September 6, 2023 • 26 mins
In what will be a two-part final episode of Sad Oligarch, we take a deep dive into the violent life and violent death of Yevgeny Prigozhin—an oligarch, a war criminal, and the head of Kremlin backed private military contractor firm "PMC Wagner". This was a man with many enemies, but who shot him out of the sky?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Something strange is going on. Who is killing Russian billionaires?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Another Russian oligarch has been found dead. Report suggests that
he hanged himself, fell out of a window, slashed his wrists,
was poisoned, murdered, his whole failing.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Last year, more than a dozen Russian oligarchs died in
the space of nine months. Many of the deaths are
suspicious with links to the Kremlin. This is sad Oligach,
an investigation into these recently dead Russian billionaires. It's created
by me jake Hanrahan and my colleague Sergei Slipchenkov. Sad
(00:37):
Oligach is a H eleven production for Kulso Media and iHeartRadio.
Last month, on August twenty third, Yevgeny Progojin sixty two,
(00:57):
boarded one of his private jets and was parked on
the runway at an airport in the West African country
of Mali. Progoson had been seen three days prior in
a propaganda video for the Kremlin backed Mercenary firm that
he led, PMC. Wagner. In the video, he says, quote
(01:21):
for those talking about whether I'm alive or not, well,
basically I'm fine. Those words were soon to be a
very bad omen on board Progosion's jet was also the
founder of PMC. Wagner his name was Dmitri Utkin. Utskin
fifty three was a lifelong Neo Nazi with ESS's tattoos
(01:44):
etched into his neck and a swastika tattooed across his chest.
He named his Mercenary firm after Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer.
Wagner was also his call sign when he served as
a Special Forces of so In Russia's GIU. It will
probably come as no surprise to now discover that both
(02:06):
Progosion and Ukin were avowed war criminals, and Wagner prides
itself on brutality and the mass murder. Progosian's plane took
off bound for Russia. It's roughly a fifteen hour flight.
As the plane traveled across the world, Ukin and Progosion
went about their business making plans that would never happen
(02:30):
in broad daylight. As progosions jet made its way from
Moscow to Saint Petersburg, the plane began to nosedive. Footage
shows the burning jet plummeting vertically to the ground. It
crashed in the village of cusan Kino in the Taywa
region that's just sixty miles north of Moscow. Everyone on
board was killed, burned alive, were obliterated on impact.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Or go here.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Within hours, the was footage of PMC. Wagner fighters crying
at a makeshift grave for Progosion and Ukin. To truly
understand what a huge event this was for Russia, we
need to understand who Progosian was and how he made
history in the country. To do this, I spoke to
extremism investigator Pierre Vaux, who spent almost ten years research
(03:23):
in PMC. Wagner.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Progosion graduated from school in nineteen seventy nine when he
was eighteen, and within a year he was in prison.
So he studied at a boarding school for sports, and
he apparently excelled in cross country skiing. But pretty much
immediately after finishing school he was charged and given suspended
(03:48):
sentences for theft.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Suspended sentences didn't put Progosion off. He went on a
crime spree shortly after dodging prison for the first time.
He was involved in armed robbery, breaking into houses, and
various other criminal enterprises. This culminated in a horrific scene
when Progoson and three of his associates followed a woman
(04:11):
home to rob her. Instead of just taking her belongings,
though Progosion personally strangled the woman with his bare hands
until she passed out. After being caught for these crimes,
Progoson was sent to prison for a full decade, doing
time in a penal colony.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
This is one of the signs that you see from
personal accounts of him is that he's generally reported as
being a sadist. So he spent the whole of the
nineteen eighties in a penal colony, and he didn't emerge
until he was released a few years early in nineteen ninety.
