 2: everything through. And yeah, Ukin was the sort of effective
[13:15] Speaker 2: commander of this group, and they were based at the
[13:19] Speaker 2: sort of gru's tenth Spets Lance Brigade headquarters, so physically
[13:25] Speaker 2: located on the territory of their base is the Wagner
[13:28] Speaker 2: Training Center, which again makes the whole like, oh, Wagner
[13:33] Speaker 2: GRU separation is the same thing in a lot of cases.
[13:37] Speaker 1: From the beginning, the Kremlin denied any involvement with PMC Wagner.
[13:41] Speaker 1: Of course, that was a lie. Soon Wagner mercenaries began
[13:45] Speaker 1: doing the dirty work for Putin.
[13:47] Speaker 2: Back in twenty fifteen, they first publicly appeared. The Kremlin
[13:52] Speaker 2: was officially denying any involvement in Ukraine, so they were
[13:55] Speaker 2: still trying to use systems to obscure.
[13:58] Speaker 1: For anyone unaware the U. The Ukraine War did not
[14:01] Speaker 1: start on February twenty four, twenty twenty two, when Russia
[14:05] Speaker 1: launched the full scale invasion. The war actually began in
[14:08] Speaker 1: April twenty fourteen, when Russia armed and assisted pro Russian
[14:13] Speaker 1: factions in the Dombas region in East Ukraine. They did
[14:17] Speaker 1: this because the people of Ukraine ousted their previous pro
[14:20] Speaker 1: Russian leader. It was a revolution that Putin and his
[14:24] Speaker 1: many supporters did not like, and so, perhaps taking a
[14:29] Speaker 1: note from America's playbook, Russia started the war in the
[14:33] Speaker 1: East to try and reverse the will of the Ukrainian people,
[14:36] Speaker 1: the people who'd launched their successful revolution. At first, the
[14:41] Speaker 1: Kremlin said that no Russian forces were there, trying to
[14:44] Speaker 1: create this illusion that the Dombas uprising was the same
[14:48] Speaker 1: grassroots revolt as the Maidan Revolution in Kiev. This was
[14:53] Speaker 1: simply not true.
[14:55] Speaker 2: They did send in regular troops twice in two big
[14:59] Speaker 2: waves August twenty fourteen and in January February twenty fifteen,
[15:04] Speaker 2: but they were still trying to cover their assis as
[15:06] Speaker 2: much as possible.
[15:08] Speaker 1: I have personally reported from the ground in Ukraine more
[15:11] Speaker 1: than ten times since twenty sixteen when I first went
[15:14] Speaker 1: to the front lines in the East.
[15:16] Speaker 3: Do you think that was fift I told you.
[15:29] Speaker 1: Yes, you did tell it that was me embedded with
[15:32] Speaker 1: the Ukrainian military in twenty sixteen in Avdivka. As you
[15:37] Speaker 1: heard there, we were getting shelled pretty heavily from the separatists.
[15:40] Speaker 1: I managed to work on both sides, although full disclosure,
[15:45] Speaker 1: I was later banned from the separatist region. Whilst in
[15:49] Speaker 1: the separatist controlled areas of the Dombas, I encountered many
[15:53] Speaker 1: regular Russian troops commanding separatists militias. They also had a
[15:57] Speaker 1: ton of Russian military equipment. They had load of Russian tanks.
[16:01] Speaker 1: For example. The next clip of audio you'll hear is
[16:04] Speaker 1: from a documentary I made in the separatist region in
[16:07] Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. At this moment, I am stuck in a
[16:11] Speaker 1: front line trench with a separatist commander who says that is,
[16:18] Speaker 1: we took all these tanks from the Ukrainians, to which
[16:22] Speaker 1: I responded, of course he was lying. When the translator
[16:27] Speaker 1: said it back to him, he just started laughing. The
[16:31] Speaker 1: whole thing was absurd, and everybody knew it. At that time.
[16:36] Speaker 1: No reporters could operate in the separatist regions without a minder.
[16:41] Speaker 1: This person sticks to you twenty four seven to make
[16:44] Speaker 1: sure you don't photograph anything incriminating that could expose their
[16:48] Speaker 1: help from Russia. This was frankly ridiculous because, as I said,
[16:53] Speaker 1: everyone knew what was going on anyway, at those times, PMC.
[16:56] Speaker 1: Wagnin was also all over the dombasly suspect, I encountered
[17:01] Speaker 1: them at the ruins of Donyetsk Airport.
[17:05] Speaker 4: So we've been taken to the Net's airport, which is
[17:07] Speaker 4: quite symbolic place for the separatists here dn R, because
[17:12] Speaker 4: whoever controls this of a minder told us controls the
[17:14] Speaker 4: entrance to the net. I've been fighting for this for
[17:17] Speaker 4: two and a half years now. Right now the DNR
[17:20] Speaker 4: control it. And over here as the frontline with Ukrainian.
