Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 145. Putin under threat as Wagner mutiny About this episode As Wagner Group mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin apparently rebel against the Russian Army, what impact could this have on the war with Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s position as president? Emergency podcast recorded at lunchtime on Saturday 24th June.
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0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:42 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics emergency podcast with me, Rory Stewart.
1:47 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
1:48 Rory Stewart? And we've got Alistair in his kitchen about to go to a wedding. So he's going to get in real trouble from the family if they find out. He's got about half an hour before he's got to rush off for his wedding. But what's happened and the reason we've hit the emergency podcast button is the developments in Russia and Ukraine absolutely astonishing. Poroshkin, who is the, sometimes called Putin chef, and who's this very sinister figure who was in jail for nine years, essentially part of Russian criminal gangs in the 1980s, runs this group called the Wagner Group, which has provided 25,000 of the fighting soldiers in Ukraine.
2:28 Rory Stewart? And he has now turned around and effectively launched something between a mutiny and a coup d'etat, where he's announced that he's captured the largest Russian military base, Rostov-on-Don, on the front line, and is demanding the dismissal of the senior military commanders. And what do you make of it all, Alasdair? What's your sense of it?
2:48 Alastair Campbell? It's very, very hard to know what to make of it. I mean, he's a fascinating character. Look, he spent a lot of time in jail in the past, bit of a crook, got close to the very oligarch class. He became known as Putin's chef because he was, there are actually pictures of him, I remember him serving George Bush at a dinner with, he was actually the guy, there's a picture of him leaning over Bush as Bush is talking to Putin. There's another picture of him leaning over Putin as he's serving him food, and that's why he became known as Putin's chef. And then got into this space, this mercenary space, which I, we've talked about this before, you know, and I've talked about
3:30 Alastair Campbell? it in relation to Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad's book, The Sovereign Individual, where he predicted this idea of mercenary armies becoming as important as state actors. And I wonder if this is the first case of this being played out. Now, the truth is, the Russian-controlled military is way bigger than what this guy commands. But at the same time, the very fact that he has, for whatever reason, decided, he's had long-running arguments with the Defence Minister, Shoigu, and with the head of the Armed Forces, Gerasimov, he's constantly slagging them off. He did a vituperative social media post on Telegram
4:11 Alastair Campbell? recently, where he basically was effing and blinding, or whatever the Russian effing and blinding is, and he was pictured in front of corpses of his troops, many of whom, if you remember, were let out of prison to fight and were told that if they went and fought, they wouldn't have to go back to prison when they came back. And whether this is the classic thing of the dictator sitting at the top, allowing people below him to kind of fight things out, but the fact that Putin had to do that, address to the nation today, looking very sober, I think he was wearing a black tie even, and essentially saying, this is an act of treason, this is a stab in the back of our country, we will crush these people. And yet, you've now got two armies going around the place. So how the hell? This is a real boon for Ukraine, that's for sure.
4:56 Rory Stewart? It's unbelievable, and there's been wonderful social media stuff, which we'll share with listeners, of Ukrainians trolling. There's a great shot, which begins with quite a serious Ukrainian soldier with a big beard in his camouflage uniform, looking at a screen, and then it cuts to a massive bag of popcorn next to him. And he's basically sitting there just eating popcorn, watching Putin's speech. And the general idea of the joke is that the Ukrainians are just going to sit back and watch the Russians tear themselves to pieces. One of the things I've noticed talking to people this morning is that, this being Russia, there are an enormous number of conspiracy theories going around. People in Moscow are terrified, they don't know what to make of it. Some of them initially thought that this
5:40 Rory Stewart? was all fake, and that Putin had organised this with Prochkin as a way of getting rid of his senior generals. So he was encouraging Prochkin to speak out, and that would give him the excuse to clean house. But it looks less and less likely that that was the case, because it's very difficult not to see this now as something that makes Putin look really weak, undermines his credibility. And it's almost impossible to imagine him meeting Prochkin's demands, when you've got 25,000 armed men seizing a military base, claiming they're thinking of marching on Moscow, which is 660 miles away from Rostov, so taking a bit of time. Unless he gets rid of his army high command, how can he get rid of his army high command, without looking as though he's just given into mutiny?
