855: Russia’s Wagner Group and Why Coups Fail | Out of the Loop

855: Russia's Wagner Group and Why Coups Fail | Out of the Loop

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[00:02:42] All right, folks, this episode is the latest installment in our Out of the Loop series, where we cover a current event that might have you scratching your head. Give you a little bit of background, do a little bit of a deep dive on that event. So as many of you know, there was an attempted coup in Russia recently. That's what it was. I know a lot of people are saying it's staged. We'll address that. It was led by Yevgeny Prigozhin of Wagner, which is a private military group.

[00:03:04] But okay, fine. What does that mean? What is Wagner? Who runs it? What do they do? How did the catering chef come to lead Russia's premier private army of marauders and recently attempted to depose Vladimir Putin? We'll explore all this and learn more about coups and what we think might happen next right now. Of course, this is a developing topic and story. So this episode will be basically out of date, the second it's recorded and published. Give us a little grace on that. I find this stuff fascinating, and I hope you will as well.

[00:03:31] So first, we're going to hear from John Lechner, who's writing a book about Wagner. He is a Wagner expert. Afterwards, we're going to hear from Brian Klaas, who's been on the show before, all about coups, why coups fail, and what happens next.

[00:03:41] Here we go.

[00:03:47] So let's not bury the lead. There was an attempted or what looked to be an attempted pseudo coup in Russia just a few days ago. Is that accurate? So far, I feel like every time I say something, it's out of date by the time it leaves my mouth.

[00:04:00] John Lechner: I'm feeling the same way right now as well. I think when we first saw what was going on, starting on Friday night and into Saturday, to me, as someone who's followed this group for quite some time, it definitely had the air or the feel of an appeal to authority at first, rather than a coup where events probably got away from all actors at the time and no one had full information about what was actually going on. What may have been initially kind of an appeal to authority from Yevgeny Prigozhin to Putin to oust his main rivals internally, Shoigu and Gerasimov, seemed to have quickly taken on a life of its own and become what appears to have been, at least, we can classify it as a mutiny or a rebellion.

[00:04:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So for people who are out of the loop, which is literally going to be the title of this episode, Out of the Loop, Yevgeny Prigozhin is the oligarch leader of a private military force called Wagner. And we say "vagner" because that's how they say it. You can say "wagner", it's the same thing. And the other name Shoigu is the Defense Minister of Russia and some of these other authorities. We sort of have to assume here that people have no idea who any of these people are, and they're like, "What am I hearing about? What is Wagner?" They have no idea, right? So let's start from there. What is Wagner? How did they even become in a position to do what they're doing? Let's just start by defining what the company even is in the first place.

[00:05:28] John Lechner: Well, in classic Wagnerian sense or Russian sense, Wagner as an entity with the name Wagner doesn't exist. It is not a legal entity. There's no company out there whose name is Wagner group. Wagner is a catchall term or nickname that developed, and we can go into how that developed for a network of companies affiliated with Yevgeny Prigozhin as well as some other individuals, his co-founder, Dmitry Utkin.

[00:05:56] Jordan Harbinger: How does a guy who becomes a chef because Prigozhin was a caterer, right? They call him Putin's caterer. It's not a euphemism, he was literally just a cook who led a catering company. How does that guy become a leader of a private army?

[00:06:09] John Lechner: I mean, I've never tried his food.

[00:06:11] Jordan Harbinger: I also would not try his food if I were in your shoes. After your book publishes, definitely, do not try any of his food. Actually, you won't have a chance to because—

[00:06:19] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:06:19] Jordan Harbinger: —he's going to tie himself to a chair and throw himself in a pool. He's very accident-prone.

[00:06:23] John Lechner: Yeah. Well, we're going to have to see, I mean, his story is that he, I think, around the age of 18, he went to prison for petty theft. He was born in 1961, so very much a product of the Soviet Union. Went to prison. At some point, when he got out, he was a hotdog vendor.

[00:06:42] Jordan Harbinger: Sorry, hotdog vendors. I didn't mean to laugh.

[00:06:45] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:06:45] Jordan Harbinger: Just not what I expected to hear.

[00:06:47] John Lechner: Maybe he cooks a great hotdog.

[00:06:48] Jordan Harbinger: Russians are known for their American street food.

[00:06:51] John Lechner: For their dogs, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he managed to work his way up to owning a restaurant. I don't know if he ever cooked for it, but he seemed to have at least hired good chefs because a young Vladimir Putin at the time very much enjoyed it. And he's a smooth operator clearly because he managed to leverage that connection, and I'm sure others, into the very lucrative world of contracting for the Russian military by providing its food. And that's how he became known as Putin's chef is because of that, the contracting to the military and schools as well. And I think he poisoned a few kids at some point with his food.

[00:07:28] Jordan Harbinger: By accident?

[00:07:29] John Lechner: By accident, well—

[00:07:30] Jordan Harbinger: Through incompetence, yeah.

[00:07:32] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:07:32] Jordan Harbinger: Slash not caring about the quality of the food, right? Yeah.

[00:07:35] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:07:36] Jordan Harbinger: Geez. Because I noticed they said that he was paid 80 billion for catering, and I was thinking, what kind of food are you making for 80 billion?

[00:07:45] John Lechner: That's doing the meals for the military.

[00:07:47] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:07:48] John Lechner: I mean, imagine what the food budget for the US military is.

[00:07:52] Jordan Harbinger: Is it 80 billion? I mean, that still sounds like a lot, but—

[00:07:54] John Lechner: 80 billion rubles.

[00:07:56] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, true.

[00:07:56] John Lechner: 80 billion rubles, one billion dollars.

[00:07:58] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. That's more believable. That's more believable.

[00:08:01] John Lechner: Yeah. Wagner first developed this network of companies, first emerged in eastern Ukraine around 2014 during the first outbreak of war in Ukraine.

[00:08:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I was just going to say, hmm, what else happened in 2014 in Ukraine? Anything of note? Yeah.

[00:08:16] John Lechner: Yeah, exactly. And so essentially what happened was he had this guy, Dmitry Utkin, who's a career soldier, a paratrooper, fought in Chechnya, and then became involved in private security first going to Syria with a prior private military company, Slavonic Corps, who is a neo-Nazi and a huge fan of the 19th-century German composer, Wagner. And he essentially shows up in Eastern Ukraine with a bunch of other volunteers, or mercenaries, most likely part of the Russian government's covert effort at the time to support a local rebellion that quickly turned into a war that could not have been a war without Moscow's assistance to do these local forces. And Dmitry Utkin is one of those guys who shows up ostensibly as a volunteer, but as we learned later, part of this forming group of different mercenary companies that became useful to the Kremlin, especially within the context of a covert war in Eastern Ukraine.

[00:09:18] Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting that somebody who's a neo-Nazi is also a Russian nationalist, right? Because my history is not great, but I do vaguely remember learning that the Nazis and the Russians were not on the same side in World War II. So what the heck is going on here?

[00:09:32] John Lechner: Yeah. I mean, there's really no way to square that one. Yeah, and I'm not going to come to the defense of Utkin with some sort of logic about how it actually all works out perfectly. But what we can say that I think is interesting is that the guys who wind up in these positions, the guys who wind up being mercenaries, military contractors, these types of people, there does tend to be a tendency for these groups to overlap and certainly flirt with white nationalism, neo-Nazi ideology. Very often the people who fall into these categories within each country have a tendency to share some ideologies, and white nationalism is certainly one of them. Same with soccer hooliganism, a lot of Wagner guys came from the kind of the hooligan, huge soccer fans of say, St. Petersburg's football team or soccer team. A lot of these guys have come out of general fans of guns and training, self-defense, martial arts, MMA, all of these kind of small cultures, niche. I wouldn't call it white nationalism niche, but like all of these kind of cultures also feed into mercenarism.

[00:10:45] Jordan Harbinger: There's a fancy word you don't often hear associated with Nazis. Yeah, it does make sense, right? It's kind of like the tough guy who beat people up in the street outside of a soccer game because he is a punk loser with nothing to do, goes to the MMA gym and decides to be a career gangster, criminal. And then, the state needs gangster criminals that are willing to kill people for money, and they're like, "Hey, this is the only thing that I really have any skills in doing." And then they join this organization and it doesn't really matter that they're also a neo-Nazi because the logic doesn't have to square. They just need to be willing to be violent for rubles, and that's the end of it.

[00:11:21] John Lechner: And at the end of the day, I mean, this portion made up, certainly at that time, a pretty vocal and central component of Wagner group, but certainly not all mercenaries within Wagner group hold this ideology. And certainly, as it expanded, you saw far and far less people with that type of ideology. I think, probably like everywhere else, the biggest feeder for folks working for these types of companies is that you have a huge pool of guys with military experience who come out of the army and very often are bored and want to relive some of that adventure, and they're not happy just sitting as a mall cop or the mall cop equivalent in Russia. These types of opportunities to go abroad again, to participate in events. And frankly, just the money is something that can be very attractive to the guys who have this type of experience.