[17:23] Speaker 1: Positions, a unit of very well equipped fighters controlled the
[17:27] Speaker 1: frontline debt. Their commander, a man in his late twenties
[17:32] Speaker 1: called Serge Lim, even told me he wasn't actually from
[17:36] Speaker 1: the Dombas, not from Ukraine at all. He came from Russia.
[17:39] Speaker 1: But he said that he traveled to fight in Ukraine
[17:41] Speaker 1: as a volunteer to help out the Russian separatists possible sure,
[17:47] Speaker 1: as he took me on a tour of the destroyed airport,
[17:49] Speaker 1: though it was clear that this guy was not new
[17:52] Speaker 1: to conflict. I've worked in dozens of war zones across
[17:56] Speaker 1: the world, including Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere. And
[18:01] Speaker 1: trust me, you can tell who's an novice volunteer and
[18:04] Speaker 1: who's properly trained and experienced. Serge Alam was definitely not green.
[18:11] Speaker 1: His unit was part of the Sparta Battalion, whose commander,
[18:15] Speaker 1: nicknamed Motorola, was also from Russia. This unit, at the
[18:20] Speaker 1: destroyed airport frontline where we were, had around a dozen
[18:24] Speaker 1: Russian military ural trucks parked up at their base in
[18:27] Speaker 1: the ruins, all with Russian plates. When my colleague tried
[18:30] Speaker 1: to film them, the fighters went berserk and made us
[18:33] Speaker 1: delete the footage. In contrast, as we were walking over
[18:37] Speaker 1: this pit in the airport, we had to walk over
[18:39] Speaker 1: this beam below there were clearly the remains of soldiers,
[18:44] Speaker 1: and the separatists started laughing, saying, hey, look it's dead Ukrainians,
[18:48] Speaker 1: old bodies of Ukrainian servicemen down in that pit there.
[18:52] Speaker 1: To see kind of a jacket for boots that they
[18:57] Speaker 1: thought was funny. They didn't mind us filming that, but
[19:00] Speaker 1: the trucks no make of that.
[19:03] Speaker 2: What you will soar gonna provided a way of moving
[19:06] Speaker 2: people in there, like these are not Russian troops, they
[19:08] Speaker 2: are members of a private military organization. The other thing though,
[19:12] Speaker 2: was that because they were directly controlled by the g
[19:15] Speaker 2: are you and private and non ideological in that way,
[19:19] Speaker 2: like a lot of them are ideological, but you could
[19:22] Speaker 2: use them. What they were used for was to clean
[19:25] Speaker 2: up separatist fighters in Ukraine who were out of there,
[19:30] Speaker 2: who you know, displeased the leadership.
[19:33] Speaker 1: Remember that guy Motorola that I just mentioned, Well, he
[19:36] Speaker 1: was eventually killed in Donyetes in twenty sixteen when a
[19:39] Speaker 1: bomb blew up in the elevator of his apartment block,
[19:43] Speaker 1: was planted in the ceiling and detonated. When Motorola entered,
[19:47] Speaker 1: his whole head was blown in two. Motorola's friend Givi,
[19:53] Speaker 1: was also a commander of a Russian separatist militia known
[19:56] Speaker 1: as the Somali Battalion, named after pirates in Side. He
[20:01] Speaker 1: was killed in twenty seventeen in his Donjet's office when
[20:05] Speaker 1: a thermobaric rocket was fired through the window. He burned
[20:09] Speaker 1: to death. The rocket used was a Russian RPO Schmelround.
[20:15] Speaker 1: The guy who was the head commander of all these
[20:18] Speaker 1: pro Russian units and separatist Donyetsk was also killed him.
[20:22] Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, he was targeted with a bomb inside
[20:26] Speaker 1: a cafe in Donyetsk, which blew up as he went
[20:28] Speaker 1: for coffee. He was blown to bits. It's worth noting
[20:33] Speaker 1: that all three of these dead separatist commanders were war criminals.
[20:37] Speaker 1: They sometimes committed these acts on camera and on the
[20:41] Speaker 1: record admitted to regularly executing prisoners of war and much
[20:46] Speaker 1: worse now the Russian separatists all blowing these deaths on
[20:51] Speaker 1: the Ukrainian special forces. They deny that many believe as
[20:55] Speaker 1: Pierre said that it was Russia clearing house with the
[20:59] Speaker 1: help of Wagner. I guess we'll never not.
[21:23] Speaker 2: Wagner's first ever appearance was on January two, twenty fifteen,
[21:27] Speaker 2: when they assassinated the commander of a unit called GBR
[21:31] Speaker 2: Batman in Lhansk.
[21:34] Speaker 1: GBR Batman was another pro Russian separatist unit fighting in
[21:38] Speaker 1: the Dombas against the Ukrainians.
