Lawfare Daily: "Putin’s Sledgehammer" with Candace Rondeaux

[Intro]

Candace Rondeaux: Then that first experiment grew into basically a professional troll farm. The one that we now know is the internet research agency that very famously was involved in fomenting anti-election, anti-Clinton propaganda during the U.S. 2016 election.

Justin Sherman: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Justin Sherman contributing editor at Lawfare and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies with Candace Rondeaux, senior director of New America's Future Front Lines program, and author of the recently published book, “Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group, and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos.”

Candace Rondeaux: Putin has really wielded the Wagner Group to great effect as a weapon to smash the global order to change the way Russia is seen in the world. And to demand a, a place for Russia at the table has a great power through wielding covert forces like the Wagner Group around the world.

Justin Sherman: Today we're talking about Yevgeni Prigozhin and his founding of the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company, Prigozhin’s rise and fall, and what role PMCs will play in the future of Russian power.

[Main Podcast]

To kick us off, the same question I always like to ask, tell us a bit more about yourself and your work for those who may not be as familiar and how you came to the topic we're gonna talk about today.

Candace Rondeaux: Well, I wear a few different hats. I'm based here in Washington D.C. I have been for a really long time.

I'm a journalist by sort of advocation and training, but also a Russianist sort of by passion. It's, it's, I guess, my other advocation. And I lead a couple think tank programs here at New America. One in particular that has been very, you know, important for the work on the Wagner Group is called Future Front Lines. And it's a public interest intelligence service that looks to use technology to also explain how technology is changing the character of war and challenging some of the international security norms that we had grown accustomed to up until very recently.

And the other program I run is called Planetary Politics, and that looks at the geopolitics of decarbonization and digitalization and geostrategic competition. So, not small things, but you know, we try and sort of manage them here. And I also am a professor of practice at Arizona State University with a future security initiative which again, sort of looks at security and international affairs issues. And we have a longstanding partnership between ASU and, and Arizona State.

Justin Sherman: Many hats and, and certainly something to come back to with the research. So let's start from the beginning. You have a new as we heard in the intro, a new book out. I commend to our listeners titled “Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group, and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos.” It's a lengthy book, it's very detailed and an interesting read.

Let's start from the beginning of that. Story with Yevgeni Prigozhin who came to found the Wagner Group, as well as the Internet Research Agency troll farm, which we'll get to later. So how did Prigozhin grow up? How did he get his start in the Russian business world?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, Yevgeni Prigozhin’s origin story is to me super interesting and I think to a lot of other people too.

For those who don't know a lot about Russia, you know, say in the 70s and 80s or even the 90s, his background will seem a little bit unusual. But for folks who studied the Soviet Union and kind of have an understanding of it's evolution over time, his background's pretty typical of a lot of middle class kids in big cities like St. Petersburg.

So he grew up in St. Petersburg and he was the only child of a single parent, a mom who was a doctor. He lost his father when he was very young at about age five or so. His father was actually a, a mining engineer of Jewish descent, but they lived a fairly comfortable life up to a point.

And at about age 13, Prigozhin with some connections that his stepfather used, entered the Olympic Academy in St. Petersburg which of course at the time was kind of this premier institution for training future gladiators in, in, in the Cold War. And his specialty was cross country skiing. He was actually very good at it. You know, there are all these stories about him whipping around in, in the forest of St. Petersburg. And doing sort of, you know, 50-kilometer runs.

And then at some point later in his, you know, teenage years, he allegedly had an accident that lamed him up. And ultimately seems to have sent him on sort of a path of idleness and, and criminal life. And he starts a gang of his own in St. Petersburg. You know, petty crimes robbing people, you know, on the street, but also robbing neighbors and friends.

Stuff that teenage boys kind of tend to get up to at a certain time in their life. But in the Soviet Union, of course lots of motivations because of course luxury items were always pretty scarce. Famously, he jumped a guy, potentially a foreigner who was visiting St. Petersburg, who tried to tell him a pair of jeans and ended up sort of taking his money.

Ultimately, he landed in a, a prison stint about nine years, and flash forward to right around 1990 when he's getting out and his path converges with another son of St. Petersburg: Vladimir Putin who was just home himself from a stint in East Germany. And at that time, Putin was actually first working as a deputy rector at the state, what was then Len Grand State University. Then ultimately got recruited into the campaign of Anatoly Sobchak, who was the mayor of, of St. Petersburg, quite a, an interesting character himself.

He was actually kind of thought of as a potential future successor to Yeltsin at one point. And Putin becomes Anatoly Sobchak's right hand, a deputy mayor of, of St. Petersburg. And at the same time that this is all happening Prigozhin is kind of making his way in the business world. He starts with his stepfather, a hotdog stand, which you know, was kind of super popular at the time 'cause there wasn't a lot of fast food in the early 1990s in St. Petersburg. And that one stand grows into many all over the city.

And I, in fact, like I was in school there in ’95, ’96 in St. Petersburg. And I'm pretty certain that I, I ate some of those hot dogs because it was sort of like a popular thing to do after a party. You know, after a long night of drinking and partying at, at the university or, you know, off campus at some of the bars there, these sosiski, you know, hotdogs were always available.