[00:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: So they recruit for the military, but it sounds like they also recruited a bunch of people from prisons, and I think some people know this, but let's speak to that a little bit. Because they had these huge number of soldiers in Wagner. They lost like 20,000 of them in Bakhmut, but then somewhere during that battle, they needed to replenish their numbers and what they went to prisons and essentially emptied him out of abled-bodied guys from the sound of it.

[00:12:37] John Lechner: Yeah. Essentially what happened was, at least initially during the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Wagner was actually initially sidelined by other guys in the Ministry of Defense. His old nemesis Shoigu, who wanted to bring in his own private military companies, his own private armies who were more closely affiliated with him. So when the war in Ukraine broke out, actually last year, on February 24th, 2022, but Prigozhin's guys, Wagner were nowhere to be seen. It was really only after the Russian military started facing some setbacks that they were forced to go to Wagner, and the reason that they were forced to go to Wagner is because a private military company is essentially at the end of the day, a logistics company. It is a company that is contracting and its job is to move men and material to places that people need them, the people who are paying. And so Wagner is as good as its Rolodex, it's as good as the spreadsheets of people with contact numbers who they can call up and recruit and get manpower. And that's what the Russian government, all of a sudden, about a month into the war, needed to tap into.

[00:13:46] And that's how Prigozhin got back in. He initially brought in a lot of very talented guys because, contrary to say, the Russian military, soldiers just in the Russian military, these guys had had about eight years of experience fighting in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 fighting in Syria, Libya, Africa. These were talented guys and so they initially made a big difference. But like you said, he started losing a lot of those guys and it became necessary in general for the Russian government to bring more men to the frontline. And one of the solutions, we don't know whose idea it was, but it would seem typically Prigozhin's was to go to Russian penal colonies with an offer. And we can talk a little bit about what that offer was because it was very interesting.

[00:14:30] Jordan Harbinger: I would love to talk about that offer because I think I would take a pretty lowball if I was going to die in a Russian prison or spend the next decade in there. Because prison in the United States, notoriously terrible. Prison in Russia has got to be even worse, probably by a lot, especially if you're in, I don't know, Siberia or someplace that's not near Moscow. I would imagine it's a as close to a living hell as you can get outside of, you know, North Korea or something. So to say, "Hey, remember when you killed somebody and you went to prison? How about now you kill somebody and you get out of prison?" And they're like, "Sure. Where do I sign?" I mean, that's what I would say if I'm in their shoes.

[00:15:08] John Lechner: Yeah. I had the opportunity, I was in Ukraine, I had the opportunity to talk to a few of the convicts who were recruited and fought for Wagner and then were captured.

[00:15:16] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

[00:15:17] John Lechner: There, there were a few interesting things I think that I came away from. One to answer your question, when I asked the guys how many people signed up, they said only about one in five. So you have a very interesting self-selection process going on here where you have the folks who tend to not think about consequences very much, who wind up in a Russian prison. And the guys that I talked to were usually there for, in kind of a very typical fashion. "We got in a fight over my girlfriend. We both had knives and my knife by chance happened to plunge into his neck. And what do you know? They gave me 20 years." And Prigozhin came and gave this offer, which was essentially if you fight for six months and you survive, and he was very open about it, their chances of surviving according to them. He even said, "You know, I'll take you out if you're alive. I will not necessarily return you alive and only God or Allah can spirit you away, and that will be in a wooden box." And so he was pretty open in their minds about what the chances were. He told them as well that the losses were two and a half times Stalingrad. And Stalingrad is something that resonates with a lot of Russians as a pretty particularly tough battle.

[00:16:27] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:16:27] John Lechner: After giving that speech, about 20 percent of guys decided to sign up for it. A few of them that I spoke with, it made sense. They had 20 years, they had served eight. They felt that they were in a hell hole. Like, why not just take a chance? Got nothing to live for. I talked to one guy who was in prison for beating someone up and he had three years, he had already served two.

[00:16:49] Jordan Harbinger: Not a good ROI. That guy's decision-making process—

[00:16:52] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:16:52] Jordan Harbinger: —not that I should be surprised, is slightly flawed. I mean, either survive another year in a prison, which I'm sure is terrible. Or again, if they were really clear about the odds of survival two and a half times Stalingrad, you just know you're getting thrown into a meat grinder. You're probably being used as like a bullet pad to show where the Ukrainian snipers and machine gun positions are—

[00:17:11] John Lechner: Yeah, a hundred percent.

[00:17:12] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I would not have made that same decision. Oof.

[00:17:15] John Lechner: No, I think, yeah, you and I are on here speaking with microphones and so we're far removed from whatever pathway that probably led—

[00:17:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:17:24] John Lechner: —those guys to be making those types of decisions. But it was fascinating to speak with some of these guys. And I kind of get the sense that they're not victims. They felt like they were given a chance and they felt that their odds weren't that great, but at the same time, they didn't seem to give a sense of feeling taken advantage of. And it was clear even through all of that, that they had serious respect for Prigozhin and felt that he was some sort of great charismatic leader, which I think we can come to later in terms of the mutiny. But it was fascinating to see that they still didn't really have anything bad to say about him, and I think that they were being pretty honest.

[00:18:08] Jordan Harbinger: No, I would imagine that makes sense. These guys didn't surrender, right? They were captured.

[00:18:12] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:18:12] Jordan Harbinger: That tells you kind of all you really need to know in combination with their testimony there. Is Wagner really private or is it an arm of the state? Because Putin seems to have either made a slip of the tongue or just decided screw it, and the wool is off everyone's eyes. He kind of said, "Eh, this is run by us. They were paid. The whole thing is part of the government. Whatever we used, slice it." What do you think?

[00:18:35] John Lechner: Two interesting statements were made. One by Putin essentially saying that Wagner was receiving support out of the state budget between May 2022 and May 2023, which times up, I think pretty neatly with the beginning in where we are kind of currently in the war in Ukraine. And then his press secretary, Peskov then went out and said that actually the Russian state has nothing to do with Wagner's African operations. And having traveled around and having followed this group for at least four years now. I think that that actually makes some sense, and the reason I think it makes sense is I think Wagner has represented something that is particularly difficult for us to analyze and to understand, and that is it's a private military company that is profit-driven, but at the same time represents the interests of the Russian state.

[00:19:26] That shouldn't be too difficult for us to understand. I'm sitting here in Washington DC and I'd say 90 percent of the companies here are profit driven that work in the defense industry or something along those lines, and also are ostensibly furthering the interests of America abroad, whether it's through selling arms and jets or what have you. We're the center of contracting, probably. What I think is unique about Wagner specific is we have had private military companies in the past like Blackwater, but Blackwater would embed itself within our national security infrastructure. That is the American national security infrastructure to try and make as much money as possible.

[00:20:08] Other PMCs and Sean McFate, who used to be a contractor, has written a great book about this, The Modern Mercenary, other styles of PMCs, like Executive Outcomes, which was a South African firm, kind of famous in the 1990s and had the movie Blood Diamond sort of based on it.

[00:20:24] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, interesting.

[00:20:25] John Lechner: They were essentially made up of white South Africans coming out of the apartheid regime. They couldn't work for the South African government. The South African government didn't really want to have anything to do with them, so they had to go out and contract with other governments, with the Angolan government, with the government in Sierra Leone. And what's interesting about Wagner is I think that it's somewhat a mixture of Blackwater and Executive Outcomes. Not only can they embed within Russia's national security infrastructure, but they can also have the freedom to go out like Executive Outcomes and offer their services to other governments. And they don't have to deal with a congress, an opposition party that's going to drag them before for a hearing because a bunch of opposition politicians want to drag Putin through the mud. That's not going to happen.

[00:21:12] Jordan Harbinger: Not in that regime, not in a dictatorship like that. That's for sure. If there were opposition—

[00:21:16] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:21:17] Jordan Harbinger: —politicians to be heard from, they might not be able to do it anyway.

[00:21:20] John Lechner: Yeah. Well, they've certainly caused some reputational risk in a very different way this past weekend. So it comes back to bite you, whether you're Bush or Putin, I suppose, in a very different way. But to your point, that means that they can both receive contracts from the state, be supported by the state, but also try to make money elsewhere, and that's what makes it so difficult to analyze.

[00:21:41] Jordan Harbinger: Right. That's a great segue into my next question, which is where do they operate? Right? Because they're operating in Ukraine. Now, they're in Belarus doing whatever, but you mentioned Syria, you mentioned Africa. I know before we get to Africa, there was a Syria incident that's quite famous. There's a leaked phone call of, I guess, a Wagnerite mercenary talking with his girlfriend or family or something, and he is very unhappy in telling, describing them, just getting absolutely massacred by US air power in a matter of minutes. What was this all about?