So this is exactly as the Soviet Union is collapsing,
and when he went in nineteen eighty is the sort
(04:52):
of height of Soviet stagnation and paralysis and very conservative
and staid, and when he comes to it's capitalist, free
for all, and he was he kind of thrived in
that environment. He was told this story about how he'd
sold hot dogs at the main market in Petersburg and
(05:13):
that they mixed the mustard in his mother's apartment. The
thing is no one else has ever corroborated that, so
it's hard to say how much of this sort of
rags to richest story is necessarily true.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Considering Progosion spent the first part of his life as
a violent criminal and then the latter part of his
life as a violent war criminal, I personally think it's
quite possible that this humble Beginning's tale about selling hot
dogs through the collapse of the Soviet Union is nonsense
or at best a half truth.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
It looks like he was actually involved in the whole
load of different businesses around that time. So he was
working at a used car lot where he was apparently
ripping people off. He was working as helped run a
supermarket chain in Petersburg, and what he quickly got in
with was a couple of well known businessman slash gangsters
(06:07):
in Petersburg, and by the mid nineties they fronted him
enough money to buy his first restaurant. This is really
how he kind of entered high level politics. So he
bought this restaurant and he got an English guy, Anthony
Gear to be the sort of frontman for it to
give it a degree of class.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Now, this is of course a warped perception of Britain
from back in the eighties to the nineties. We're now
best known for throwing plastic chairs, getting hammered and birthing
football hooliganism, and we love it. But back then, the
thin veneer of British classiness was a thing more commonly
known and used for advertising. So Progosion has this pretend
(06:47):
British aristocrat type running the restaurant that he purchased through
a loan from his organized crime community. The restaurant was
at market Fancy, a place where rich people go to
eat slowly. They began to garner an elite clientele. After
establishing himself here, Bragojin opened another restaurant in the late nineties.
(07:10):
This was called New Island. It was situated on the
river in Saint Petersburg. An aimed to cater to the
rich and powerful. That worked so much so that the
head of the International Monetary Fund was taken there for
a luxury meal.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
The key moment was in nineteen ninety nine where the
IMF's head was in the country while the Russians were
trying to get alone and they wanted He wanted to
find a restaurant to go to, and also wanted to
tour of the river and the waters in Petersburg, so
someone in the Russian entourage invited him to New Ireland,
(07:48):
and as a result of that, the negotiations were successful
and Russia got an IMF loan. After that, you start
seeing Russian leadership using this as a regular venue to
bring foreign guests to Putin brought over Jacques Shirak, George W. Bush,
the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshira Mauri on one of his
(08:08):
other restaurants as well. I found an interesting mention in
an old newspaper review of it. They had a portrait
of Prince Andrew on the wall as one of their
honored guests.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Legally, there's not much we can say about Prince Andrew
other than that he was a close friend of international
pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Oh and also that
he was accused of sexual activity with an underaged girl
from Epstein's circle of the abused and trafficked. Anyway, Progoson's
(08:57):
restaurant New Ireland became the go to plays for the
Russian elite, not just rich people, but also powerful rich
politicians who'd later go on to shape the country into
the authoritarian regime Russia has now become. This is when
Progosim first started getting close to the Kremlin and its
various tentacles.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Putin personally held his birthday party on New Island, so
he's doing really well at this point. He's got access personal,
very close access to top people. He then opens his
own catering company, Concord, and they get really wealthy contracts.
They start contracting and supplying all of the food for
(09:38):
schools in the area, and by twenty ten he's sort
of dealing with local police and eventually starts becoming the
major supply to the army. He's in a position where
he's getting loads of business in through contacts, particularly through
the government, also through the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which
(09:58):
is like the large of fire ambulance and stuff, and
at that point it was headed by Sergei Shoigu, who's
now the Defense Minister. There's an interesting sort of alignment.