And that business and his connections to the mafia underworld of St. Petersburg grew into a grocery empire, a casino empire, and ultimately a luxury restaurant empire, which included one of the restaurants that he first opened in St. Petersburg called the ‘Old Customs House.’ Which became kind of a, almost like a clubhouse for Vladimir Putin and a lot of his friends, politically connected people with a lot of money to throw around, used to eat there.

And that's how Prigozhin sort of started his path on being, you know, the number one chef to one of the most powerful people in all of Russia.

Justin Sherman: First of all, the personal hotdog anecdote is, is excellent. And, and I, I do want to come back to the restaurant and some of those other elements.

Just briefly on the, the 1990s piece, Russia had quite an explosion of crime and violent crime following the Soviet Union's collapse. As you write there were private security firms during that time that were using quote unquote striped protection. So employing active badge holding security service personnel to protect privately hired clientele, so a blurring of, of public and private boundaries as you put it.

There was rampant organized crime and corruption and hostage taking. And an always horrific statistic, more people murdered in Russia in one year than the number of Russian soldiers killed over a decade in Afghanistan.

So, so just to zoom in on this period for a moment, you mentioned, for instance, that Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin during this era. Are there other lessons that you think Prigozhin sort of took from operating in that environment that were helpful or even harmful to him for his, his later security work?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, I mean, to set the scene a little bit more and kind of give a a fuller picture. One of the other things obviously that's happening when Putin's path con, converges with Prigozhin’s in the early 1990s is the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And you know, this is total economic free fall, it's political collapse. All of the institutions are turning in on themselves, imploding. People are out of work and out of money. So anybody who did have cash or did have food, had a lot of power and a lot of influence, and Prigozhin was one of those people by dint of his, you know, entrepreneurial spirit, but also the connections that he maintained with elements of the mafia world in, in St. Petersburg.

So I think one big lesson for him was, you know in chaos, there is always opportunity and particularly opportunity for people who are willing to, you know, work in the gray area. And, and that's kind of where he's resided. You know, ever since basically until, until obviously his death in 2023, that's kind of where he lived most comfortably, was in this kind of gray zone between private and public, but also the criminal underground.

And I think that early, those early 1990s, they call, used to call them the wild 90s when there was so much mafia violence, it was extremely formative for him. But another lesson I, I certainly think that he took away was it's really important to get to know the guys in charge of VIP security.

And one of his great talents was because he was kind of, he could be between two worlds. He had a pretty decent education. And he also was a sort of a, a sort of autodidact. He, he spent a lot of time in prison in solitary confinement, reading, you know, learning, teaching himself. And then when he came out, he sort of maintained that appetite for, for learning.

And on some level, he was able to kind of move between classes and between worlds. And so he befriended a lot of Putin's bodyguards. And I think that was really important. And, and those people, many of them were veterans of the Afghan war and had come back pretty broken, but looking for a sense of purpose because of course the state didn't really have a Veterans Affairs Department in the same way that United States does. And these guys were kind of castoffs, and I think he really related to that. I mean, I think that was always sort of one of his special talents is the ability to relate to people who were thought of as sort of castoffs or, or throwaways.

So I think those were some of the big lessons. And of course, the critically important piece is, you know, that restaurateur is, is real estate. And I think there's a, the CEO of McDonald's made the same comment, and I think he was very astute as a, as a builder, as a real estate developer, as a construction manager that is one of the hidden talents of Prigozhin that I think we often fail to appreciate

Justin Sherman: At this point in time, now we're talking maybe 1990s into the 2000s. What is the role of private security forces in Russia, both domestically and abroad at, at this point in time?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah. Well what's really interesting is there, there isn't really much of a, a broad private security company industry, certainly not in the same way that we kind of think of it in terms of, let's say, Blackwater or some, some of these other large scale American contracting forces.

In fact, in the 1990s, early 2000s, technically there were a lot of prohibitions against private military security companies operating under the laws at the time. Although there were some executive orders that made some exceptions for that, particularly when it came to state enterprises like Gazprom, Rosneft, big sort of state enterprises that were important for the economy did have the ability to stand up their own essentially private armies.

On the domestic front, there were actually, there was a huge proliferation of private security agencies and very kind of classic looking out after protecting buildings, doing surveillance maybe VIP bodyguard protection. And the reason for that sort of big boom was largely because now you know, the free market was making people extremely rich.

You know, you had heads of industry, heads of companies who needed guarding, and still that criminality, you know, that was just so prevalent all through the 1990s and early 2000s, made it impossible to really do business without some sort of personal protection. And so some of the folks who ended up being veterans of, of the Afghan War would stream into those domestic private security companies.

Many of them, however, kind of found themselves in between worlds. And so there was always this kind of struggle, I think for, particularly for veterans to adjust to a world that didn't really have a place for them.

Justin Sherman: That's interesting in your comparison to, of course, to the, the differences with Blackwater and you talk about executive outcomes and, and other entities in the book as well.

So how is Prigozhin, I mean, once Putin is in office how is Prigozhin evolving his businesses at this point in time and you mentioned the importance of interpersonal currency, certainly in Russia. How is his relationship with the new president evolving in the, the early and mid-2000s?