[00:22:11] John Lechner: Yeah, this case could actually be an interesting way to show the evolution of the group. I think it's safe to say that when Wagner first went to Syria as contractors, they were most likely employed by the Russian military and they participated in attacks on Aleppo, on Palmyra, I think very much in lock step with their contacts, their touch points within the Russian military intelligence and probably other handlers. It seems like at some point, probably late 2017, early 2018, the contracts with the Ministry of Defense dried up. And so Wagner decided to go out and search for other ways to make money through an entity called Evro Polis, a company. They struck a deal with the Syrian government to help them recapture and protect oil fields in exchange for 25 percent of what those oil fields would make. So a good way to incentivize, right?

[00:23:11] Jordan Harbinger: So retake the oil field from, I don't know, ISIS or whoever else, and you get 25 percent of the take which is really good. I mean, you're talking about an operation that could take a couple of days and cost you some lives that you kind of care about, but not, I mean whatever, you know? And then you get millions, tens of millions, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars over the years from just making sure that it stays in Syrian regime, hands secured by Wagner.

[00:23:38] John Lechner: Yeah, I mean, it's a good gig if you're the one sending people. Yeah, probably a little bit less. So I don't think the 25 percent kick really made it down to the average contractor who was probably paid by the month. But yeah, if you're in management, yeah, it's not a bad deal. But essentially, what happened at one point in early 2018 was a contingent of Wagner personnel, probably around 600, together with some local forces, decided to attack a base of the, I believe it was the Kurdish SDF at the time. And either they didn't know or they didn't care but there were some American special forces who were also at that base. And these guys were approaching and essentially the US called up through their deconfliction line with the Russians in Syria because all of these countries have to have, try to make sure that they don't shoot at each other and cause a world war, I suppose. And so they called up the Russians and they said, are these your guys? And the Russians said no. And so they got the green light, but the US came in with fire power. That was, to put it mildly, unnecessary for the threat, most likely. You know, for 600 guys lightly armed. I think we were flying kind of multiple jets were coming in using the big bombs and it did not go well, obviously. It wouldn't go well for anybody in that position. It's not very fair to say to Wagner.

[00:25:00] Jordan Harbinger: No, they got left twisting in the fricking wind to say the least.

[00:25:04] John Lechner: To say that this was, you know, somehow up to like their lack of talent—

[00:25:07] Jordan Harbinger: No, no, no. Not that I'm defending these pricks, but like you're not going to fare well when you've got an Apache gunship and you think you're sneaking in someplace through the desert. So they got torn up and they lost hundreds lost of people.

[00:25:20] John Lechner: Yeah, probably around 300 guys or so in the United States military made a point to the Russians or to Wagner, don't ever point a gun in our direction again. And I think that point was understood because we haven't seen something like quite like that in the time since.

[00:25:36] But one big question, and it's one that I'm continuing to look into is why exactly did the Americans get that green light in light of kind of the tension that we saw ratchet up into a mutiny? I think it goes to show that at the very least it could have been human error, of course, or it could not have been. But certainly, after we could say that internal rivalry and internal tensions within Putin's system have always existed. The difference is that they have a tendency to be behind closed doors.

[00:26:08] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So at the time that that happened, I thought, wow, what a cluster. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And then, I kind of evolved to, ugh, maybe Wagner wasn't supposed to be there. They needed plausible deniability. They couldn't say, "Yes, those are our guys." Because then it's like, "Well, then how did you know they were doing this? Don't you know better than to send your guys into these places where the US soldiers are and you're not even supposed to be here?" And now, I'm thinking there's at least a chance where they said, "Oh, Wagner's attacking this oil platform. You know what? I'm sick of those guys. I'm the defense minister. You know what? You tell the US to tear those guys up? I want to watch this happen from our satellites or our drones, or with my binoculars or whatever. I want to watch these guys get lit up because I'm sick of this guy. This guy's a thorn in my side and I want to see him take one on the chin." There's a much higher chance of that now, in my opinion, than there was a couple of weeks ago, at least in terms of me thinking that, I don't mean that the chances have changed, obviously, but now it seems like it's more clear that there's at least a possibility that that was essentially deliberate. "Just let them walk into a trap and let the Americans just destroy them because we can't do it." They can't hit each other without looking really bad, but they can certainly let the United States bloody their nose and it just looks like they just mess with the wrong bowl.

[00:27:22] John Lechner: Yeah, I mean, it'll be great to try and get to the bottom of this. Who knows? It might be something that we never do because there's only so many people in the world who know exactly what happened, and I'm sure they're not likely to share.

[00:27:33] Jordan Harbinger: No. A lot of them are going to fall out of windows in the next 90 days, I think is what's going to happen.

[00:27:38] John Lechner: But I think at the very least, it was probably a testament to the fact that there was not a lot of command and control going on. The ties at that time, or at least the command of and control between Wagner group and the Russian military was very weak. And if they were super concerned about Wagner, they would've double-checked perhaps and said, hey—

[00:27:59] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe made a phone call, sent off a text message. Are these your guys?

[00:28:03] John Lechner: Yeah. Like, "Hey, are these your guys?" But it would be safe to assume that maybe that phone call wasn't made, but more to come, hopefully on that incident.

[00:28:11] Jordan Harbinger: So how was Wagner funded? We mentioned that earlier. We saw some news reports that Putin said, "Hey, we paid these guys 160 billion out of the state budget or whatever it was. 80 billion out of here, 80 billion out of there." But that's not all, right? The oil platforms that they've retaken in Syria, there's some funding there. What I found interesting was these guys are in Africa and they'll be a Chinese-run mine, or they'll be a locally run mine for rare minerals or some kind of precious stones, and suddenly the miners end up dead floating in a river, and Wagner has secured the mine and expanded it. So what's that all about?

[00:28:49] John Lechner: Yeah, there's several kind of different incidents to disaggregate, but essentially when Wagner first arrived in the Central African Republic, they arrived in a fairly, I would say, normal or typical role in that their job was to provide training to the Central African Armed Forces, which is known by the French acronym, FACA. And in exchange, they signed some mineral concessions to different mining rights. The notion of PMCs being used, private military companies being used in Africa, especially for large countries, big powers like Russia or the United States is not anything atypical or necessarily new. It's safe to say that, in general, the Africa is, unfortunately, and I wish it were otherwise, because it's a place that I love and and want to work at all the time is not very high on the list of national security military priorities for either Russia or the United States or their respective publics.

[00:29:47] And so what that means is when American soldiers or Russian soldiers die in the field, there is a tendency for a public backlash and for people to want to know why did this happen? I mean, I think Somalia is a great case in point, when the United States lost several people in Mogadishu, Bill Clinton pulled out, right? He pulled the forces out immediately. It was a massive scandal. Why are we over here? You don't have to report contractors in either the United States or Russia. And so that is a big plus. They usually are cheaper as well, so you don't have to invest significant treasure. So you neither have to invest blood or treasure, but you can still essentially have a footprint that various people in government want to have.

[00:30:30] When they first came, it was a little bit strange that it was Russian because typically the PMCs or the people who are usually over there with the French, Central African Republic is a former French colony, but they were essentially on a training mission. What happened next was they tried to bring together different armed groups because CAR was in a low-grade civil war at the time, into a peace agreement. They did for a little while. And then, essentially with elections coming around, six of the 14 armed groups broke the agreement, started a new alliance, and they charged on the capitol of Central African Republic, Bangui. Wagner, in addition to Rwandans and a UN peacekeeping force defended the capitol. And then they pushed back on a counter-offensive and actually, they returned more territory to the CAR government than they had had in years.

[00:31:19] Usually, the CAR government only controlled the capital. And then, it was kind of a various deals with armed groups outside, over who runs the mines, how the cash flows work. And so Wagner was just the newest actor in a conflict that had existed for quite some time. And what they did was, I think they leveraged their importance. Basically, the FACA, the Central African Armed Forces couldn't have done what they did without Wagner.

[00:31:45] Jordan Harbinger: What strange bedfellows though? Wagner, the UN, and Rwanda. That is bizarre.

[00:31:50] John Lechner: They all found themselves technically on the same side at the time, and there's some very weird little complications that can arise on the ground. I was there when there was the threat on Bangui at the time.

[00:32:01] Jordan Harbinger: You were in the capital at the time?

[00:32:02] John Lechner: I was in the capital, yeah.

[00:32:04] Jordan Harbinger: How is that when the local government is so weak, they can only hold one city, and you've got Russian mercs in that same city and you've got UN peacekeepers in that same city, and then suddenly Rwanda rolls in and is like, we can do this. How are you not immediately on the first plane home?

[00:32:19] John Lechner: Uh, well, the flights stop usually.

[00:32:21] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, well, that will do it.

[00:32:22] John Lechner: You're in that kind of situation, so yeah.

[00:32:24] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha. You were stuck. Okay.