It's the same people that he's been both dependent on
and in conflict with since the mid two thousands for
all this money. And it's really interesting reading interviews with
(10:20):
him back then, because even back in twenty ten, when
he was saying, Oh, our next big target, we want
to break into the army. He was very paranoid, and
he was report he was talking to the interview about, Oh,
there's all these parents protesting against our school food because
people as claying that it's poisoned.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Spoiler. Literally hundreds of kids did get food poison in
because the food from Progosions catering company wasn't up to
hygienic standards.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
He's got this constant paranoia that he's being undermined by
business rivals who are orchestrating protests against him, and you
can kind of see he's projecting his own methodology onto
other people. At the same time, he was as intimidating
journalists who are investigating him.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And his companies.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Already, he built a huge empire, making millions and millions
and millions of rubles through this catering empire. But then
in late twenty thirteen, he suddenly starts popping up in
connection to the Troll Factory, the Internet research agency, which
obviously is most famous for what it was involved within
(11:26):
America and stuff during the twenty sixteen elections by paying
people to sit there writing comments on various newspaper comments
pages Twitter, read it anything you'd name it. They had
people pasting pro Russian arguments or making up narratives on
it at the same time. By the summer of twenty fourteen,
(11:46):
this is by when he finally admitted it, he started
funding and providing the shell companies for the Wagner Mercenary Group.
So Wagner was basically a reconstruction of a mercenary outfit
that had already existed since mid to twenty thirteen, which
(12:08):
fought in Syria, which was called Slavonic Core and I
say four It had one engagement and pretty much lost
miserably to j hll Islam and ran away from the
resort and was never returned.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
To the country.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Most of its leadership got picked up by the FSB,
but then the leading commanders of it, which included Dimitri Utkin,
turned up as the head of Wagner.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Remember that's the neo Nazi founder of PMC Wagner, a
guy ironically later deployed to Ukraine to quote denazify the region.
According to Kremlin propaganda, Progosion's role within PMC Wagner began immediately.
He provided the use of show companies and various different
(12:50):
complicated networks of bank accounts to pay for Wagner's fuel,
medical equipment, body armor, and more. However, from the very start,
EMC Wagner was backed by the Russian Armed Forces.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
The GRU actually hosts them physically and really controls everything,
but he provides the sort of contracting nexus to run
everything through. And yeah, Ukin was the sort of effective
commander of this group, and they were based at the
sort of gru's tenth Spets Lance Brigade headquarters, so physically
(13:25):
located on the territory of their base is the Wagner
Training Center, which again makes the whole like, oh, Wagner
GRU separation is the same thing in a lot of cases.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
From the beginning, the Kremlin denied any involvement with PMC Wagner.
Of course, that was a lie. Soon Wagner mercenaries began
doing the dirty work for Putin.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Back in twenty fifteen, they first publicly appeared. The Kremlin
was officially denying any involvement in Ukraine, so they were
still trying to use systems to obscure.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
For anyone unaware the U. The Ukraine War did not
start on February twenty four, twenty twenty two, when Russia
launched the full scale invasion. The war actually began in
April twenty fourteen, when Russia armed and assisted pro Russian
factions in the Dombas region in East Ukraine. They did
this because the people of Ukraine ousted their previous pro
(14:20):
Russian leader. It was a revolution that Putin and his
many supporters did not like, and so, perhaps taking a
note from America's playbook, Russia started the war in the
East to try and reverse the will of the Ukrainian people,
the people who'd launched their successful revolution. At first, the
(14:41):
Kremlin said that no Russian forces were there, trying to
create this illusion that the Dombas uprising was the same
grassroots revolt as the Maidan Revolution in Kiev. This was
simply not true.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
They did send in regular troops twice in two big
waves August twenty fourteen and in January February twenty fifteen,
but they were still trying to cover their assis as
much as possible.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I have personally reported from the ground in Ukraine more
than ten times since twenty sixteen when I first went
to the front lines in the East.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Do you think that was fift I told you.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yes, you did tell it that was me embedded with
the Ukrainian military in twenty sixteen in Avdivka. As you
heard there, we were getting shelled pretty heavily from the separatists.
I managed to work on both sides, although full disclosure,
I was later banned from the separatist region. Whilst in
the separatist controlled areas of the Dombas, I encountered many
(15:53):
regular Russian troops commanding separatists militias. They also had a
ton of Russian military equipment. They had load of Russian tanks.
