Ep. 86: What will Moscow do with the Wagner Group now?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Abbas Gallyamov used to have a pretty spectacular job.

ABBAS GALLYAMOV: I used to work as Vladimir Putin's speechwriter.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Vladimir Putin was Prime Minister at the time. Abbas worked for him on
and off from from 2000 to 2010.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: What kind of boss was he?

GALLYAMOV: Look, I understand it’s hard to believe it now, but actually, [he] always seemed
to be preoccupied with, uh, finding the most reasonable solutions to the problems.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Did he change your speeches all the time, or did he
compliment you when you wrote his speeches?

GALLYAMOV: He was quite complimentary. Look, don't get me wrong. I was never the top
speech writer, so I was never communicating with him directly. I visited many meetings he
held, maybe even hundreds of them. He was always very patient. He was never disrespectful
towards others. He seemed like a good corporate manager.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He said Putin knew that people would tell him what he wanted to hear
and he didn’t want to limit the discussion that way.

GALLYAMOV: And he was very cautious not to press on to people whom he wanted to listen
to, so he was, let me use the word, uh, “gentle.” Even the word gentle is okay. You know,
after the war started, I was thinking a lot [about] why it happened, how it happened, like,
that kind of person turned into this kind of person.

TEMPLE-RASTON: How did that kind of person turn into this kind of person….

CBS: Quite a few of Putin’s enemies have perished

Alexei Navalny: They discovered nerve agents in my blood. // Putin is developing new
program for this chemical weapon

1
TEMPLE-RASTON: People say the same thing about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the
Wagner Group, an ex-con, restauranteur, and favorite of Putin who ended up staging a
short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership and die in a fiery plane crash two
months later. But he didn’t seem to start this way.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Did you ever cross paths with Yevgeny Prigozhin?

GALLYAMOV: when I was working in the government, he opened the restaurant there in the
Moscow White House. It was a very good restaurant, I can say. We were visiting it with
pleasure.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Was he charming? Did you see him be charming?

GALLYAMOV: Look, when he was serving people, he was very charming. So he was, yes, he
was going around, smiling and asking people if they like everything

TEMPLE-RASTON: But from chef to paramilitary leader?

GALLYAMOV: Nobody could expect it. It was such an amazing transformation.

[MUSIC]

GALLYAMOV: Look, uh, the way he transformed, uh, during this year, it was shocking. He
turned out to be such a beast. Nobody could expect this, even Putin.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He turned out to be such a beast, he says, no one would expect this even
Putin. But of course Prigozhin went even further, starting to challenge if not Putin himself,
the way he was running things. And that, of course, led to his demise. Which means
Prigozhin’s paramilitary and media empire is up for grabs…

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things
cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital
world.

2
And today, Wagner after the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Military intelligence
agencies, private military companies and emissaries sent from the Kremlin are all vying for
control of his operation. And the only thing that is certain is that Wagner will emerge
transformed.

Stay with us.

[BREAK]

YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: It's May 20, 2023….

TEMPLE-RASTON: This May 20th video of Prigozhin is now the stuff of legend. Today, at
twelve noon, he says, Bakhmut was completely taken…

PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: Bakhmut….

TEMPLE-RASTON: Prigozhin is in battle fatigues pulled tight against his belly. He’s holding a
Russian flag against a howling wind. There are armed fighters standing behind him, holding
Wagner banners. Blood, honor, homeland, courage, they read. Just a little over a month
later, Prigozhin would launch an armed mutiny.

ABC: There’s been a dramatic escalation in tensions between Russia’s military and Wagner’s
mercenary…what he called a march for justice…
NEWS: Prigozhin claims his troops have crossed the border back into Russia from Ukraine.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Armed Wagner mercenaries entered Rostov-on-Don, home to one of

Russia’s largest military hubs and a command center for its forces in Ukraine, and parked
their armored personnel carriers right outside military headquarters. And Wagner forces,
Prigozhin said, were headed for Moscow.