[21:40] Speaker 2: That he just waited for. This paramilitary commander, who was
[21:43] Speaker 2: a separatist commander driving down the road, ambushed him. Five
[21:47] Speaker 2: loads of Thermobarrat missiles into his car, killed everyone. Then
[21:52] Speaker 2: a few days later, they were involved in besieging another
[21:55] Speaker 2: base used by another paramilitary Cossack group in Krasnadonna in
[22:00] Speaker 2: the hands so they were basically used as a death
[22:02] Speaker 2: squad to go and enforce Kremlin control over their various
[22:07] Speaker 2: paramilitary groups. Then a few weeks later they were finally
[22:11] Speaker 2: thrown into proper battle in the bouts of it, in
[22:14] Speaker 2: the big offensive there, and all the survivors from that
[22:17] Speaker 2: said that they were just using human wave tactics.
[22:20] Speaker 1: Human wave tactics is exactly as it sounds, soldiers sent
[22:24] Speaker 1: up over the trench in waves. They keep going. Everybody drops,
[22:29] Speaker 1: another wave comes an awful tactic that gets a lot
[22:32] Speaker 1: of people.
[22:33] Speaker 2: Killed horrific casualties as a result of it. Their image
[22:36] Speaker 2: they always like to present is very important. The image
[22:40] Speaker 2: is like, oh, we're special forces, where you know operators
[22:43] Speaker 2: were really capable and elite. They're not. They never were.
[22:47] Speaker 2: What they were actually used for in almost every conflict
[22:50] Speaker 2: was meet disposable, deniable cannon.
[22:54] Speaker 1: Foddow, which is what Progosion started mouthing off about in
[22:59] Speaker 1: a big way on telegram mostly and through various different
[23:04] Speaker 1: or Wagner associated propaganda channels. That's what he was kicking
[23:09] Speaker 1: off about right in Ukraine.
[23:11] Speaker 2: Yeah, because he was saying that the Ministry of Defense
[23:15] Speaker 2: was withholding ammunition from them. I don't know what it
[23:19] Speaker 2: was that really caused this in no way because this
[23:21] Speaker 2: is in a way how they'd always operated. It's just
[23:24] Speaker 2: I think, I mean, there's also the potential that on
[23:27] Speaker 2: a human level, something does eventually snap on you when
[23:31] Speaker 2: you're surrounded by that many corpses on a daily basis.
[23:34] Speaker 2: The battlefields outside Bakhmu work. I mean, you've seen the
[23:38] Speaker 2: drone videos and stuff, and the piles and piles of
[23:41] Speaker 2: corpses around there and people still trying to advance through them.
[23:44] Speaker 2: It was horrific. So, yeah, there's some change in him
[23:48] Speaker 2: where he sort of finally decides that this is not
[23:51] Speaker 2: an acceptable way to use the personnel he's getting. I
[23:55] Speaker 2: wonder if also it's the fact that he was using
[23:57] Speaker 2: penal conscript stuff, and I think his own identity as
[24:00] Speaker 2: a convict was quite important penal conscripts.
[24:04] Speaker 1: Let me explain that. So, when it became clear that
[24:07] Speaker 1: invading and taking over Ukraine was not going to be
[24:10] Speaker 1: the walk in the park Russia thought it was, the
[24:13] Speaker 1: Kriminin realized it needed a lot more men for its
[24:15] Speaker 1: ongoing groundwar. They conscripted young men, then older men, then
[24:20] Speaker 1: older men still, then literal prisoners, rapists, murderers, and other
[24:26] Speaker 1: various convicts were released from many prisons across Russia on
[24:30] Speaker 1: the condition that they fight in Ukraine under PMC. Wagner.
[24:34] Speaker 1: The deal was that if they survive, they can go
[24:37] Speaker 1: home a free man after the fighting is done. Now,
[24:40] Speaker 1: of course, at least two of these fighters that we
[24:42] Speaker 1: know of that survived returned home and immediately started committing
[24:47] Speaker 1: murders again. But anyway, that's the penal conscripts. As you
[24:53] Speaker 1: can probably tell by now, Yevgeny Progosian's life was a
[24:57] Speaker 1: brutal but extremely eventful one. He was worth over a
[25:02] Speaker 1: billion dollars when he died. For weeks before that, at
[25:05] Speaker 1: sixty two years old, he was out in a field,
[25:08] Speaker 1: bed in a tent on the front lines of East Ukraine,
[25:10] Speaker 1: watching his men get butchered. In amongst this savagery which
[25:14] Speaker 1: he was so used to, something happened, and Progosian decided
[25:19] Speaker 1: to turn it against his old friend Vladimir Putin. He
[25:23] Speaker 1: took PMC. Wagner, turned around and rode back into Russia
[25:28] Speaker 1: with the aims of destabilizing the Kremlin. We'll be covering
[25:33] Speaker 1: Progosion's mutiny on Putin in the second half of this
[25:36] Speaker 1: episode next week. The final conclusion to sad Oligach said.
[25:58] Speaker 1: Oligarch is a H eleven production for Cool Zone Media
[26:01] Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio, hosted, produced, researched and edited by me Jake
[26:08] Speaker 1: Hanrahan and Sergey Slipchenko. Co produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music
[26:14] Speaker 1: by Sam Black, artwork by Adam mcdoyle, soundmix by Splicing Block.
[26:20] Speaker 1: Go to Jacanrahan dot com for more information.

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