[00:32:27] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:32:27] Jordan Harbinger: Did the hotel prices quadruple overnight at that point? I imagine they would like, oh, you're going to leave—

[00:32:31] John Lechner: I mean, you would think so, yeah. But usually the flights kind of stop or they become a lot more fewer. But it was an interesting time to be there for obvious reasons. You could see Wagner trucks rolling through the streets at all times, you know, blaring horns. And strangely that UN peacekeepers, Rwanda and Wagner all were on the same side. It's not too strange because we've now found ourselves in this very strange world with this new version of PMCs where they are supposed to be on the same side.

[00:33:05] Jordan Harbinger: By the way, PMCs, I think we defined it earlier, but private military contractor is what that is. So Wagner, Blackwater, whatever. Yeah, continue.

[00:33:14] John Lechner: I mean, essentially, the way that the UN peacekeeping forces work or tend to work is that they are invited in by the national governments to then keep the peace between the various parties. The original idea of peacekeeping was that a peace agreement is reached and then it's to be kept. But the tendency now, or very often is that they find themselves in peacekeeping in an open conflict.

[00:33:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yikes.

[00:33:38] John Lechner: That's not ideal given usually mandates and their own effectiveness. And so Wagner has come around at a very interesting time, kind of an existential crisis in UN peacekeeping where a lot of folks in the Central African Republican included, have seen years in years of peacekeeping and thinks not get better, and there'd be more armed groups. So Wagner has been popular among a lot of Central Africans because some folks want a military solution. They don't like the armed groups, they want to see them out of the country in jail or eliminated. They see the UN peacekeeping forces incapable of doing that, and both of these entities are effectively invited by the Central African government.

[00:34:21] And in strange times, even though they offer kind of antithetical solutions, one, a peaceful solution to a conflict, the other, a military solution, they're now finding themselves on the same side. Same issue is happening in Mali at the moment, and the UN is pulling out, but they're kind of two different sides of the coin. And in weird circumstances, I would say it would be difficult to say that they were working together, but they definitely were making sure that they weren't shooting at each other. They definitely were I think in some incidents they were offering to stay in each other's bases. I mean, what's strange about when you go through a town in CAR.

[00:34:59] Jordan Harbinger: CAR is Central African Republic for people who are not sure what we're talking about.

[00:35:03] John Lechner: You'll see a Wagner base right next to a UN base, right next to a central African forces base. And so these guys are ostensibly, there's no love loss between them because the UN is constantly criticizing Wagner and Wagner thinks of them as essentially ineffective at best.

[00:35:24] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:24] John Lechner: But they're right next to each other at all times. They're right on top of each other, and there's the potential that that's going to be the reality, whether Wagner exists or not going forward because they've introduced a model that invariably will be attractive to other governments.

[00:35:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think you're fortunately, unfortunately, onto something there, and I understand the people of the Central African Republic. If you are going to be under the thumb of armed groups, at least make it the same damn armed groups. So you don't worry if you're going to get dragged out of your business and killed because you paid those guys instead of these guys, and it's Tuesday. So these guys are in charge now, and now you're the enemy. Just pay the one warlord or whatever that's doing the thing. You know who to be afraid of. You know who your friends are. If there's one group, maybe they're not fighting in the area where you're supposed to be working and not earning any money. I mean, it's just, it's a mess, but it's better the devil you know.

[00:36:15] John Lechner: You've essentially made the pitch that Wagner makes to people.

[00:36:19] Jordan Harbinger: I would imagine. Yeah. Again, not defending some of these terrible people, but it's kind of like, it's either going to be unworkable and not survivable at all, or it's just going to be a living hill.

[00:36:29] John Lechner: And in a place like the Central African Republic, I mean, we have to remember, this is the least developed country in the world. 70 percent of people make less than a dollar 20 a day. It's a country the size of France probably has about 300 kilometers of paved road total. We're talking people who are in a desperate situation and improvement in people's lives can be as simple as, is it safe to go to the next village? Can I trade a little bit to get X, Y, or Z? And that is how narrow people's priorities can be.

[00:37:04] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:37:04] John Lechner: The unfortunate reality for a lot of people when you live in decades of conflict is very rarely do you have the choice between a good guy and a bad guy. Usually, your choice is between a bad guy and a worse guy. And Central Africans aren't naive to think that Wagner doesn't come with consequences. They absolutely know that. But when you're living there day to day, you have a tendency to have a more nuanced perspective and a very local perspective, which is literally are things better now? They are a little bit good. It doesn't have a lot to do with disinformation, what people think about the war in Ukraine, geopolitics, anything along those lines.

[00:37:48] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. This is Out of the Loop on Wagner and the Russian coup. We'll be right back.

[00:37:54] This episode is sponsored in part by TextExpander. Do you want to be more productive and save literally hours each month? We use a tool every single day called TextExpander. I've been using it for years. You can save time by typing out repetitive things such as the current date, email addresses, phone numbers, commonly used phrases, paragraphs in an email. Like when I say, "Hey, please review the show." That's a TextExpander thing, but it doesn't mean I'm not answering or reading your email. TextExpander is basically keyboard shortcuts, but it's way, way more powerful. You can create dropdown menus, fill in the blanks, customize the shortcuts. Jen uses the crap out of this. A few of you have had your own team implement this, and your bosses are all stoked. Our whole team uses it now. I just think it's one of the coolest tools. I've saved hundreds of hours total. You never have to type the same thing over and over again. You can use it pretty much anywhere, even on your phone. Highly, highly recommend it.

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[00:40:39] All right, back to Out of the Loop.

[00:40:43] I want to talk about the coup. After our piece here, we're going to do a segment with a coup expert Brian Klaas who's been on the show before, writes for The Atlantic, among other places, just an amazing coup expert, but I will ask you as well, this coup is very odd, right? What happens? What supposedly sparked this? Prigozhin says Wagner was shelled by the army, sounded like BS. But now, we're kind of thinking maybe that actually did happen because those two factions are fighting and he decides suddenly, "You know, I'm going to go to Moscow and negotiate a change in leadership in the military." That was his initial smokescreen, was it not?

[00:41:18] John Lechner: Yeah. What we had been seeing for quite some time within Putin's system is that it was feudalistic. You had various oligarchs, powerful individuals who control various institutions and are always duking it out with each other over the state's resources, and they would certainly fight, but for the most part, they would take these battles to court where maybe the outcome was already determined. But there was some sort of kind of legalistic framing smokescreen around usually what was happening.

[00:41:46] What Prigozhin did was, for the first time in a very long time, try to basically get the attention of the leader Putin by giving a naked show of force that is like in the most classic sense of feudalism. That is what you would do is you have local princes, essentially within the empire or country who periodically rise up when they feel that they're being marginalized, treated unfairly, misallocate. And by showing your dangerousness, you're showing that you matter and that you have to be dealt with. And that's how you, in a most basic sense, get what you want.

[00:42:27] So what we saw is something that's been going on throughout history—

[00:42:31] Jordan Harbinger: Tale as old as time, yeah?

[00:42:32] John Lechner: Yeah. It happened to be something that we hadn't seen in the past 20 years or so in Russia, and it was very surprising.

[00:42:39] Jordan Harbinger: It's something you hear about happening in Sudan or Haiti. Some military guy went in there and shot the president while he was sleeping, and now they got a new guy or they didn't get a new guy.

[00:42:48] John Lechner: Well, I mean, interestingly enough, Sudan is literally going through a similar thing where paramilitary structure has been built up, and a lot of people thought that it would never bite the hand that fed it. And then sure enough, in both cases they bit the hand. I think the most important thing is that it's revealed to people. There's more than one guy in Russia. Putin is not the only guy. He is not sitting around with a million TVs in front of him, controlling what's going on. It's a constant battle between people just underneath him for his ear. And at the end of the day, the way that we get into this mess is because he doesn't really like to make decisions and so he lets things fester and usually somehow things have managed to kind of slog along. But Prigozhin is a unique individual and he's shown that he is ready to always assert his own agency and cross whatever red lines we assume exist in the system. He just steps right around him.

[00:43:45] Jordan Harbinger: So he gets to Moscow, he ends up standing down. We don't know what Putin negotiated or promised him, but basically, Wagner is now out of Ukraine, correct? They're in exile in Belarus.

[00:43:56] John Lechner: Yeah. So we've heard that Prigozhin is in Belarus. What we've heard the deal is as it stands, is that there's amnesty for those who participated in the events. Members of Wagner can either assign a new contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense, or they can join Prigozhin in Belarus. We don't know to what extent Prigozhin will still be in control of the organization of the operations in places like Africa. I think it's safe to say that Wagner probably won't be in Ukraine anymore. They want them as far away from there as possible, and they obviously want Prigozhin himself out of Russia. There's been rumors of arrests of various Wagner personnel in Syria. That's another country that's important to the Russian military and the Russian government in general. But again, with the Central African Republic, I think in the near term, it's not a high priority. They've got bigger fish to fry with a full scale war in Ukraine on its borders right now. And it probably would take a significant amount of time to replace those guys.