Candace Rondeaux: Prigozhin is really Mr. Fix-it at this stage, especially in the early 2000s. You know, he has a big business. in sort of luxury restaurants. He almost had, I think, seven restaurants by, let's say around 2003, he was starting to kind of build out an actual empire.

One of the most important ones was New Island, which was basically a floating restaurant and was modeled after the, the Bateaux-Mouches of, of, of Paris that he fell in love with after, you know, traveling there in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and he decided to open this luxury restaurant on this boat that became kind of the go-to place for Putin when he was president and also prime minister.

And famously of course, Prigozhin and hosted Laura Bush and George Bush on New Island and at a, a couple of other restaurants.  He also catered the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, so this big, you know, tricentennial party over at the at the palace in, in Peterhof. And I mean, he rehearsed that for, for years.

So he was a really, he was an extraordinary commander of both resources and men already. You know, and that was that was clear from just the, the, the size of his, of his empire. And then he does get into the luxury real estate business. He opens a real estate development kind of on the, this very nice part of the Gulf of Finland that, you know, was supposed to be kind of a, almost a, a reenactment of, you know, Louis the 14th or Louis the 16th had all these sort of Chateau and British style mini palaces, and so he got really into luxury real estate and then ultimately this evolves.

And all the while he, you know, Putin turns to him constantly because he's the kind of guy Prigozhin, who can get you sort of a, a, a really old bottle, Chateau Lafite, you know, or, you know, get you a whole bottle of brandy like from the early 1900s and, and can show up at the right time with the right things. He kind of genuinely is almost like a extraordinary butler.

But of course this is where he gets the name ‘Putin Chef.’ And also he wins a lot of contracts. And that usually that starts to happen right after 2008, after the beginning of a series of military reforms that springs from the Russo-Georgian conflict in, in August of 2008. And it's that set of reforms, and particularly the privatization of catering and hygiene services that sets Prigozhin off on this defense contractor path.

Justin Sherman: It's an excellent segue around 2008 and, and you mentioned Russia and Georgia, you write of the 2000/2008 time period that three imperatives drove Putin's strategy as his second term ended: suppressing armed rebellions and territories adjacent to Chechnya, controlling Caspian and Black Sea trade transport and energy routes, and blocking further NATO encroachment in Russia's traditional spheres of influence.

By this point in time, you mentioned in the ‘90s a lot of the private security was perhaps domestically focused, given the mafia and, and criminal environment. But by this point in time, how, if at all, are Kremlin decision makers thinking about private military companies are talking about private military companies. And what role did paramilitary forces play in these objectives, including as you referenced the 2008 Russo-Georgian War?

Candace Rondeaux: Well, so one important thing that happens in 2007, 2008, is what was just a kind of patchwork of executive orders pertaining to companies like Gazprom and Rosneft and Rostec, which is of course the big arms maker, having the right to hire their own private security forces.

In 2007 and 08, the Duma passes a couple of laws that kind of expands that remit and really gives these major state enterprises a lot more leeway and power to essentially contract their own private armies. And this coincides with a real concern inside the Kremlin, over Russia's ability to contain rebellions in Chechnya.

And also, of course, of course, the succession of color revolutions that happens, starting with the Rose Revolution in late 2003, and then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and then very shortly thereafter, one that most people forget, but I certainly remember is the Tulip Revolution, which was in Kyrgyzstan.

And all these, all three of these uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were viewed by Putin as both a plot by the West to overthrow what was sort of an extant piece of the Soviet Union to kind of undermine, you know, what remained of this, this relationship and of cooperation between, between Russia and those countries. But it was also clearly just an overall threat to Russia's ability to do everything from sell weapons and move them abroad to also moving energy and exporting energy across those territories.

So, for Putin, it was almost an existential crisis that really threatened some of the most important engines of the economy. Importantly, Gazprom had huge amounts of investments, or at least had ambitions to extend its reach across Georgia and certainly across Ukraine as we all know now. There are still pipelines now that are kind of at the center of the, the war in Ukraine.

And so those things kind of converge around 2006 when Gazprom is also having a lot of financial trouble. And I write a little bit about this in the book, and I think it's one of the underappreciated parts of Russia's kind of motivation around its incursion in Georgia is just how much Gazprom was, having trouble with paying its own debts and bills.

And started to put pressure on Georgia, started to put pressure on Ukraine, upping the, the rate that was due you know, revising the, the amount of debt that was due because of energy transfers. And this becomes ultimately kind of the crux of some of the financial and economic entanglements between Russia and Ukraine and Georgia.

You know, in order to kind of stir the pot even further, some people within the Kremlin, particularly in the GRU, begin to experiment with the idea of using, you know, diversionary forces in some of these places, particularly in Georgia, deploying them quietly in 2006 and ‘7 into Abkhazia, which of course is a disputed part of Georgia, and then into South Ossetia.

And some of those folks who were inserted actually were inserted under the guise of being contractors for protecting the railway services in, in the, in the region. In actual fact, they were attached to one of the very first hubs for private security forces, which is known as Redut. Some people call it PMC Redut, but today I think we can say with, with certainty that Redut was always a GRU sort of funded and founded enterprise that was led by some, some of it's more adventurous Spetsnaz leaders and ultimately became the basis for which some within the GRU and some within the Defense Ministry began thinking, well, maybe they could spin something up on the order of Blackwater.