CBS: Breaking news overseas. Tonight, security around Moscow is being tightened

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then, just as suddenly, Wagner’s leader called it off.

3
GALLYAMOV: You know, it's like in the horror movie when you are, uh, afraid. And at the
same time, you are like, you are enjoying it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Abbas Gallyamov again, the former Putin speechwriter. He was in
Israel by the time all this was unfolding.

GALLYAMOV: The feeling was like this, like, on the one hand, Prigozhin is not a good guy. He
is a criminal, he is an absolutely ruthless, unscrupulous, unprincipled, mean person. But on
the other hand, he was literally doing what nobody else could do. He was shaking the
system.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Why did he stop?

GALLYAMOV: Because he didn't plan any coup. He is part of the system. He wanted to make
the system more efficient. Not to change the system, like substitute it with something else.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Maybe put more of his own fighters on the ground instead of Russian
military forces. Maybe to show the military leaders who had been denying his men
ammunition that Prigozhin wasn’t to be trifled with. Abbas said it was never about ousting
Putin, because without Putin, Prigozhin wouldn’t survive. He’d end up in prison.

GALLYAMOV: The only thing he wanted, he wanted for them to hear him. His message was
simple. Hey, guys, if we go on like this, we will lose the war. We will lose the country, we'll
end up in prison. And, uh, so this step by step, it happened.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Prigozhin began showing his frustration with the Russian Ministry of
Defense by posting crazy videos on Telegram

PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: “You think you own these lives…”

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then he named names …

PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: Shoigu!

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s you, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: Gerasimov!

4
TEMPLE-RASTON: And you, Valery Gerasimov, who was head of the Russian Armed Forces.

PRIGOZHIN [RUSSIAN]: Shoigu! Gerasimov! “WHERE IS MY AMMO?”

TEMPLE-RASTON: He even pulled his troops out of Bakmut at one point. So maybe it was
inevitable that he wouldn’t know when to stop. This is a march for justice, he called his
armed rebellion, and we are going all the way to Moscow.

GALLYAMOV: Prigozhin was not the enemy of the system. He was part and parcel of the
system. This crisis would never have happened if Putin had been working properly.

After knowing Prigozhin for decades, Putin thought he could handle him. Until he
discovered that he couldn’t.

GALLYAMOV: Obviously he took Putin by surprise. I think he took himself by surprise. He

didn’t expect this from himself, probably.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The fact that Prigozhin wasn’t immediately arrested, pushed out a
window, or just disappeared surprised just about everyone. Instead Prigozhin was effectively
exiled to Belarus where he and members of the Wagner group established a camp.

BRIAN LISTON: It was formerly a Belarusian military camp north of Ukraine by about maybe
200 kilometers.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Brian Liston, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Recorded

Future’s Insikt group. Full disclosure, Click Here is part of Recorded Future News, an
editorially independent part of the company.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Brian says that though Prigozhin had technically been exiled, he
continued to move around as if nothing had happened.

LISTON: Traveling to and from Moscow, St. Petersburg, um, and still maintaining his
presence despite the fact that he was effectively exiled from Russian territory. It almost was
as if it actually wasn't an exile, um, just because of, his whereabouts and how he still had his
presence despite the fact.

5
TEMPLE-RASTON: Prigozhin, we know now, was also spending a lot of time in Africa. Wagner
had been operating there since 2017, helping counter insurgencies, propping up
strongmen. And they were in all the hot spots: Mail, the Central African Republic, Sudan.

In some cases, they would trade security services for mining rights or set up shell
companies that would contract out to other shell companies Wagner controlled. A couple of
years ago they even started a brewery to compete with a local French beer.

[EXPORT 33 COMMERCIAL]

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: Do you think he actually thought he was going to keep his
Africa operations?

LISTON: For the large part, this was fairly business as usual. He believed that he would still
continue to operate as is in Africa with not only Wagner Group, but, uh, his mining
companies or some of his investment firms to procure things like mineral rights, despite
everything that happened with the March for Justice.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And this isn’t speculation. Shortly after the mutiny, Prigozhin released a
video from the camp in Belarus.