[00:45:00] If you think about, if you're the CEO of any company and you come in, you don't want to fire all 2000 employees on day one and then just bring in 2000 new people who don't know anything about Africa or anything along those lines. And you certainly wouldn't expect the ship to sail smoothly. So they're in a bit of a dilemma, both on what to do with these African operations. It may have been part of the deal that he's allowed to keep them. But then the question is essentially remains, how does he source, how does he finance? We think maybe some of the operations like in Central African Republic, I mean, I think that he might be able to self-finance that, but he was usually getting his equipment, I think from the Russian military. So where's he going to go to get that? That's going to be a crucial question down the line.

[00:45:45] Jordan Harbinger: That is interesting. How important were they as a fighting force in Ukraine? The only even sort of victory that the Russian army has had in Ukraine in recent months is Bakhmut. And that was largely Wagner. And Bakhmut, it's not Kyiv as far as being kind of a big deal.

[00:46:01] John Lechner: No, and the thing is, is when you drive over to the outskirts of Bakhmut, you realize along the way there's the equivalent of just Bakhmuts at every single turn. I mean, Ukraine is an industrialized developed economy. It has so many cities of several hundred thousand people. Each one of these places is a Grozny for the Russian army to take. And so you just have to imagine that they're going to have to face a number of Bakhmuts to even get close to Ukraine.

[00:46:33] Jordan Harbinger: So it seems like the Russian military is fighting without Wagner could be significantly degraded now in Ukraine.

[00:46:39] John Lechner: Yes and no, could be. But they, at the same time, they had declared victory and Bakhmut and there were already were issues going along. And essentially, Wagner Prigozhin declared victory in Bakhmut on May 9th or May 10th. And then he said, "I'm handing this over to the Russian military. We're out." So when he crossed over into Russia, his forces at that time were not being used on the front. And so we're not really sure. I think, and there are a lot of people who are the real military experts and they aren't me. I'm just like dumb enough to go to CAR and try to look at stuff. But I think the folks who are real military experts would probably say that. It's too early to tell if that's going to have an effect.

[00:47:23] Jordan Harbinger: On a simply practical level when your supply lines increase, that's a problem. That's even more of a problem when you're smaller like Ukraine is. You're low on resources. In fact, that's historically one of the reasons that invasions of Russia have failed, and right now, maybe ironically, Ukraine is benefiting from Russia having to deal with that exact same problem.

[00:47:43] John Lechner: Yeah. What's happening right now is not something that Ukraine could have pulled off for the very clear reasons that we stated. I think that they will try to take advantage of this, but I think right now the biggest consequence that we can probably think of for the Russian military is just the psychological damage of something like this happening. I mean, imagine sitting in the trenches as a soldier and just watching just this absolute cluster going on behind you and you're just like, wait, why are we doing this?

[00:48:11] Jordan Harbinger: I'm risking my life over here for this. And they don't even know who's running the show. Yeah, exactly.

[00:48:15] John Lechner: And it's just a clown show in bag. Yeah. And so I think one of the things that made it so tough for Putin, and probably the reason that Prigozhin is still alive too, is that figuratively speaking, you don't want to be outflanked by people to the right of you, the people who are more nationalistic—

[00:48:33] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, interesting.

[00:48:34] John Lechner: —if you're a regime. And so your political legitimacy matters, especially in a time of war. You don't want to be getting criticized from the right, from the people who are the more jingoistic pro-war people, which Prigozhin certainly was. And the last thing that you want to do when he's claiming that you and the top brass have become this, you know, corrupt, sluggish, out of touch with the Russian soldier. The last thing you want to do is martyr him and like 300 of his guys. It's like literally out of a movie. It's a trope, right? Like the corrupt top brass and then the loyal to Russia 300 or however many people who die for the true Russian values. Like if you're Putin, that's the last thing that you want, is to martyr this guy. Because if you martyr him, you validate his entire argument. And so they're faced with an actual conundrum on their hands. And I think that's also part of the reason why you didn't just see a missile come in and take them out.

[00:49:30] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. No, you may be right. I got to say this whole coup, there's no sort of classy way to say this, definitely blue balls for a lot of us watching this, I think. Right? I was kind of ready for something. This whole thing has been weird. Even Game of Thrones had a better ending.

[00:49:42] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:49:42] Jordan Harbinger: And the Russian Army was the second strongest army in the world. And then it's the second strongest army or third strongest army in Ukraine. And now, it's like the second strongest army also in Russia. What the hell is going on?

[00:49:55] John Lechner: Well, I mean, weird things can happen. And I think one of the things that we can't ignore when they went in and we're getting close to Moscow, is when there's a lot of uncertainty. It's human nature. People are loathed to create certainty by doing something like shooting someone. And these guys are on the same side, Wagner and the other kind of Russian military personnel who were along the way. Usually, for like a civil war to take place, you need a time period where there's significant polarization, like dehumanization of the enemy so that you can prepare yourself essentially to kill them. It's just not an easy thing to do. And there was none of that. These guys just were going, and if I was a Russian soldier, the last thing I would want to do in that moment of confusion is just be the guy who shot one of these guys.

[00:50:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no kidding.

[00:50:46] John Lechner: And so if you put that up on a large enough scale, it makes sense. Here in Washington DC, I'm sitting in the most powerful nation in the world and a bunch of pretty much unarmed protestors, managed to storm the nation's capitol and get pretty far. And this is a convoy of dudes who are armed. So it's unsurprising that they fell into a surprisingly small amount of resistance.

[00:51:09] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine being one of those Wagner soldiers who shot down a Russian helicopter and now there's no coup. It's like, whoops.

[00:51:16] John Lechner: Yeah.

[00:51:16] Jordan Harbinger: Who saw me do that?

[00:51:17] John Lechner: Well, they said amnesty, so that's what I would be trying to call for. Yeah.

[00:51:21] Jordan Harbinger: I would just be saying good thing that wasn't me. I would, you know, amnesty, but maybe not for the guy who shot down error.

[00:51:28] John Lechner: I'd be changing my call sign for sure.

[00:51:30] Jordan Harbinger: For sure. They say amnesty, but then like the next day they're raiding Wagner officer's houses and taking vans full of money. And there's videos of defectors being executed, being killed very slowly and gruesomely, videos being posted on Telegram. I don't know if that's happening widely, but they certainly didn't like that guy. And can we dispense of the conspiracy theory, for lack of a better word, that this whole coup, this is theater, they just wanted to secretly have covered a move Wagner to Belarus and now they're going to attack there, it just seems like the dumbest sort of explanation. They could have moved Wagner to Belarus in a million other ways. It's the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot so you can get a free trip to the hospital because you need to pick up a prescription. It doesn't make any sense to me.

[00:52:11] John Lechner: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. If there's a more simple explanation where people are just really dumb and I'm sure that there are a lot of incompetent people involved in this entire thing, then it's unlikely to be a conspiracy. You would hope that this would kind of put the final nail in the coffin of this idea of Putin as playing five-D chess while the rest of us are playing checkers. But I think the people who are convinced of that are never going to be unconvinced of it. And so it's just an unfortunate reality of trying to talk about Russia is that, I mean, it's like the show Veep, the scary thing when you get into the room with the center of power is you look around and you realize these are just normal people. And that's even scarier than the conspiracy theory.

[00:52:54] Jordan Harbinger: It is, it is. Especially if you see like those hearings with Mark Zuckerberg and the senators and he is trying to explain how Facebook works and you're just like, "Holy crap, these guys are going to regulate AI? We are doomed. This guy probably doesn't even understand what Gmail is." This is insane to me.

[00:53:12] John Lechner: Yeah, and it's the same thing. I mean, you're dealing with a ton of very imperfect people and people who by default of getting to where they are at that level in the government are probably not the most creative thinkers. Prigozhin actually does know how to think out of a box because I mean, as of now, he's remained alive after doing probably the craziest stunt during Putin's 20-plus years in power,

[00:53:36] Jordan Harbinger: I would say. So what's going to happen to Wagner now? They're in Belarus. They're possibly going to have a base there. If they're not going to make a go for Ukraine, what are they going to do?

[00:53:45] John Lechner: Yeah, it's like the end of like an Ocean's Eleven movie where everyone goes to Hawaii and you know, enjoys the money that they made.

[00:53:51] Jordan Harbinger: Right? Did they just all schlep off to Africa and then Prigozhin watches over his shoulder?

[00:53:56] John Lechner: You know, I think folks are kind of talking about maybe they're able to keep their Africa operations, but for the same time, there's a lot of logistical difficulties about keeping those, right? Not being able to leverage the state for your flights, sourcing material and equipment, there's a whole headache of other things that they would have to try to figure out. The short answer right now is just that we really don't know where this is going to go organizationally.

[00:54:23] Jordan Harbinger: Geez, if I'm Prigozhin, I'm calling China as quickly as possible and finding maybe a new master to serve on that front. The only other thing I can think of is if he can paint this in a way where he's quietly okay with the West, it might be his only lifeline. Like he ends up — but then again, he's so dirty. The West could never work with him.