For example. The next clip of audio you'll hear is
from a documentary I made in the separatist region in
twenty sixteen. At this moment, I am stuck in a
front line trench with a separatist commander who says that is,
(16:18):
we took all these tanks from the Ukrainians, to which
I responded, of course he was lying. When the translator
said it back to him, he just started laughing. The
whole thing was absurd, and everybody knew it. At that time.
No reporters could operate in the separatist regions without a minder.
(16:41):
This person sticks to you twenty four seven to make
sure you don't photograph anything incriminating that could expose their
help from Russia. This was frankly ridiculous because, as I said,
everyone knew what was going on anyway, at those times, PMC.
Wagnin was also all over the dombasly suspect, I encountered
(17:01):
them at the ruins of Donyetsk Airport.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
So we've been taken to the Net's airport, which is
quite symbolic place for the separatists here dn R, because
whoever controls this of a minder told us controls the
entrance to the net. I've been fighting for this for
two and a half years now. Right now the DNR
control it. And over here as the frontline with Ukrainian.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Positions, a unit of very well equipped fighters controlled the
frontline debt. Their commander, a man in his late twenties
called Serge Lim, even told me he wasn't actually from
the Dombas, not from Ukraine at all. He came from Russia.
But he said that he traveled to fight in Ukraine
as a volunteer to help out the Russian separatists possible sure,
(17:47):
as he took me on a tour of the destroyed airport,
though it was clear that this guy was not new
to conflict. I've worked in dozens of war zones across
the world, including Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere. And
trust me, you can tell who's an novice volunteer and
who's properly trained and experienced. Serge Alam was definitely not green.
(18:11):
His unit was part of the Sparta Battalion, whose commander,
nicknamed Motorola, was also from Russia. This unit, at the
destroyed airport frontline where we were, had around a dozen
Russian military ural trucks parked up at their base in
the ruins, all with Russian plates. When my colleague tried
to film them, the fighters went berserk and made us
(18:33):
delete the footage. In contrast, as we were walking over
this pit in the airport, we had to walk over
this beam below there were clearly the remains of soldiers,
and the separatists started laughing, saying, hey, look it's dead Ukrainians,
old bodies of Ukrainian servicemen down in that pit there.
To see kind of a jacket for boots that they
(18:57):
thought was funny. They didn't mind us filming that, but
the trucks no make of that.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
What you will soar gonna provided a way of moving
people in there, like these are not Russian troops, they
are members of a private military organization. The other thing though,
was that because they were directly controlled by the g
are you and private and non ideological in that way,
like a lot of them are ideological, but you could
use them. What they were used for was to clean
(19:25):
up separatist fighters in Ukraine who were out of there,
who you know, displeased the leadership.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Remember that guy Motorola that I just mentioned, Well, he
was eventually killed in Donyetes in twenty sixteen when a
bomb blew up in the elevator of his apartment block,
was planted in the ceiling and detonated. When Motorola entered,
his whole head was blown in two. Motorola's friend Givi,
(19:53):
was also a commander of a Russian separatist militia known
as the Somali Battalion, named after pirates in Side. He
was killed in twenty seventeen in his Donjet's office when
a thermobaric rocket was fired through the window. He burned
to death. The rocket used was a Russian RPO Schmelround.
(20:15):
The guy who was the head commander of all these
pro Russian units and separatist Donyetsk was also killed him.
In twenty eighteen, he was targeted with a bomb inside
a cafe in Donyetsk, which blew up as he went
for coffee. He was blown to bits. It's worth noting
that all three of these dead separatist commanders were war criminals.