[EARLY JULY VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s him welcoming his fighters to their new camp. And he announced
that for now they weren’t going to be fighting in Ukraine but instead would need to prepare
themselves for a “new journey to Africa.”

Prigozhin even went on a kind of whistle stop tour — first to Burkina Faso in Western Africa.
It booted out French troops in February. Then Libya to meet the head of armed forces in
Tripoli. And it was there that Prigozhin decided to make a kind of proof-of-life video…

[LIBYA VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Everything is fine, he kept saying. People keep talking about my

liquidation, but I’m fine. But behind the scenes this other thing was happening. Just as
Prigozhin would leave one African country, senior Kremlin officials would arrive in his wake,
all smiles, bearing gifts, posing for photo-ops with various African leaders. Brian Liston said
it was obviously a sign.

6
LISTON: So the way that this looks from our perspective in many ways now in retrospect,
that they were preparing to try to fill that gap of Wagner at some point in the future with
maybe more of a formal Russian presence.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Lou Osborn works with the All Eyes on Wagner project. It’s a volunteer
operation that tracks Wagner activities all over the world. They use open source intelligence
to track the group’s human rights abuses and information operations. And they’d been
watching Prigozhin’s comings and goings after that fateful march.

LOU OSBORN: I mean he was spotted a number of times in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He
could still enjoy his mansion and wealth. I think that situation could have given him quite a
lot of confidence, maybe overconfidence to believe he could kind of get pardoned by
Vladimir Putin.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But it appears the Kremlin had a very calculated reason for putting
Prigozhin on such a long leash.

OSBORN: I think the rationale for the Kremlin behind it was the fact that Prigozhin has been
instrumental for a decade for the Kremlin, specifically on their operation in Africa, and that
the Kremlin needed time to kind of put together a plan on how they would manage the
African operations, which are critical for Russia.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She says the Kremlin was probably just buying time. Brian Liston agrees.
He says it’s clear that the Kremlin was looking for some breathing space to figure out how it
would manage Wagner’s operations in Africa. He had been left largely to his own devices to
build operations there. And clearly the Kremlin now saw that as a mistake. They understood
that if Wagner were to suddenly disappear…

LISTON: Russia would lose a lot of its influence because of its dependence on that
organization It would lose a lot of resources, financing, um, and relationships that they have
tried to build with these fragile governments in places like Burkina Faso, Sudan, Mali,
Central African Republic.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: It's not subtle.

7
LISTON: Yeah. I think from that point of things, I think it was trying to establish a rapport
and a relationship with some of these African leaders. Absorbing or taking on Wagner's
influence or making that transition perhaps as painless as possible.

NBC: We’re following breaking news out of Russia. According to Russian state media, a
private plane has crashed killing all 10 people on board…
CNN: Prigozhin has been listed among passengers on board a plane that crashed….
SKY NEWS: ….aircrafts do crash, but generally speaking they don’t crash like this.

TEMPLE-RASTON: There is a video of his private plane spiraling to earth. It is missing a wing,
and there is a trail of black smoke. It’s clear this wasn’t a simple equipment malfunction.
With Wagner’s leader dead, his empire was now up for grabs. When we come back, divvying
of the spoils of Prigozhin’s infamous paramilitary operation

Stay with us

[BREAK]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Wagner isn’t set up like a traditional private military company. It isn’t just
one giant entity. It’s lots and lots of smaller ones.

DENISE SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: The Wagner Group might receive a contract through one of
their companies and one of their companies might subcontract one of their shell
corporations in order to actually, you know, act on whatever they might have been asked to
do to take over a country with a coup, to supply arms to an armed group, to supply,
ammunition to a presidential guard, so on and so forth.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Denise Sprimont-Vasquez.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: I am an analyst here on the Conflict Affected States team at Center

for Advanced Defense Studies.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She says that means they really function as a corporate network, a
personal network, and also a mercenary group. Think of Wagner as one of those Russian

8
nesting dolls. You know, the ones you twist open and there’s a doll inside. And inside that,
another doll.