And I think there's a real division between, you know, especially later on after the, the 2008 Russo Georgian war. There was a, I think, a split between some Russian generals and leaders in the military who genuinely wanted to see a private military security contractor, ala Executive Outcomes, ala, you know, Blackwater giving it a very, very long leash, putting it on, you know, contract.

And then there were others who saw that maybe just saying that something was private would be just enough to divert attention from some of the accountability issues, some of the attribution issues that often come with deploying people in expeditionary contingent abroad. And I actually think that what actually, when it ultimately end up winning the day was that secon, you know, conceptualization, which is a PMC or private military contractor in name only.

Justin Sherman: No, that's, that's very interesting. Around this point, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, Prigozhin sees an opportunity for a restaurant. This sounds like an absurd transition, but this is, this of course is, is related. Talk to us about, you mentioned a little bit, but a little bit more about this restaurant and it's sort of involvement with or precipitation of, as you mentioned, Prigozhin, then getting into both the online disinformation as well as the private military company sectors.

Candace Rondeaux: Well, so the restaurants are part of a larger sort of broad catering umbrella, known as the Concord Company or Concord Group, depending on, you know, which shell company you're referring to. But ultimately it's Concord that is the vehicle by which Prigozhin not only grows his restaurant empire, but you know, builds this vast catering enterprise that ultimately becomes a major defense contractor and ends up feeding an army of, of 1 million people, right.

And you know, it's, it's a little bit like becoming like the McDonald's of the United States Army, or the Burger King of the United States Army. That's essentially what you know happened with Concord, but well before that contract was fully in play, and this is, you know, circa 2010, ‘11.

There were other things happening in Prigozhin’s life, as with many restaurateurs, not just in Russia, but of course around the world were coming out of the 2008 recession. Anybody who was in the food business will know that, you know, demand for eating out was pretty low. And, and if you found yourself stuck with a lot of restaurant real estate, he probably took a hit. And Prigozhin definitely took a hit. And a lot of his restaurants especially a one of his fast-food restaurants, which was mostly served blinis, which are kind of like Russian pancakes, and it was called Glean Donald's.

It was like an ironic play on, on McDonald's. Those restaurants ultimately ended up folding, but in the process he learned a lot from some of the young people that he began to hire to work with Concord in his company, who were really into social media, who were really into Facebook and Twitter.

He was really, I think, intrigued find that actually you can kind of game the system by hiring people to comment on your rivals, you know, businesses. And very famously one of his kind of close young advisors in the Concord Company had this idea to compete with a rival, another rival catering company by making a sort of fake video of that caterer serving, you know, bad food that ended up making people vomit and so forth, and then throwing it online.

It was sort of like this you know, kind of blackmail expose video that was completely faked. And that first experiment grew into basically a professional troll farm. The one that we now know as the Internet Research Agency that very famously was involved in fomenting anti election, anti-Clinton propaganda during the U.S. 2016 election.

Justin Sherman: In the ensuing years, the, the 2010s into the early 2020s, talk to us about, you know, how did the Wagner Group get stood up? What was its role in the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, which as you note, is sort of the first time it's this, this new PMC is seen publicly on the international stage and what does this group look like? The, the financing and organization and where does it get its weapons and, and so on?

Candace Rondeaux: So fast forward to 2013 we've already now seen Vladimir Putin return to office as president. We've seen mass street protests in opposition to Putin's, return to office, and what many in you know, liberal Russia perceive as corruption and gaming and electoral fraud within the election system.

And of course Prigozhin was very instrumental in trying to kind of help manipulate public opinion using again, you know, Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte, which is kind of the Russian version of Facebook. And to some degree that success or perceived success of ability to manipulate public opinion and kind of provoke people to action, seems to have also commended him and, and his services well beyond kind of just the sort of standard contractor.

In 2013, you might remember, there was a serious meltdown in relations between Ukraine and Russia over a proposal for Ukraine to join the EU. This ascension agreement became very contentious. You know, there was all sorts of threats of, you know, protectionist tariffs, and at one point one of Putin's advisors, you know, condemned Ukraine for even thinking about joining the EU and said it was suicidal.

Ultimately, the, you know, the explosion of tensions between Russia and, and Ukraine ultimately plays out in the Euromaidan crisis in the fall of, of 2014. And I will just mind remind you that this is also after the Olympics that, that Russia has hosted in in the Black Sea resort area of Sochi and there's some, there's some degree of staging or pre-staging of troops, some sort of anticipation that something is going to happen there.

And while that's all happening, Prigozhin is winning contract after contract. By this time it's kind of hard to say exactly how many tens of millions of dollars worth of defense contracts he's won. But what we do know is that he also began building, you know, businesses in Ukraine itself. And there, you know, we don't know what those companies were about, but there was some degree of preparation on his own part, almost as if he anticipated that trouble was coming for Ukraine you know, in, in late 2013, early 2014.