6:25 Alastair Campbell? The truth is that Prigozhin has been very, very critical of the overall military strategy at various points throughout. And look, there's some talk that he actually sees himself as Putin's successor, definitely sees himself as being a better military commander than the people who are actually supposedly in charge. But if you think about it, having this mercenary army, where the loyalty to flag and country, I don't care what anybody tells me, is likely to be less than if you were fighting for your own flag and country. It's an untenable situation unless the people at the top have total control. And what you're
7:10 Alastair Campbell? seeing is this guy effectively saying, you're not in control of this, I am. And the point you're making about what people in Russia are meant to think... One, it'd be very interesting to see, I'm always interested to hear Steve Rosenberg on the BBC, because he, of course, is telling us what he thinks, but he's also having to track Russian media. So it's important to know what the Russians are being told about what's happening now beyond the conspiracy theories. What actually even the state media are saying about this, because they presumably have covered Putin's statement in full, but he didn't name Prigozhin. It felt almost like he's saying, there's something going on in here and we're over here and we're having to deal with it. But you could tell from his body language, and I can remember from from meetings with Putin, although he
7:53 Alastair Campbell? looks very, very calm all the time, he has this sort of tightening of his face and his cheek muscles go. And you can always tell when he's very, very, very, very tense. And in a funny sort of way, I looked at it, first of all, I couldn't, because I'm useless and Fiona's not here at the moment, I couldn't get the sound to work on my laptop. And so I actually, I couldn't, I saw him first without sound. I watched, I watched him and he looked really, really, really tense and angry.
8:25 Rory Stewart? It's very weird, isn't it? At the moment there, as you say, Putin is not named Prigozhin and Prigozhin is not naming Putin. And Prigozhin has named, as you said, the the Defence Minister and the Chief of the Army, who he called a bunch of fat cats sitting around at home. This has also been a very weird moment. So Prigozhin's a very wealthy guy, runs this amazing network of grocery stores, restaurant businesses, catering. But he's clearly found a new lease of life, being right out there on the front line with his troops and sees himself, and reinventing himself as a general. On the private military companies, one of the things I think the hasn't been covered as much is that the Wagner Group is just one of 10 major private military companies now operating in Russia and on the front
9:09 Rory Stewart? line. The Defence Minister himself has his own private military company. And in a sense, Putin has the equivalent, this thing which is being described as the National Guard. It's not really the National Guard, it's what used to be called Omon and the Interior Ministry troops combined. So it's called Roskavadia. And this is nearly half a million people that Putin is relying on, separate from the Ministry of Defence, to protect him. They're his Praetorian Guard. They're like the the Roman emperors relying on their Praetorian Guard in Rome to try to stop it happening.
9:41 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And how often do the the Guard turn against the Emperor in history?
9:48 Alastair Campbell? I would have said at the start of this, I don't know because I don't know their relationship, but the sense was that Prigozhin was there and given so much power because Putin did see him as completely one of his. And yet, since then, we've had this clear fallout. He doesn't call out Putin, as you say, but in calling out the Defence Minister and the head of the Armed Forces, he's effectively calling out Putin. The other thing that I think is interesting in this is he's clearly, the places where he's directing this mutiny attempted coup, call it what you will, they are very, very strategic places. The first place, you know, Rostov-on-Don is the headquarters of the Russian Southern Military District
10:32 Alastair Campbell? Command. So they're the ones, if I'm right, that I think I'm right on this, they're the ones that will probably be most directly engaged in the direction of the handling of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
10:44 Rory Stewart? 100%.
10:45 Alastair Campbell? So how does that work out?