[00:54:43] John Lechner: No.

[00:54:43] Jordan Harbinger: I wouldn't want to be him right now, I'll tell you that.

[00:54:45] John Lechner: No, but he's painted himself into his own corner.

[00:54:48] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. I don't feel sorry for him. I'm just saying, holy sh*t man. If there's a guy in the world that's in a mess right now, it's him.

[00:54:54] John Lechner: And I think what he probably does, and probably what was part of what he was doing is that you just have to like drink your own Kool-Aid and he's probably mentally preparing himself to be this like nationalistic martyr for Russia. If you're like, it's likely you're going to die, then I would be like, okay, I'm going to go down with like some sort of legacy.

[00:55:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you may be right.

[00:55:18] You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. This is Out of the Loop on Wagner and the Russian coup. We'll be right back.

[00:55:23] This episode is sponsored in part by Microsoft Clarity. Your product success hinges on one crucial element. You got to truly understand your users. Don't just guess what their experience is like, see it for yourself. That's where Microsoft Clarity comes in. Microsoft Clarity is not just another analytics tool. I certainly thought it was when they came to me with this campaign, but we installed it on our website. I checked out the session replays. It's like a little movie of how users are using your website or your app, because it works for apps too where they clicked, where they hovered heat maps that visualized their engagement, highlighting hotspots or cold zones or rage clicks. That was something I discovered that was funny, where basically somebody's clicking over and over thinking something should be clickable but nothing happens. And to top it off, Microsoft Clarity is completely free. Jen got it set up in a couple minutes. Super easy. Check out Clarity at clarity.microsoft.com.

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[00:57:37] This episode is sponsored in part by FlyKitt. Have you ever gone on an international trip and you've just been annihilated by jet lag either during or after the trip? Yeah, that's natural, but it always takes me like two weeks to recover from jet lag until I started using FlyKitt. They didn't pay me for this. My friend's company, I thought it was a bunch of BS, a solution to jet lag, whatever. Totally sounds fake. I first discovered FlyKitt on my Bhutan trip where the lead said, everybody's got to get this. And I was like, I don't want this. It's just vitamins. It arrived in a really neat, small, organized packet with everything you need. I was again, pissed off cause I was like, I don't need vitamins. I can buy vitamins. I even demanded a refund before I started taking it. And this is my friend, so you can tell him we're great buddies, but he told me, "Hey, follow the schedule," which comes in the FlyKitt app. You enter some basic info like when you arrive, what time you want to wake up, when you go to sleep, the schedule tells you when to eat, what to have, and when. I followed the schedule to Bhutan and back and now it's like shut up and take my money every trip, I'd never get jet lag. I buy it for every international trip with a big time zone difference. It's not just placebo. There's a lot of studies behind this, a lot of science. It's worked every single time. And of course, we always laugh about how much of an a-h*le I was in the beginning about this business. This is all based on research with Navy SEALs. Flying causes inflammation, which is brain fog, low energy, gut issues, all that stuff, and of course, your circadian rhythm. FlyKitt leverages cutting-edge AI, which of course, it does, to precisely time, light, proprietary supplementation, eating, sleep, a little bit of caffeine here and there to tune your physiology. I, again, almost don't even care why it works. It just works super freaking well, and it's easy to do. So go to flykitt.com with two Ts. That's F-L-Y-K-I-T-T.com. To get a FlyKitt for 15 percent off with FlyKitt with two Ts dot com, promo code JORDAN. A lot of you have ordered this saying it's a game changer. I'm not lying about this as a real endorsement. Again, I just think this is the bomb. Try it out on your next trip and let me know how it's working out for you. I guarantee you it's going to do well. Well, they guarantee it, but I also guarantee it. How's that?

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[00:59:59] Now for the rest of Out of the Loop.

[01:00:03] All right, now that we've heard all about Wagner, let's talk to my friend and former show guest Brian Klaas on coups, why coups work, why they fail, and of course, why this one failed, and what happens next. Here we go.

[01:00:14] Brian, thanks for doing the show, man. I know you have a super interesting field of study. You've been on the show before about corruption but also coups, pretty damn cool area of academic research.

[01:00:27] Brian Klaas: Yeah, I've traveled around the world interviewing people who have carried out coups and failed to carry out coups and gotten sort of caught out and gotten tortured, general soldiers, rebels, that sort of thing in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and post-Soviet Europe. So it's a very weird field of study, but it's an interesting one.

[01:00:43] Jordan Harbinger: It's got to be strange to research coups because you ask one side and they go, what coup because they're the ones who won or were challenged and the other guys are maybe dead.

[01:00:51] Brian Klaas: Well, it's really interesting because actually it's difficult to measure what a failed coup is because sometimes dictators invent them. There was a time I sort of uncovered a fake coup plot in Tunisia where people had thought it was real and these poor soldiers had basically just gotten dragged out of the barracks and tortured just because the dictator wanted to pretext to purge the military. So it's very difficult to measure the data because sometimes they just fake them. And the coup plotters never tell me. The real reason why they did it, which is usually power or money. They usually have some sort of pretext. So you have to basically listen to people who lie to you and read between the lines about what they're really doing.

[01:01:27] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That's a whole different show. By the way. You were here on the show before episode 650 on the Corruptible Influence of Power, really, really interesting episode. But we're here to talk about Putin and coups because speaking of fake coups, I'm not even sure what the hell just happened and I think a lot of people are in the same boat. Your article on The Atlantic, which I'll link in the show notes, was fascinating. You mentioned since World War II, two-thirds of dictators have been deposed in coups. If I'm a dictator, that statistic is not comforting at all.

[01:01:55] Brian Klaas: Yeah, I mean it's the main way they get ousted from power and very often, even when we think there's a revolution. Like in the Arab Spring for example, there were revolutions in the sense that they were broad base mass uprisings, but the actual thing that got the dictator out of power was in the military turned on them. And that's the way it tends to work in these regimes. You can sort of weather a little bit of protest. You don't really care that much if your people don't like you. It's what the people in the military want, and that's why every dictator when they come to power starts making precautions to basically insulate themselves from the risk of a coup because they know it's the most likely way they're going to get taken out.

[01:02:29] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned that the coup is usually a faction in the military, and I believe I copied this from your piece here, half asleep last night, but you said, "When the coup is carried out by a faction within the military sector," as has happened in Russia, so we're talking about Wagner having possibly attempted whatever this coup was, "the dynamics become more complicated. Such a coup plot is not like a battle in which the bigger superior force tends to win. Rather the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception." Flesh that out a little bit because that certainly seems to be, I don't know a hell of a lot about military, but when a mercenary force that doesn't even have any air assets goes against the entire Russian military, despite their performance in Ukraine, I'm immediately thinking, how do they expect to win? This is virtually impossible.

[01:03:14] Brian Klaas: Yeah, so this is a big difference between civil wars and coups. So civil wars, you actually expect to fight, and that's where the force strength actually matters. So it matters how many guns, how many tanks, how many soldiers you've got. In a coup, it's all about perception. And the reason is because basically nobody actually wants to fight. The Russian military didn't really have much interest in fighting Wagner, and nor did Wagner group have much of an interest in fighting the Russian military. So what they're trying to do instead is they're trying to topple the government through effectively what's called a coordination game in political science. It basically means they're trying to convince people they're going to win in the end, and they need to join the winning team.

[01:03:48] So I liken it to a sports team, right? I mean, the fans abandon the team when they lose all their games because it's pointless. They're not going to make the playoffs as soon as they start to get towards the playoffs, and it looks like a serious championship drive, all of a sudden, the stands fill up. And that's exactly what happens with coups, is you're trying to make it seem inevitable because nobody wants to be caught out on the losing team. So if you're part of Putin's elite and you think that Prigozhin is going to win, you're going to abandon ship because you don't want to be the loyalist who then gets tortured after they do win.

[01:04:19] And the exact same is true on the flip side, right? If you're someone who's part of the Wagner mercenary force, you're basically thinking to yourself, "Well, if we get caught and we lose, we might die." So all of this is sort of a confidence game. And what you're really hoping to do when you have a coup plot underway is you're trying to convince the other side that it's inevitable. And as soon as you do that, you win. Because what happens is there's a sort of bandwagon effect where elites, you know, senior figures in the Russian military, for example, would start to defect. And for that to have successfully been carried out, this coup plot would've needed to maintain itself for longer. As it were, it fizzled pretty quickly, and as a result, people waited on the sidelines and they waited long enough to not have to make a decision.

[01:05:03] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. That does seem to be, now that you explain it from the outside, what happened, right? They roll into this Rostov-on-Don Wagner, rolls into Rostov-on-Don this military hub. People kind of don't seem to care, and I think it was you who pointed this out in your piece in The Atlantic, the soldiers are just running around getting coffee from places that used to be at McDonald's and are now like, you know, Russo coffee or whatever. Nobody seems to care. Like they just go to work and go home again and drive around the tank that's blocking their way home and take a different route. And it's just another day in Russia, like a Grand Theft Auto reality, right? And they just don't care. And then the guy leaves and he gets a couple photo ops of people shaking his hands, whatever those were, and then leaves. And now those same people in that city are just going back to work, but the tank isn't in their way anymore. It's just comically ridiculous. Why did Prigozhin attempt the coup in the first place and why did he think he would succeed? It seems like he read the room really poorly.