If you fast forward just a little bit further, we have the Crimea invasion in February of 2014, and, and then not that long afterwards, a group of separatists that are clearly affiliated with, with, with the Kremlin and have the backing of the Kremlin march over into Donbas. And they take control of a huge parts of the Donetsk area in, in Eastern Ukraine.

And it's at this stage that trouble starts brewing largely because those forces were ill-trained, sort of under, under equipped, not really particularly prepared. And in May of 2014 is when we see the first kind of inkling that there's, there's something new brewing on the horizon. There are new, new troops appearing in Donbas with much better weapons, much better uniforms, much better training, and some of those were associated with what we now know today as the Wagner Group.

But at the time, it was known as Battalion Group V, which was one of several experimental paramilitary battalions that was deployed secretly, covertly by the Kremlin into Donbas in order to shore up the separatists who were doing the fighting on the front lines.

Justin Sherman: As the group evolves, then you, you discuss some of the other areas of the world in which Wagner begins operating sometimes more clearly aligned with the Kremlin objective, sometimes perhaps due to its own business venture. Can you, can you elaborate more on, on what the group gets up to where Prigozhin is sending these forces and what kinds of activities they're engaged in, in, in Syria and, and so on?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, well, listen, a cru-, a crucial fact that, that we haven't really touched on yet is, you know, what is the origin of this Wagner, you know, moniker in the first place. And it comes from a guy named Dmitry Utkin, who is a, a VDV airborne assault paratrooper. Very seasoned, he spent yeah, years in Chechnya jumping out of helicopters, was very well known for being kind of hardcore.

And he happened to be a very. Ardent fan of, of, of Adolf Hitler, and more specifically of Richard Wagner, who is of course Hitler's favorite composer. And there were kind of lots of different sort of reasons for the, the, the Wagner moniker or call sign that he adopted. But one was that he actually genuinely was a neo-Nazi.

He had, you know, SS tattoos bolted on his neck. He had tattoos all over his bodies that had sort of, you know, swastikas and Nazi symbolism. It's kinda a strange thing for to think about a Russian who's, you know falling in love with, with neo-Nazi culture, but this is part of special forces culture, not just in Russia, but certainly other parts of the world as well, is to kind of take on that sort of supremacist, hardcore vibe.

And Utkin was really kind of the engine in some ways of the paramilitary operations that we see now today, you know, in the guise of, you know, contingent spaced in Syria and, and Libya, Central African Republic, it's Utkin who really is kind of the field marshal while, Prigozhin is more like figurehead, CEO, he's kind of the business guy.

And there's a third guy named Andrei Troshev, who's the executive director and he's one of these very salty Afghan veterans who seems to do all the sort of personnel work and what was basically a battalion of, you know, roughly 300 guys and Donbas in 2014, 2015, very quickly grows in size to a couple thousand in Syria, a couple thousand more than in Central African Republic and, and then Libya and Sudan, and it becomes a worldwide enterprise.

But the one thing to that's important to understand is that even though we talk about the Wagner Group, there's no such company known as the Wagner Group. Still to this day, there's no address, there's no headquarters, there was never any company, you know, registered as, as the Wagner Group. There was always a bunch of shell companies. And so the way to think about the Wagner Group was really a network of shell companies and individuals who were essentially servicing Russia's arms trade, and its oil and gas trade.

Justin Sherman: Let's turn back now to Ukraine. What role has Wagner played in Russia's full-scale invasion of and war on Ukraine since February 2022?

Candace Rondeaux: Wagner played an incredibly important role, and I think maybe for some outsiders who maybe were not fully expecting kind of the scale of the invasion that the Kremlin planned and plotted in February 2024, I think some folks were very surprised to see how central the Wagner Group became to the operations there in Ukraine.

But for anybody who really understood the challenge that Russia was facing, just militarily it was pretty clear that the Russian military, despite its very large size, despite its, you know, tremendous amount of money being spent on not just men, but also equipment. It's a very advanced and sophisticated weaponry. Despite all of that, it was riddled with corruption and, and always has been, and and this really was problematic for having forces that are that have the capacity to maneuver in wide expanses of territory.

However, that was not a problem that Prigozhin faced and that was not a problem that Wagner faced: they were actually, they were almost built for purpose as maneuver units. They're very small and fleet. Usually the detachments were roughly about 300 guys a piece. And they had very distinctive roles.

And so, and they were actually, many of them were very seasoned spetsnaz veterans who had fought in, you know, conflicts around the world, quite a few had also fought with the French Foreign Legion. And so these were guys who really understood the importance of maneuver, of creativity, of innovation in the battlefield, learning lessons very quickly. And that's something that was very different than the conventional military.

And so when in early March of 2022 we found Russian forces bogged down in Kyiv, bogged down all across the country, that's when the Wagner Group kind of jumped in and began to kind of break up a lot of the log jams, particularly in the East. And and of course we also saw the insertion of a rival group of paramilitaries associated with, with Redut, which was primarily operating in the center of Ukraine around the Kyiv region.

And there's a lot of conflation about who was doing what, which is actually quite useful in terms of a deception operation. They were incredibly important, of course, very famously in the Battle of Bakhmut, which lasted almost 10 months. Historically speaking, I think it's, it rivals only Stalingrad in terms of its, you know, destruction and a number of casualties and just overall kind of sacrifice on a daily basis.