10:47 Rory Stewart? So from the Ukrainians' point of view, this is incredibly beneficial. I think there's going to be a big decision that the Ukrainian commanders have to make. There will be some people saying, "Mount the counter-offensive now. These guys are so distracted. They're all fighting each other. This is the time to break through, drive all the way through to Crimea." There are going to be other people saying, "Don't do it now. Let the Russians tear themselves to pieces, because if you mount the counter-offensive now, it will just reunify the Russians and give them a reason to pull it together." And I think at the moment, the Ukrainians are on the second path. They're, as it were, sitting back in that great video, eating popcorn and watching the Russians do it. Well, they make some tactical advances. So they've just recaptured Bakhmut, which was this horrible,
11:31 Rory Stewart? you know, nearly, I don't know, tens of thousands of people killed in trench warfare. The Russians just narrowly seizing that. It looks like they've lost that again. So I think we can expect the Ukrainians, at the very least, to be taking tactical advantage of this all the way along the frontline over the next few days.
11:44 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. Zelensky has posted on his Telegram account, and I, look, one of the things I really admire about Zelensky, whatever's happening, he always essentially says the same things.
11:59 Rory Stewart? It's called message discipline.
12:00 Alastair Campbell? He's got such message. Well, it's message discipline and adaptability. It would be so easy for him to sort of go out and say really big dramatic things. And he's basically just said, anyone who chooses the path of evil destroys itself. That's what I call a big strategic message. Russia's weakness is obvious. Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government. Nice personal insult. And now there is so much chaos that no like can hide it. And all this is one person, although he's not able to lead to anything else. So in other words, he's basically, I guess he's looking at somebody like Prigozhin and saying, right, I may despise you, I may despise what you do, but I'm going to make this all about Putin, because this now is about trying to to divide opinion within Russia.
12:44 Alastair Campbell? And people will, I mean, you've now got, you've now got the military out on the streets of Moscow, because they're obviously worried about where this goes.
12:50 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, the people on the streets of Moscow, this sort of Praetorian guard lot separate from the Defence Ministry, it's Putin trying to trying to hunker down. I I think you've also put your finger on something very interesting there, which we should talk about more when more information comes out, which is the extent to which this has really been exactly what Zelensky has been trying to achieve, that his use of social media, his use of propaganda, has been about whipping up the conflict between Prigozhin, Putin and the generals as much as he can. And and this is really a kind of triumph of that kind of approach.
13:25 Alastair Campbell? I think I see the other thing that's that's interesting is so we know from history that the arm of Russian intelligence and security stretches very, very far, that if it means wiping out people on the streets of the UK, they do it. They have been, one of their big strategic goals since this whole thing started has been to take out Zelensky, and they have failed. Will Putin be sitting there thinking, right, we have to take out Prigozhin?
13:51 Rory Stewart? And and that's, so you've put your finger on it, because. In a sense, one of the things motivating Prigozhin is that he felt they were about to take him out. So there had been a bungled attempt, it seems, by the FSB, the KGB's successors, to try to abduct him. And then there was this attack, he claims, against the Wagner camps, led by an amazing, you know, rockets, helicopter gunships and the rest, which was the final thing that triggered him. And that was an attack by Sergei Shogun against him, which triggered him to move and seize Rostov. So I think Prigozhin felt, or at least he's suggesting that his back was against the wall, that he was going to be killed anyway, and that
14:34 Rory Stewart? he needed to move before the Defence Ministry and the intelligence services took him out. And it's at that point that these 10 different types of military unit, how they split, who goes with who and who remains neutral, is absolutely critical. Now, I think it's not likely, and this is me really, you know, I apologize, because the chance of this being right is going to go wrong quickly because we're early days. But it doesn't feel like a coup d'etat, feels like a mutiny. And the difference is this, a coup d'etat, you really have to get up to Moscow, you've got to grab the president, you've got to take the radio and television stations, you've got to take control in the first two, three hours. If you don't, generally, the lumbering state wakes up and over the next few days
15:17 Rory Stewart? crushes you. This is much more like a mutiny. But that will feel to Putin. And then the speech you were referring to, he talks about 1917, and that's something that really terrifies people, because of course, the Russian revolution came out of a mutiny of soldiers on those fronts. And that, and so that's why he's thinking 1917, he's thinking mutinies of the collapsed regime.