Except, instead of dolls, it’s companies. Many of which have only a tangential relationship to
military work. Take one Wagner company…

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: Meroe Gold Limited is a company which is incorporated in Sudan. Its

parent company is M-Invest, which was owned by Prigozhin. And then Mirari Gold created
another shell company in Sudan, Solage, so you have a shell company that sits under itself.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This may sound like a complicated way to manage a private military
company. But, Denise says, there are benefits to running it this way. For one, it’s a great
way to avoid sanctions.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: As soon as you get a sanction slapped on, if you create a new
company with a different name and a different shareholder, you are able to, you know,
obfuscate the kind of first round of due diligence.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It also gave Wagner more control over the supply chain. Military groups,
after all, need more than just guns and ammo. They need…

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: Helicopter parts, police batons, riot shields, these sorts of things
which most mercenary groups would have to buy and transit themselves.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But Wagner just bought them from another part of the company. No
waiting for supplies before you deploy. Some other arm of the company had a vested
interest in making sure you got what you needed.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: Wagner used to quickly respond to situations, to quickly create an

effective and efficient response.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which burnished its reputation, helped land them more contracts and
allowed them to pay its fighters more. Which all worked to Prigozhin’s advantage, too,
because of the reach and success of that network he built, he appeared to be a guy who
could get any job done. And a cult of personality began to develop around him.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: It also has kind of this interesting, really unique military aspect to it
that Prigozhin is able to inculcate or was able to inculcate through his persona.

9
TEMPLE-RASTON: He created the sense that if you are part of Wagner you’ve responded to a
higher calling. You’re part of a kind of brotherhood, which if you know your mercenary
military history, should sound familiar.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: So he has really kind of given Wagner a French foreign legion-esque,

from the 20s, pull.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The French Foreign Legion was the legendary last-stop military brigade. It
was full of disgraced officers, French criminals, desperate foreigners, and crazy adventurers.
It actually still exists today, but Russian criminals seem to prefer Wagner.

SPRIMONT-VASQUEZ: You not only get the excellent benefits of Wagner, you not only get the
preferred deployments of Wagner. You also get the women and the booze and all of the
other things that the French Foreign Legion was so famous for in the 20s and the 30s

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: All of which explains why trying to strip Wagner for parts isn’t going to be
easy. Aric Toler is a researcher at Bellingcat, and he says there’s no one who can just step in
for Prigozhin.

TOLER: He was great at managing all these things and keeping all these plates spinning,
and he was the thing holding it all together. So it's kind of tough to keep those plates
spinning and they're going to, who knows what their, what the debris is going to look like?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Given Wagner’s messy corporate structure, its cult of personality, and its
complicated relationship with Russia’s Ministry of Defense. A lot of analysts think that in the
end putting Wagner into another existing private military company may be the cleanest
solution. And the most likely company is one that got its start protecting Russian
commercial operations from terrorist attacks: PMC Redut…

TOLER: Redut, which has been around forever. It mostly just kind of did, like, private stuff for
oligarchs and security and things like that. But it was kind of chosen to be the new
mercenary company to possibly replace Wagner and some of his contracts and its
responsibility. Redut and Wagner have a history.

[MUSIC]

10
TOLER: They've been recruiting from Wagner for well over a year and there was kind of this
now-infamous confrontation between, you know, Prigozhin, um, you know, the late, the
early departed Prigozhin and some people from Redut.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Redut poached one of Prigozhin’s top lieutenants a few years ago. Wagner
actually called it a defection, so there is no love lost between the two PMCs.