[01:06:01] Brian Klaas: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that it's worth speculating on, but there's no clear answer. It seems very unlikely that he actually thought he was going to seize power. Putin was not going to just let him. And unless there had been a mass sort of defection very quickly from the elites around Putin, this was probably doomed to fail. And most coup plots do fail, but he did abruptly turn around the troops. And that's where the speculation is around what leverage Putin had.

[01:06:26] A classic ploy for dictators is to threaten the family of a coup plotter or to just say, "Look, we're going to kill you when this is all over." And that's a pretty credible threat from Vladimir Putin, especially because the Russian state has the ability to kill people anywhere in the world. And so even if he were to flee an exile, they would know that they could get targeted at any point. So I think that there's delusion, ambition, misreading. Maybe he thought that the entire apparatus, all the oligarchs, et cetera, would immediately turn on Putin, but that clearly didn't happen. And given how long it took for the sort of convoy to approach Moscow, there was a lot of time for Putin to prepare.

[01:07:06] And the best coups, the most successful ones are genuinely lightning strikes where they sort of, they last a few hours and the dictators arrested in the first hour. The airport is seized, the airwaves are shut down. And none of that was going to happen here. So I didn't know it was going to happen during it because these are very difficult to predict events. But my money would not have been on this one succeeding just because the kinds of things that have to happen were not happening.

[01:07:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there's that saying, if you take a shot at the king, you better not miss. And this just seems like a huge miss. He rolled in, everybody sort of looked on, and then he ends up turning around so quickly that any military leader who was thinking like, "Do I get my Spetsnaz guys and join these guys and march on the Kremlin? Let's see what happens." They went to bed and they woke up, or not even, they took a nap and they woke up and it was over already. And now, he's just supposedly somewhere in Belarus and all as well for Russia. It doesn't make any sense. There were like, at least from the sound of it, from the look of it, very few defections either to or from Wagner or the Russian military.

[01:08:11] Brian Klaas: Yeah, so the main thing to understand here is that information flows don't operate the same way in dictatorships as they do in democracies. So in other words, Putin doesn't really know the strength of his adversaries or who really supports him because everybody lies to him. So he has no way of knowing whether his elites are actually going to hold strong or defect in the last minute. And the same thing, the Wagner group really doesn't understand that the layout either. So what ends up happening is they sort of roll into this town and everyone's just looking around and thinking like, "Who's going to win this? We don't want to get caught out." So nobody knows where the momentum is, and this is where the political implications of the coup are actually quite profound for Putin, because everybody has now seen something they didn't know that somebody is willing to challenge Putin and that information is not going to go away.

[01:08:56] So Putin doesn't know the real strength of loyalty within his regime. He does know that now everybody is looking around and thinking, "Is there going to be somebody else who challenges me?" And that is very, very damaging for a dictator because once the floodgates open, where it's like the myth has been shattered, the myth being everyone loves Putin, right? As soon as that's been shattered, then the question is, is somebody else waiting in the wings? And that's where dictators get really paranoid and that's why the most likely outcome of this. Is going to be Putin trying to assert control through purges and trying to do sort of shows of strength. It's the kind of thing that dictators do to sort of reassert dominance after they have had this moment of obvious vulnerability that's been on display for everyone else.

[01:09:37] Jordan Harbinger: I noticed that on the news they showed Shoigu, who's the defense minister, who I guess Wagner was saying, "Hey, we need to get rid of this guy," he showed up pretty quick. And it seems like that level of very deliberate visibility is from Putin to say, not only did you go home or go to Belarus, not even home, you just went to Belarus in exile. The guy you wanted to get rid of. Here he is on TV giving a press conference. We didn't capitulate to any of your stuff. That's not why you left. You didn't leave because you got one of your demands. You left because we kicked you out of here knowing that you were going to leave in a body bag or you're going to leave on your own because you're in my good graces for the time being because I'm so benevolent or whatever that sort of message was. It almost seems like Putin has coup-proofed himself in some ways by showing up on TV right away. Although you can kind of hear the anger and fear in his voice or am I imagining that?

[01:10:27] Brian Klaas: No, I mean I think this is the most dangerous time he's had in his 20-plus years in power coop-proofing is something that happens both sort of long-term and also in the actual moment of a coup being underway. So the long-term stuff is actually creating structures that are like your insurance policy.

[01:10:43] I've been around Madagascar for example, where there are literally cars parked outside the palace and the people who live there and sort of work there in this elite special forces unit, their only job is to shoot back if someone shoots at the president, and that's all they're paid to do, right? So you pay them an extra amount of money so that when the coup happens, they don't turn the guns on you, they shoot back. So you have things like that. You also play various factions off each other. So they jockey for power and they want to tear each other down. That protects you. And then, during the actual coup itself, the main thing you have to do is be highly visible.

[01:11:15] If you look back on the history of coups, a lot of successful ones have taken place, believe it or not, when a dictator is under general anesthesia, when they're actually taking a surgery abroad.

[01:11:25] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I was going to say, is that a literal thing or a figurative thing? So literally asleep.

[01:11:28] Brian Klaas: Yeah.

[01:11:29] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[01:11:29] Brian Klaas: And it's done very, very carefully. It's why dictators are very cagey about talking about their health because if you know that they're going to be literally asleep having a surgery, let's say you're an African dictator who's traveled back to Paris or London for a surgery, that moment of vulnerability means that that extra time, let's say it's you know, six, eight hours, that it takes you to actually muster a response. That's enough for the government to fall.

[01:11:50] Coups usually are carried out, the Russian one was a bit of an exception, they're usually carried out in less than six hours. So it's a situation where speed and timing actually make a huge difference, which is why I said, you know, look, nobody knows how this is going to turn out because these things are extremely contingent events. Sometimes the timing's really good. You catch a break. People bandwagon to your side. All of a sudden the government collapses. Other times, you're unlucky, the timing's bad.

[01:12:15] Erdogan in Turkey in 2016 went on FaceTime and broadcast the nation, and he did that because he knew that if he waited to go to his studio, his government might actually collapse.

[01:12:24] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[01:12:24] Brian Klaas: So he just instead broadcast from his phone.

[01:12:26] Jordan Harbinger: That shows you the need for speed. If they're going, "Sir, we need to get you to the main studio with all the lighting," and you're like, "No, no, no, no. I'm three hours away because I'm at my cottage. Where's my iPad? Turn all the room lights on and open the windows and get me a microphone if we have one." I mean, when you're defending your regime using AirPods, you're potentially in some trouble.

[01:12:45] Brian Klaas: I mean, it's literally what happened. He was away from the city. And that's why they struck when they did. It's why dictators are really paranoid about travel and orchestrating their movements. And they usually put in, when they go on international trips for diplomacy, they usually have very strong contingency plans in place where they've delegated what to do if a coup happens because they all know — it's not rocket science. Right? Like most of these people came to power in coups. So they understand pretty viscerally that it's the way they can get toppled as well and they learn on the job very, very quickly.

[01:13:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. Interesting. So what other ways has Putin coup-proofed himself? Right? Now that I've hear you talk about this, it makes me think all this stuff with Prigozhin going on Telegram and doing these videos about how Shoigu is terrible and Shoigu being like, "What are you talking about? You're just a dumb mercenary." That almost seems like he's got those two factions fighting. Now, whether that bit him in the ass a little bit with Wagner going, "Hey look, we're getting away with this. Why don't we just drive to Moscow?" I guess that's another story, but what other ways has he created in fighting and things like that? You do see a lot of oligarchs falling out windows, and I wonder if that's part of it.

[01:13:45] Brian Klaas: Yeah, so there's the culture of fear stuff where it's obvious that standing up to Putin is a very, very dangerous game. There's the factions where none of them want to let the other one get an upper hand because that means they lose. So sort of playing people off each other. There's sort of these elite special forces units within some of the Russian intelligence branches, and those are supposed to be the line of last defense, the sort of Praetorian Guard. And then you also try to make sure that nobody gets their own individual power base.

[01:14:09] Now, one of the reasons why the Wagner group, I think was allowed to do this is because the imperative in Ukraine became more urgent than coup-proofing. So normally, it's the case that a dictator will not allow any single force to amass a significant amount of power because they understand they're like the enemy within the potential enemy within. But because they had the enemy without, which was Ukraine, you had the enemy outside. He allowed the Wagner group to develop its own power base, and that's what ultimately led to this moment.