15:38 Alastair Campbell? The second city where the Wagner forces have now reached and where they've seized the military facilities as well is, I don't know how it's pronounced, Voronezh, V O R O N E Z H, which is actually halfway between Rostov and Moscow. So that's, you know, and he's only got, he's got 25,000 troops that have been operating in Ukraine. But as you say, we've talked before about the, the reach of the Wagner group, all pretty much right around Africa. How many forces can he call upon more generally if he would try to to build up?
16:12 Rory Stewart? So just quickly on that, he seems to have demobilised at least 25,000. So he could almost double his forces by bringing back the people that he'd demobilised.
16:20 Alastair Campbell? And how many of the ones that he has would actually be loyal to him or thought, oh, no, I'm not getting involved in this. I went to fight for Russia, not for this guy. How many of the Russian forces would be thinking, do you know what, I've had enough of this, let's get involved with the guy. I mean, I think this is what Putin will be worried about, is actually where the where the chess pieces now now move to. And, you know, and then whether it extends to the population, that I think is the thing that will absolutely be terrifying.
16:45 Rory Stewart? So certainly, Sirovkin, who is the main commander up on the Ukrainian front, made this big statement yesterday, whether it was extraordinary. Sirovkin's this kind of big, burly, sort of central casting, looks like a cage fighter, a veteran of the Afghan wars. And he gave this speech yesterday, grabbing a gun, saying, you know, you're going to stand down. This is rebellion against the elected president, Russia. But his troops haven't moved. And that's presumably because the mutiny of Wagner reflects a general sense from all the Russian troops that they haven't been properly supplied, they've been betrayed, they've been treated as cannon fodder, they're not getting their arms, ammunition, food,
17:28 Rory Stewart? casualty evacuation. So at the moment, the danger for Putin is that the Ministry of Defence troops seem at the moment to be neutral. Now, I still think the odds are against, very, very strongly against Poroshkin. I mean, if you were betting, it still seems to me that he's in a weak position. He's triggered it without doing a proper coup. He might be able to get from 25 to 50,000 troops. But everything now rests on this Praetorian guard of almost half a million people, most of whom based around Moscow.
17:57 Alastair Campbell? He is a very, very, very emotional guy. You can see that in the way that he communicates. He's put out a message on on his telegram, on the official Wagner telegram channel as a direct response to Putin's statement. And one assumes this is him, I don't know, but this is what they put out, saying it is from him. And in his voice, about treason of Motherland, the president was deeply mistaken. We are patriots of our motherland. We've been fighting, brackets, unspoken, unlike Grasimov and Shoigu, and are fighting now. And nobody is going to, as demanded by the president, or the FSB, or anyone else, nobody is going to admit our guilt. Because we don't want our country to live anymore in corruption, lies and bureaucracy.
18:39 Rory Stewart? Yeah, so it's
18:40 Alastair Campbell? Pretty strong.
18:41 Rory Stewart? He's signaling one of the risks is also that he's whipping up not the progressive Russian left, but the right. There are people far to the right of Putin. People who think that the war should have been conducted in a much more brutal way, who will be looking to try to get that nationalist thing going. But probably not yet, maybe topple Putin, because I think there's a sense, somebody, I was talking to a great Russian expert earlier today called Chris Donnelly, who was our main man in defence intelligence for years and a great Sovietologist. And he was saying that it feels to him like the barons moving against King John in the Middle Ages. They don't want to actually replace King John, they want to control him. So his view is nobody wants to be the president of Russia, but they want to control Putin.