(20:37):
They sometimes committed these acts on camera and on the
record admitted to regularly executing prisoners of war and much
worse now the Russian separatists all blowing these deaths on
the Ukrainian special forces. They deny that many believe as
Pierre said that it was Russia clearing house with the
(20:59):
help of Wagner. I guess we'll never not.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Wagner's first ever appearance was on January two, twenty fifteen,
when they assassinated the commander of a unit called GBR
Batman in Lhansk.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
GBR Batman was another pro Russian separatist unit fighting in
the Dombas against the Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
That he just waited for. This paramilitary commander, who was
a separatist commander driving down the road, ambushed him. Five
loads of Thermobarrat missiles into his car, killed everyone. Then
a few days later, they were involved in besieging another
base used by another paramilitary Cossack group in Krasnadonna in
the hands so they were basically used as a death
(22:02):
squad to go and enforce Kremlin control over their various
paramilitary groups. Then a few weeks later they were finally
thrown into proper battle in the bouts of it, in
the big offensive there, and all the survivors from that
said that they were just using human wave tactics.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Human wave tactics is exactly as it sounds, soldiers sent
up over the trench in waves. They keep going. Everybody drops,
another wave comes an awful tactic that gets a lot
of people.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Killed horrific casualties as a result of it. Their image
they always like to present is very important. The image
is like, oh, we're special forces, where you know operators
were really capable and elite. They're not. They never were.
What they were actually used for in almost every conflict
was meet disposable, deniable cannon.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Foddow, which is what Progosion started mouthing off about in
a big way on telegram mostly and through various different
or Wagner associated propaganda channels. That's what he was kicking
off about right in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, because he was saying that the Ministry of Defense
was withholding ammunition from them. I don't know what it
was that really caused this in no way because this
is in a way how they'd always operated. It's just
I think, I mean, there's also the potential that on
a human level, something does eventually snap on you when
you're surrounded by that many corpses on a daily basis.
(23:34):
The battlefields outside Bakhmu work. I mean, you've seen the
drone videos and stuff, and the piles and piles of
corpses around there and people still trying to advance through them.
It was horrific. So, yeah, there's some change in him
where he sort of finally decides that this is not
an acceptable way to use the personnel he's getting. I
(23:55):
wonder if also it's the fact that he was using
penal conscript stuff, and I think his own identity as
a convict was quite important penal conscripts.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Let me explain that. So, when it became clear that
invading and taking over Ukraine was not going to be
the walk in the park Russia thought it was, the
Kriminin realized it needed a lot more men for its
ongoing groundwar. They conscripted young men, then older men, then
older men still, then literal prisoners, rapists, murderers, and other
(24:26):
various convicts were released from many prisons across Russia on
the condition that they fight in Ukraine under PMC. Wagner.
The deal was that if they survive, they can go
home a free man after the fighting is done. Now,
of course, at least two of these fighters that we
know of that survived returned home and immediately started committing
(24:47):
murders again. But anyway, that's the penal conscripts. As you
can probably tell by now, Yevgeny Progosian's life was a
brutal but extremely eventful one. He was worth over a
billion dollars when he died. For weeks before that, at
sixty two years old, he was out in a field,
(25:08):
bed in a tent on the front lines of East Ukraine,
watching his men get butchered. In amongst this savagery which
he was so used to, something happened, and Progosian decided
to turn it against his old friend Vladimir Putin. He
took PMC. Wagner, turned around and rode back into Russia
with the aims of destabilizing the Kremlin. We'll be covering
(25:33):
Progosion's mutiny on Putin in the second half of this
episode next week. The final conclusion to sad Oligach said.
(25:58):
Oligarch is a H eleven production for Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio, hosted, produced, researched and edited by me Jake
Hanrahan and Sergey Slipchenko. Co produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music
by Sam Black, artwork by Adam mcdoyle, soundmix by Splicing Block.
(26:20):
Go to Jacanrahan dot com for more information.
Something strange is going on. Who is killing Russian billionaires?
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Another Russian oligarch has been found dead. Report suggests that
he hanged himself, fell out of a window, slashed his wrists,
was poisoned, murdered, his whole failing.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Last year, more than a dozen Russian oligarchs died in
the space of nine months. Many of the deaths are
suspicious with links to the Kremlin. This is sad Oligach,
an investigation into these recently dead Russian billionaires. It's created
by me jake Hanrahan and my colleague Sergei Slipchenkov. Sad
(00:37):
Oligach is a H eleven production for Kulso Media and iHeartRadio.