[01:14:37] There are even strategies that dictators use where when somebody gets popular, They give them a plum post as the ambassador to, you know, the United States or France or something like that, to get them physically out of the country. And it's even packaged as this nice honor. And, you know, often the person likes being able to take their family to this elite, you know, sort of experience in Europe, but it's literally done just because it's hard to launch a coup from 3000 miles away.

[01:15:00] So there's a trade-off in dictatorships as well between coups and civil wars. So if you let people amass power internally within your regime, then they can take you out in a coup. If you sideline people like what's about to happen with the Wagner group it seems like is that there's a risk of a civil war. Because even though that's unlikely, I think in this case, in Russia, in the, at least the short term, the more you push people outside the regime and they can't get power for themselves inside of it, the more there's a sort of risk of sort of outsider violence. So the more you damp down the coup risk, the more you increase the Civil war risk and vice versa.

[01:15:34] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned that it's hard to let any group gain power. That seems like in dictatorships, I may be overstepping here, it seems like then in dictatorships, you can't have a super powerful military because they're the people who are going to overthrow you. So by virtue of the way that Russia works, he has to limit military power, which is not great because you're fighting a war in Ukraine against a NATO-trained army. So I don't, how's that going to work?

[01:15:58] Brian Klaas: Yeah, I mean there are trade-offs here, right? I mean, one of the things I did research in Tunisia and after the Arab Spring collapse, they realized they basically didn't have an army because the dictator had sidelined the army and had set up a private police force, secret police, and that was loyal to him, right? So he wanted to downgrade the army and, and sort of upgrade this loyalist police force. But then when the dictatorship collapses and you can't have the secret police, you actually need national defense. So there's like a trade off here, and they had to rebuild the military from scratch.

[01:16:27] There's other places where what you do is you try to sort of rotate generals. And this is a classic hilarious case in Madagascar and another of the countries I work in where there's something like several thousand generals, I think it's 1000 generals for like 6,000 soldiers, something like that. And it's just because they keep promoting people to buy their loyalty and then they rotate them. But it's hilarious because it's like the most top-down structure and then all the generals fight each other and they keep each other down.

[01:16:52] So I'm not an expert on the Russian military, but I would say that this is the kind of thing in coups that you look at a situation like these trade-offs and you think, what's my most imperative problem now? Well, for Putin for the last several months and certainly for the last year, it's been military dominance in Ukraine. But the more you amp up those generals, delegate to them, do all the things that make them an effective fighting force, the more they get bastions of power. And that's where the cracks and the regime start to show.

[01:17:18] So dictators are basically people who are constantly living in fear. And always taking actions that decrease one form of risk to them and necessarily increase another form. There's no costless action. So whatever they do is going to risk that they have down the road a new threat to their power, and they just have to make a lot of short-term decision making, which is why they often break apart catastrophically in the end.

[01:17:40] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's all just sort of, how do I get through the next couple of months here and not, let's think about what's going to be good 10, 20 years from now. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. All right. In closing here, one of the worst things for a dictator is to look weak or to have those cracks show, like you mentioned earlier. Putin definitely just got a slap across the face, so he can't let that go, right? I mean, yes, he exiled him to Belarus. Who cares? That guy's got to fall out at three windows. Now, I would imagine. He can never fix this, right? The vase has shattered onto the floor. He can glue it back together, but you're still going to see the cracks. What do you think he's going to do? What do you think we're going to see in the next few weeks or months for him to try to glue the vase together in a way where maybe from the outside, you can't really tell.

[01:18:24] Brian Klaas: Yeah, so there's a few things here. One is that you have, again, a trade off. So if you go too hard against the coup plotters, you might actually make more coup plotters because there's people who are sympathetic to this mutiny or coup plot, whatever you want to call it. And they're going to be angry if there's too much of a crackdown.

[01:18:41] So there might be a second wave, right? But if you do nothing, if you look weak, then there's going to be coup plotters who are just opportunists who think, "Well, this guy is going to fall anyway. I might as well be me who's in charge." So there's a sort of sweet spot, and there's some research from a couple of years ago in political science that basically shows that sort of modest purges that don't harden the opposition to the regime, but do send a clear message to the regime's opponents are what actually works best for maintaining power for the longest.

[01:19:08] So, you know, I don't think that Putin reads political science journals, but if he were to the smart move here, unfortunately, I'm not trying to give advice to Putin, but it's the sort of thing that tends to work in these regimes is to do enough of a purge to show your dominance, but not so much that you alienate larger sections of your elite class, which frankly, in this instance are already pretty skeptical about Putin because of the war going so badly.

[01:19:30] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So we don't really know, but I know there's some raids going on Wagner officers' families, and they're kind of saying, "Hey, we're just going to look through all your stuff and treat you poorly because you were on the wrong side." So maybe he's trying to tow that line a little bit, right? The idea that, "Okay, we might not throw you guys out of windows, but we want you to know that you have to join the military now or retire. You can't just go back to Wagner and keep making money in a private army and maybe threaten me again. You have a choice here. You're either with us or you're out of the game entirely, or you will die a horrible, slow, painful death."

[01:20:06] Brian Klaas: Yeah. I mean, I've written something to this effect where I've said, look, it's very difficult to predict these situations because they're extremely different from each other.

[01:20:13] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:20:14] Brian Klaas: But the one prediction I'm pretty confident in is that Yevgeny Prigozhin is not going to die an old man. I think that's pretty clear and he's not going to die a natural death because ultimately, it's probably not a wise move to do anything really severe right now. But six months, a year or two years down the road, I think that guy is going to be watching his back for the rest of his life.

[01:20:33] Jordan Harbinger: Definitely. Yeah. He's going to be checking his teeth with a Geiger counter if he's smart.

[01:20:37] Brian Klaas, thank you very much. I know you've got a Substack going. We'll link it in the show notes and we'll link to The Atlantic piece in the show notes as well. Where else should we send people? Because you do have fascinating content. I read pretty much all your stuff, at least all the stuff that I find online.

[01:20:50] Brian Klaas: Yeah, I've, I've got a podcast called Power Corrupts and the Substack is called The Garden of Forking Paths.

[01:20:56] Jordan Harbinger: Great. Thank you so much, man.

[01:20:57] Brian Klaas: Thank you. Thanks a lot.

[01:21:00] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with geopolitics analyst, Peter Zeihan.

[01:21:05] Peter Zeihan: We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident the US is going to intervene or not. And I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what's allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model. Less than one percent of that shipping happens on land, and that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict and competition.

[01:21:30] Countries are increasingly find in, in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it, and then producing more locally. We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese started to break down, and before the German industrial model started to implode. This has just sped everything up, so we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year which should suggest that we are going to have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow. I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it. The biggest loser by far is China. Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed.

[01:22:14] I think we're in the final decade of the European Union because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model. And without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence. The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around. We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never going to last and it's, it's going to be a rough ride. So anyone who thinks that this is going to be easy is wrong in every possible way.

[01:22:43] Jordan Harbinger: For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:22:53] Fascinating stuff. The stories developing might even end up with another out of the loop. Who knows? All links and resources mentioned in the show will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot. That includes transcripts also in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

[01:23:14] And yes, we have a newsletter, highlights and takeaways from the most popular episodes of the show going all the way back. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it, and I can reply to you if you reply to me there so you can send me your feedback, passive-aggressive, constructive, whatever. I'll take it all snarky comments/appreciation. It's brand new. I'd love to hear what you think of it. jordanharbinger.com/news. And don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well. Also on the website at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[01:23:43] Once again, a reminder that the Stitcher app will no longer work for any podcasts as of August 29th, 2023. So if you're using the Stitcher app, time to switch. If you're on Android, Podcast Addict is a good one, Castbox. And if you're on iOS, I suggest Overcast or Apple Podcasts. The Stitcher app is going away, folks.

[01:24:02] I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and I will say hello there as well.

[01:24:07] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who needs a little bit of background on this, is interested in the coup, interested in geopolitics, definitely share this episode with them. There's probably new stuff in here that they don't know. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

[01:24:42] Paula Barros: Hi, Cold Case Files fans. We have some exciting news for you. Brand new episodes of Cold Case Files are dropping in your feed. And I'm your new host, Paula Barros. I'm a Cold Case Files super fan, true crime aficionado. And I love telling stories with unbelievable twists and turns. And this season of Cold Case Files has all of that and more.

[01:25:03] Male 1: I want to die.

[01:25:04] Male 2: You don't want to die.

[01:25:05] Male 1: I want to die.

[01:25:06] Paula Barros: Her cause of death was strangulation.

[01:25:09] Male 3: Lying face down on the bed.

[01:25:10] Male 4: She was in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.

[01:25:13] Male 5: A little bit of bloody froth had come from Deborah's mouth.

[01:25:16] Male 6: He panicked and decided he was getting rid of the body.

[01:25:18] Female: I saw danger in everything.

[01:25:20] Paula Barros: So get ready. You don't want to miss what this season has in store. New episodes of Cold Case Files drop every Tuesday. Subscribe to Cold Case Files wherever you listen to podcasts.