Bakhmut was really a treacherous situation where of course we had the recruitment of prisoners in order to fill the ranks and foment these human wave attacks in the open battlefield in Bakhmut that went on and on. At some point, the number of casualties in Bakhmut counted somewhere near 200 to 300 a day on the Russian side.

So Wagner took a lot of casualties there, but what it did do also, despite those many losses. And this is where Prigozhin’s special talent for social, social media marketing, I think comes in is it had already created itself as a brand. People recognized the, the skull and crossbones, the, you know, the skull and cross hair, iconography, the sledgehammer.

All of these things became kind of symbols of Russia's rise again. A new way of fighting war. And I think what Prigozhin really achieved, along with his compatriots, of course, with the help from, from the Kremlin, was taking what was really kind of like a kind of crappy army, and turning its, you know, at least the perception of it into something that was much more powerful than it really is.

Justin Sherman: Briefly on the branding point. What, what is the perception in Russia, perhaps globally too, of Wagner at that point? And can you say more about the sledgehammer piece? Cause this is a really interesting sort of double entendre, I think, in, in the title of your book, and, and relating to some of the themes we're discussing.

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, I mean, I, I, it's hard to emphasize or like how hard to kind of like explain just, you know. Russia's military has always had this challenge of, on the one hand, being huge, powerful, strong, second largest army in the world, competitor to the United States. On the other hand, inefficient, corrupt, you know, broken down materials, broken down men, a lack of kind of fighting spirit.

And what progressively the Wagner Group does is recreate the image of the military as something extremely virile, extremely violent, extremely forward looking and, and, you know, thinking outside of the box. And I think it in some ways, Prigozhin achieves with that reinvention of the image of the Russian military as something very stealthy and smart and capable, agile and virile. He really recreates the image of the Russian military as something much more powerful, right.

And you know, to his credit, to some degree and the credit of, of those behind the, the campaign, he's able to kind of also give Russian people, a sense of who is actually fighting on their behalf. One of the things that I think, you know, has always stood out historically about Russia's wars, whether it's in Afghanistan or Chechnya or Tajikistan you know, some of the earlier wars, wars before you know, 2022 was that many, you know, many people fought in anonymity particularly in Afghanistan, you know, very famously, casualties would come home in zinc boxes and there would be no official burial.

You weren't allowed to talk about that. And I think what the Wagner Group did was sort of put all of that old fashioned, you know, covert warfare and sort of secrecy to bed and kind of valorized the image of the virile Russian man, even though he was wearing a mask, he was still a virile Russian man.

And it really starts with a very famous video of a bunch of Wagner fighters who, you know, beat mercilessly a man, a Syrian man on camera with a, with a sledgehammer. And, and then of course, you know, dismembered him and, and burned his body. And that video became just this sort of viral symbol of, of not only Wagner's sort of brand and power, but also Russia's brand and power. And from that moment forward the sledgehammer becomes very closely as sort of associated with, with the Wagner Group.

But the, you're right about the double entendre. It's also, I think, a symbol of, you know, in the old days the Soviet Union used to be sort of the hammer and the sickle, right? And the hammer was this sort of sign of, of Russian power, Soviet power, and, and Putin has really wielded the Wagner group to great effect as a weapon to smash the global order to change the way Russia is seen in the world and to demand a, a place for Russia at the table as great power through wielding covert forces like the Wagner Group around the world.

Justin Sherman: In June of 2023, Prigozhin had what some dub sort of march on Moscow or advance toward the Kremlin. Can you briefly recap to us what this event was and what prompted it?

And, and I, I'm curious, your answer here as well as someone who's been studying this at, at length. Were you surprised by Prigozhin’s turned against Putin? What did you make of how far he got? Was how successful or unsuccessful you think it was and, and so on?

Candace Rondeaux: Well, I can, I'll start by answering the last part of your question, which was, was I surprised? Yes, I was surprised by the form of Prigozhin’s rebellion or resistance against Putin's, you know, push to put him back in the box. And I certainly, I woke up one morning on June, you know, 23rd to find my, my inbox dinging and, you know, just constant like incoming.

And only to see that, you know, Prigozhin of course had decided to order some thousands of Wagner forces to march from their encampment just over the board in Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don, and then onward to Moscow. And this was his great March for Justice, as he called it at the time. And Prigozhin, and characterized this as his masterclass in how war should be fought and won.

In reality, it was his last gasp effort to try and save his political career at a time when he had been really for months haranguing publicly not just, you know, his rivals in the Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, who was the defense minister at the time and Valery Gerasimov, but also really jabbing Putin's regime for the way it was running the war.

And some of you may remember actually, you know, several months before this great march on Moscow, in June of 2023, there was a series of videos that Prigozhin issued on Telegram, and he was a huge Telegram channel following about 500,000 followers just for his own channels to say nothing of the dozens of others that were affiliated with him and the Wagner Group.

You know, very famously he, in, I think it was April, late April, early May of, of 2023, he's standing in this field of corpses shouting at the top of his lungs, you know, where's the fucking ammo and screaming for the defense minister to, to provide more sources, more resources, and accusing them essentially of, of corruption for failing to outfit the troops at a time when they were in the greatest of need.