Last month, on August twenty third, Yevgeny Progojin sixty two,
(00:57):
boarded one of his private jets and was parked on
the runway at an airport in the West African country
of Mali. Progoson had been seen three days prior in
a propaganda video for the Kremlin backed Mercenary firm that
he led, PMC. Wagner. In the video, he says, quote
(01:21):
for those talking about whether I'm alive or not, well,
basically I'm fine. Those words were soon to be a
very bad omen on board Progosion's jet was also the
founder of PMC. Wagner his name was Dmitri Utkin. Utskin
fifty three was a lifelong Neo Nazi with ESS's tattoos
(01:44):
etched into his neck and a swastika tattooed across his chest.
He named his Mercenary firm after Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer.
Wagner was also his call sign when he served as
a Special Forces of so In Russia's GIU. It will
probably come as no surprise to now discover that both
(02:06):
Progosion and Ukin were avowed war criminals, and Wagner prides
itself on brutality and the mass murder. Progosian's plane took
off bound for Russia. It's roughly a fifteen hour flight.
As the plane traveled across the world, Ukin and Progosion
went about their business making plans that would never happen
(02:30):
in broad daylight. As progosions jet made its way from
Moscow to Saint Petersburg, the plane began to nosedive. Footage
shows the burning jet plummeting vertically to the ground. It
crashed in the village of cusan Kino in the Taywa
region that's just sixty miles north of Moscow. Everyone on
board was killed, burned alive, were obliterated on impact.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Or go here.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Within hours, the was footage of PMC. Wagner fighters crying
at a makeshift grave for Progosion and Ukin. To truly
understand what a huge event this was for Russia, we
need to understand who Progosian was and how he made
history in the country. To do this, I spoke to
extremism investigator Pierre Vaux, who spent almost ten years research
(03:23):
in PMC. Wagner.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Progosion graduated from school in nineteen seventy nine when he
was eighteen, and within a year he was in prison.
So he studied at a boarding school for sports, and
he apparently excelled in cross country skiing. But pretty much
immediately after finishing school he was charged and given suspended
(03:48):
sentences for theft.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Suspended sentences didn't put Progosion off. He went on a
crime spree shortly after dodging prison for the first time.
He was involved in armed robbery, breaking into houses, and
various other criminal enterprises. This culminated in a horrific scene
when Progoson and three of his associates followed a woman
(04:11):
home to rob her. Instead of just taking her belongings,
though Progosion personally strangled the woman with his bare hands
until she passed out. After being caught for these crimes,
Progoson was sent to prison for a full decade, doing
time in a penal colony.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
This is one of the signs that you see from
personal accounts of him is that he's generally reported as
being a sadist. So he spent the whole of the
nineteen eighties in a penal colony, and he didn't emerge
until he was released a few years early in nineteen ninety.
So this is exactly as the Soviet Union is collapsing,
and when he went in nineteen eighty is the sort
(04:52):
of height of Soviet stagnation and paralysis and very conservative
and staid, and when he comes to it's capitalist, free
for all, and he was he kind of thrived in
that environment. He was told this story about how he'd
sold hot dogs at the main market in Petersburg and
(05:13):
that they mixed the mustard in his mother's apartment. The
thing is no one else has ever corroborated that, so
it's hard to say how much of this sort of
rags to richest story is necessarily true.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Considering Progosion spent the first part of his life as
a violent criminal and then the latter part of his
life as a violent war criminal, I personally think it's
quite possible that this humble Beginning's tale about selling hot
dogs through the collapse of the Soviet Union is nonsense
or at best a half truth.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
It looks like he was actually involved in the whole
load of different businesses around that time. So he was
working at a used car lot where he was apparently
ripping people off. He was working as helped run a
supermarket chain in Petersburg, and what he quickly got in
with was a couple of well known businessman slash gangsters
(06:07):
in Petersburg, and by the mid nineties they fronted him
enough money to buy his first restaurant. This is really
how he kind of entered high level politics. So he
bought this restaurant and he got an English guy, Anthony
Gear to be the sort of frontman for it to
give it a degree of class.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Now, this is of course a warped perception of Britain
from back in the eighties to the nineties. We're now
best known for throwing plastic chairs, getting hammered and birthing
football hooliganism, and we love it. But back then, the
thin veneer of British classiness was a thing more commonly
known and used for advertising. So Progosion has this pretend
(06:47):
British aristocrat type running the restaurant that he purchased through
a loan from his organized crime community. The restaurant was
at market Fancy, a place where rich people go to
eat slowly. They began to garner an elite clientele. After
establishing himself here, Bragojin opened another restaurant in the late nineties.