TOLER: They've been kind of going after Wagner for a while now, um, after it became clear
that Prigozhin kind of has, is kind of a, you know, his own kind of mad dog working on his
own. He got put down, right? Obviously, I've been doing this for a while, but now the
recruiting picture is a lot easier to make than it was a year or two ago.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It appears the Kremlin has learned its lesson and wants to have a tighter
rein on whoever runs Wagner next..

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Remember all those Africa trips Russian military officials made after
Prigozhin’s mutiny? There was one unexpected person that kept showing up. The head of
the Russia intelligence service, General Andrei Averyanov.

TOLER: He's a, you know, he's a little mustachioed guy. Um, he, uh, he's been serving for
quite a while.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And he’s been serving as a leader of a special unit of the GRU, Russia’s
foreign military intelligence agency, the squad known as Unit 29155. And you’re probably
familiar with their work.

[SALISBURY NEWS]
[ARMS DEPOT NEWS]
[COUP CLIP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Unit 29155’s leader, Averyanov is also thought, not so coincidentally, to

have been behind that fiery plane crash that took out Prigozhin and Wagner’s top
leadership in August.

11
And now, ironically, it's his name that’s being floated to help Redut strip the Wagner Group
for parts. Which, in hindsight, Aric says, goes a long way toward explaining something
unusual that’s started to happen more recently…

TOLER: Andhe's also now becoming a little more in the public sphere.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Averyanov is popping up in photo-ops and meetings…

TOLER: He was never, ever, ever a public personality because again, he's a spy chief
basically, right?

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it wasn’t just as part of that Africa swing.

TOLER: He was at this public forum for African leaders visiting. And he was a part of that
and introduced and talked a little bit.

[MUSIC]

TOLER: And now we know why. Because the GRU is taking hold of Redut. They’re like, “OK,
this is ours now,” and he is the point person for this. And now we know why he was involved
in these African forums, [because] his role and kind of replacing the Wagner activities and
Wagner footprint in Africa with replacing with this GRU-led operation.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So this spy chief, who also essentially runs an elite unit of assassins, may
now be stepping out of the shadows and into the light. And if that does happen, as Kremlin
speechwriter Gallyamov said earlier about Putin and Prigozhin, it would be quite a
transformation.

This is Click Here.

[HEADLINES MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: A China-linked hacker group has managed to crack into more than two
dozen multi-national organizations since last year with a very old-school approach – they
tricked people into plugging malware infected USB drives in their organizations’ networks.

12
The cybersecurity firm Mandiant revealed at the mWise security conference last week that
many of the infections appeared to originate from the Africa-based operations of
multi-nationals in countries like Egypt, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Madagascar.

The malware was a variant of an old malware strain known as Sogu and it seems to have
traveled via USB stick from shared computers in internet cafes and then began infecting
computers worldwide.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has floated some new ways to simplify
reporting instructions, including the idea of a single reporting web portal.

Right now, there are some 52 cyber incident reporting requirements that are either
proposed or in effect. As part of the cyber incident reporting bill that was signed into law
last March, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA was asked to
examine and streamline its regulations.

And finally, the British government has quietly sacked an independent AI advisory board
that was supposed to hold government agencies to account for the way they used AI and
algorithms in their work.

Ten Downing Street has said it wants the UK to be a world leader in AI governance and it is
hosting a global AI Safety Summit in November at Bletchley Park. The technologies are
currently deployed in Britain to predict welfare fraud and analyze sexual crime convictions.

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I'm Dina Temple Raston. I'm the executive producer and host of the show.
Sean Powers is our senior producer and marketing director. Will Jarvis is our producer, and
Lucas Riley and Jade Abdul-Malik are our staff writers.

Our editing team is led by Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski. Darren Ankrom does our
fact-checking, and our theme and original music compositions are by Ben Levingston. We
also use music from Blue Dot Sessions.

13
And as always, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave us a review and rating wherever you
get your podcasts or send us an email at Click Here at Recorded Future dot com. Check out
our website with details about our shows and our whole show catalog at Click Here Show
dot com. I'm Dina Temple-Raston, and we'll be back on Tuesday.

14