And this is of course during Ukraine's counteroffensive in 2023. So of course, Wagner forces, all of Russian forces were really feeling the pain in the spring of 2023. And instead of sort of Prigozhin and sort of just towing the line and doing what he says, I mean, he's not a military guy, he's a mafia guy, right?

And so his instincts are to go to the, to the Mafia playbook. He begins to openly threaten, you know, Putin's regime essentially, you know, threatening to bring charges in the prosecutor general's office against the defense minister for, for treason and so forth and so on.

In a way, his, you know, his ego is blown way outta proportion. You know, their public polls showing that he was extremely popular. Some people thought he might even replace Putin, so he's kind of getting full of himself and he was also kind of going mad at the same time. I kind of like to think of it as his Colonel Kurtz moment where he just sort of was like, I think so soaked in the, the horrors of Bakhmut that he really started to kind of lose his, his sense of mental bearings basically.

And so he marches on, on Moscow you know, starting on late on June 2023 and allegedly with this idea that he's gonna go petition the Parliament and sort of say, you know, we've got to do better by our mercenaries. These guys should not be, you know, second class citizens and so forth. But obviously in reality when you, when you drive, you know, thousands of men across into to Moscow and begin shooting down jet planes maybe your message is a little bit mixed.

And so it all falls apart very quickly within about 48 hours. You know, Prigozhin backs down and says he's willing, he's made an agreement to lay down his weapons and encouraged his, his men to seek amnesty so that they can redeploy to Belarus and sort of live in peace and serve the, serve the state, as it were.

It's a crazy episode and I, while I certainly didn't expect thousands of men to march on Moscow, I think it was always clear that Prigozhin was going to be the kind of guy who struggled with his own ego and that ultimately his ego would be the thing that took him down.

Justin Sherman: Stepping back and looking at the book as a whole I wanted to make sure to ask you about the research itself because Wagner like many things, Russia, but especially, I imagine due to its activities isn't necessarily the easiest group to, to track. What kinds of techniques, just maybe an, an overview if you want, were most helpful as you studied the group?

And in terms of what we know and what you've uncovered in your work about Wagner is this information that Wagner wants hidden but is leaked through sloppy trade craft or hacks or something else, or, you mentioned the brand earlier are there also areas or scenarios where Wagner actually wants to put out photos or materials or videos, which then of course can contain some of this interesting insight?

Candace Rondeaux: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I started this journey of studying the Wagner Group in early 2018. And that was around the time that Wagner forces some might remember this, clashed with U.S. special forces in Syria, they got shellacked. It was a couple hundred guys that they lost.

And, you know, for a brief moment the Wagner group was once again in the headlines and international headlines, and I sort of started looking at, you know, trying to sort of see like, what is this all about? The one thing I found very frustrating in the early part of that journey was that all the news coverage and really even some of the think tank analysis was pretty limited.

Nobody was able to say with any certainty how the operational culture was working out within the Wagner group. The only things that we knew was that there was this Dmitri Utkin guy and there was Yevgney Prigozhin. We just knew two names, but it was clearly, you know, a paramilitary that certainly was in the hundreds, the hundreds, if not the thousands by then.

And so one thing I did, of course, is just turned to the historical record. Always with Russia, as with any country you know, you, you really need to understand that actually it's a place built more by continuity than it is by change. And there was a lot of continuity with the way special forces or Spetsnaz forces operated during the Cold War era as sort of comrade tourists.

You know, very secretly, kind of surreptitiously servicing partner and client states in Syria, in, in Egypt, deploying to Mozambique, et cetera. So there was already this historical precedent, so I spent a lot of time looking at the historical record and look, you know, of course reading in the, in the Russian original a lot of the sort of historical counts of the evolution of Russia's, you know, special forces and also the debates over that. But a big piece of it was also examining the law, looking at the policy, and again very important to do so in the Russian language as opposed to just relying on English language sources.

But the, the second thing that I thought was very helpful was really using open source intelligence techniques or investigative techniques, sort of using as much public information as, as possible to try and put the puzzle pieces together. And eventually I realized you know, that while I could do that on an anecdotal basis, I might be able to discover, for instance, how one commander was connected to another just by looking at their social media accounts.Or I might be able to reconstruct, for instance what happened in that sledgehammer video with the Syrian national who was beaten and beheaded by using different techniques like geolocation.

But that was sort of the one-off stories were very frustrating and I realized actually if I could just do something bigger, get bigger data, look at network, you know, look at the, how networks formed that I might be able to sort of prize out what is the command structure, what is the operational culture of this organization? You know, most people think just consists of, you know, two people. You have Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitri Utkin.

And so working with Arizona State University's school of engineering and also a couple of information scientists at ASU, we were able to really dig deep on tens of thousands of social media accounts and build this network analysis. And that was sort of the, the next evolution.

And then finally as you mentioned, of course there were just tons of leaks about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s businesses. Most famously at some point his, his business Evro Polis was hacked and the servers in, in St. Peter's were hacked. And very shortly thereafter, you know, these little bits and bobs of information started appearing and being offered by different organizations, you know, as kind of evidence of, of what you have Yevgeny Prigozhin was up to.