19:26 Alastair Campbell? Prokoshin is demanding that these people see him and he sits down and basically gives them a piece of his mind. It's very hard, given what he has done and given what he has since said about what he's done. It's very hard to see him back inside any kind of tent that has Putin at the top of it.
19:42 Rory Stewart? One hundred percent. And I think, I mean, we don't know yet what this means for the broader war. There are many, many scenarios. Prokoshin could be curled quite quickly. This could spark the Russian military to pull their socks up and mount a more professional counteroffensive, or it could collapse the country into a pseudo civil war. But what we do know is that this has revealed, and this is what I think Zelensky is emphasizing again and again, is just how sick the regime that Putin has created over the last 23 years is. It's a regime which isn't really controlled by oligarchs, it's actually controlled by people with guns. And as I say, almost 10 different warring military units run by warlords.
20:25 Rory Stewart? And this sense of a fragile dictator with a collapsing economy, whose only legitimacy is whipping up this nationalistic mad fantasy about NATO threatening them through Ukraine. All the sickness of that is now, is now coming to a head. And I think this may mean that whatever residual support they're getting from the rest of the world is going to fall away. I don't think the Chinese are going to be impressed by this. I don't think that they're allies elsewhere.
20:53 Alastair Campbell? No. And the rather sinister, baby-faced-looking guy with the long beard, who, the Chechen leader.
21:00 Alastair Campbell? Kadyrov, he's piled in as well now and has said that he's going to be sending forces to help Putin crush the rebellion. Whatever aims you're given, whatever promises are made to you, the safety of our state and cohesion of Russian society are the most important thing right now. And Chechen fighters from the Defence Ministry and National Guard have left for the zones of tension. Rebellion must be crushed. If that requires harsh measures, then we are ready. So, pretty big weekend, I would say.
21:30 Rory Stewart? Pretty big weekend. Thank you for cutting into your wedding. We're going to have to keep watching this space.
21:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
21:36 Rory Stewart? Thing could disappear in two days, or it could redefine the whole course of the conflict, and we'll have to keep on top of it.
21:42 Alastair Campbell? And, you know, there was a time, Rory, there was a time when the British response to something like this would be fundamental in the whole world. We want to see it and hear it. So it was a bit dispiriting just to hear the usual, the UK government's emergency committee is to meet to discuss the situation in Russia. There is an appeal for calm on all sides. And there is longstanding advice to British citizens not to travel to Russia.
22:08 Rory Stewart? Right.
22:08 Alastair Campbell? Thanks for that. Now, listen, before you go, Rory, can I, can I?
22:12 Rory Stewart? Oh, yes. You want to pay a tribute to a friend?
22:13 Alastair Campbell? Well, I do. We had some very, very sad news this morning. Margaret McDonagh, who's been ill for some time, but she was a massive part of the new Labour team in the 97 election campaign. One of the most formidable campaigners I've ever met. I think I mentioned on the podcast before, is the person who actually came in to see me one day and said, what do you think of this as a song? And it was, Things Can Only Get Better, which became our song. She's had a brain tumour for some time. Thankfully, I say thankfully, she came to a special dinner we had for Tony Blair's 70th a while back. It was all
22:56 Alastair Campbell? the original team. And even though she was in a wheelchair, couldn't really speak properly, had a carer, it was fantastic that she was able to come. But sadly, for most of us, that was the last time we saw her live. So I just want to say, Margaret McDonagh really was one of the key people who helped Labour win that first election and was one of the most amazing campaigners the Labour Party ever had. It was very sad that she's died. And you would probably know her sister, Siobhan, who was an MP for Mitchum and Merton.
23:23 Rory Stewart? I do. Sorry, sorry to hit that out. Good, well, you're now going to go off to a wedding. I would say that maybe that'll cheer you up, but I know that you don't really like weddings. But hopefully it's a friend so that I'll cheer you up. Yeah, anyway, we'll see you soon. See you soon. Thanks again. Bye-bye.
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