And I very you know, I got very lucky in working with a couple of partner organizations. I just wanna name the Dossier Center as one another was, of course C4ADS, and we got access to about 130,000 data files from the Yevgeny Prigozhin’s businesses. And we were able to piece together a lot more of the command structure, a lot more of who was in charge, who was deployed where simply by looking at those files.

Justin Sherman: Looking forward now, what do you think the future of PMCs in Russia looks like, including that they're, in many cases, as you noted earlier, not one clear corporation or maybe not technically legal? And how do you see the Kremlin shifting its approach to PMCs, especially given the activities of the Wagner Group in Ukraine, but then perhaps the leash that it gave Prigozhin turning back on, on Putin and the regime?

Candace Rondeaux: I doubt we will ever see the likes of the Wagner Group again in the near future. What we, what we have seen since Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August of 2023 in an unexplained fiery plane crash. Since his disappearance from the, from the stage we've seen a kind of a reorganization at the top of the Defense Ministry.

So a lot of generals and officers who were kind of partisans or friends of the Wagner Group, supporters of the Wagner Group, have now been purged and pushed aside including of course the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

And there's now of course, a new Minister of Defense Andrey Belousov, who's been very instrumental in transforming the war effort into a much more economic enterprise. He, he himself is a, an economist by training. So one effect of you know, the Wagner Group's legacy is simply to kind of take, take the def, Defense Ministry in a new direction just by dint of sort of the purges and the reorganization.

But the second thing that of course happened was that Wagner's rival or sort of kind of rival Redut ended up becoming the main hub for contracting contingent contracted forces, ala the Wagner Group. So, there are now, you know, PMCs, they're not really PMCs. They're, they're really sort of contingents that are contracted, volunteer contracted that have been deployed into Ukraine, some are deployed in in Belarus.

And then of course, most famously quite a few,—you know, we think about at least 10,000—have been deployed to Africa under this Expeditionary Corps which is also known as the Africa Corps, and that is largely run by the GRU Intelligence wing of the military, and tends to be on a much tighter leash than Wagner ever was. So I think one big sort of legacy is simply much more structure, much more intentionality about control over the forces.

The downside of that has been their, their kind of capacity to maneuver, particularly in places like Mali has been reduced somewhat. We've seen a lot of casualties there in the last year, and so it's, it's a little bit of an uneven legacy, I think, but the big lesson is the, the Wagner Group, it's the brand lives on.

And it's in fact there's something now called Wagner Group Istra, which mostly consists of some of the old commanders who became quite famous during the first stage of the, the Ukraine war who kind of are, you know, leading the charge as, as the new, the new wave of, of, of Wagner forces. And Wagner has been very instrumental in mobilizing and recruiting young men in Europe to fulfillment, sabotage campaigns. And I've been covering that quite a bit.

Justin Sherman: All very instructive for where we might be headed. So lastly, you've, you've written a book here and again for listeners, the title is “Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group, and Russia's collapse into Mercenary Chaos,” that, as you've noted, is about Prigozhin and of course about the Wagner Group, but it's also about, and contains history and analysis on a much wider host of issues.

So, to close this out here, are there any broader themes are, are a big point, not so directly related to, to Wagner that you hope readers take away about Russia writ large?

Candace Rondeaux: I think there are two things that I think are really important, especially when we're thinking about these ongoing conversations about a potential ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. And one is that there's a deep path dependency between, you know, the decision that the Soviet Union made in its reorganization the post-Soviet period of reorganization of its energy and arms industry.

You know, it still to this day remains largely in control of, of the state. And the sovereign wealth fund of Russia depends very heavily on oil and gas and arms revenues. That hasn't changed fundamentally, which means that the structural factors that kind of led to the war in Ukraine haven't changed either, and they're not likely to change anytime soon.

So that's one really important lesson is that no matter what we think about, you know, different approaches, whether it's Biden or whether it's Trump or another president who comes, you know, to replace Trump in the future, the United States will always wrestle with those fundamentals. And the sooner, you know, the foreign policy apparatus of Washington starts to understand that, the better for the idea of containment and/or engagement with Russia.

And I think the second thing I just would point out that's really important for people to understand is Russia has been at war pretty much since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's been at war either in Chechnya or in Georgia or in Ukraine or all of the above at various times.

And it has been at war both physically in the sort of classic military sense, but also politically with its neighbors and with its sort of regional rivals. And in the minds of many who now sort of sit in the Kremlin today they believe they are engaged in World War III and that they're in, in an epic struggle with the West, with the United States for survival.

And the sooner we understand that, the more we're gonna understand how difficult it will be for Putin's Russia to climb down from this escalatory path that it has been on, and how hard it will be also for domestic politics to kind of bridge the sugar high of many, many, many years of war almost, you know, 30 years of constant war. And how difficult will it will be to mitigate some of the risks that come from such a militarized society.

And these are the fundamentals of dealing with Russia going forward. No matter where we look, whether it's Putin in charge, whether it's Trump in charge, these fundamentals remain the same and they have to be factored into our foreign policy responses.

Justin Sherman: That's all the time we have Candace. Thanks very much for joining us.

Candace Rondeaux: Thanks for having me.

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