(07:10):
This was called New Island. It was situated on the
river in Saint Petersburg. An aimed to cater to the
rich and powerful. That worked so much so that the
head of the International Monetary Fund was taken there for
a luxury meal.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
The key moment was in nineteen ninety nine where the
IMF's head was in the country while the Russians were
trying to get alone and they wanted He wanted to
find a restaurant to go to, and also wanted to
tour of the river and the waters in Petersburg, so
someone in the Russian entourage invited him to New Ireland,
(07:48):
and as a result of that, the negotiations were successful
and Russia got an IMF loan. After that, you start
seeing Russian leadership using this as a regular venue to
bring foreign guests to Putin brought over Jacques Shirak, George W. Bush,
the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshira Mauri on one of his
(08:08):
other restaurants as well. I found an interesting mention in
an old newspaper review of it. They had a portrait
of Prince Andrew on the wall as one of their
honored guests.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Legally, there's not much we can say about Prince Andrew
other than that he was a close friend of international
pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Oh and also that
he was accused of sexual activity with an underaged girl
from Epstein's circle of the abused and trafficked. Anyway, Progoson's
(08:57):
restaurant New Ireland became the go to plays for the
Russian elite, not just rich people, but also powerful rich
politicians who'd later go on to shape the country into
the authoritarian regime Russia has now become. This is when
Progosim first started getting close to the Kremlin and its
various tentacles.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Putin personally held his birthday party on New Island, so
he's doing really well at this point. He's got access personal,
very close access to top people. He then opens his
own catering company, Concord, and they get really wealthy contracts.
They start contracting and supplying all of the food for
(09:38):
schools in the area, and by twenty ten he's sort
of dealing with local police and eventually starts becoming the
major supply to the army. He's in a position where
he's getting loads of business in through contacts, particularly through
the government, also through the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which
(09:58):
is like the large of fire ambulance and stuff, and
at that point it was headed by Sergei Shoigu, who's
now the Defense Minister. There's an interesting sort of alignment.
It's the same people that he's been both dependent on
and in conflict with since the mid two thousands for
all this money. And it's really interesting reading interviews with
(10:20):
him back then, because even back in twenty ten, when
he was saying, Oh, our next big target, we want
to break into the army. He was very paranoid, and
he was report he was talking to the interview about, Oh,
there's all these parents protesting against our school food because
people as claying that it's poisoned.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Spoiler. Literally hundreds of kids did get food poison in
because the food from Progosions catering company wasn't up to
hygienic standards.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
He's got this constant paranoia that he's being undermined by
business rivals who are orchestrating protests against him, and you
can kind of see he's projecting his own methodology onto
other people. At the same time, he was as intimidating
journalists who are investigating him.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And his companies.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Already, he built a huge empire, making millions and millions
and millions of rubles through this catering empire. But then
in late twenty thirteen, he suddenly starts popping up in
connection to the Troll Factory, the Internet research agency, which
obviously is most famous for what it was involved within
(11:26):
America and stuff during the twenty sixteen elections by paying
people to sit there writing comments on various newspaper comments
pages Twitter, read it anything you'd name it. They had
people pasting pro Russian arguments or making up narratives on
it at the same time. By the summer of twenty fourteen,
(11:46):
this is by when he finally admitted it, he started
funding and providing the shell companies for the Wagner Mercenary Group.
So Wagner was basically a reconstruction of a mercenary outfit
that had already existed since mid to twenty thirteen, which
(12:08):
fought in Syria, which was called Slavonic Core and I
say four It had one engagement and pretty much lost
miserably to j hll Islam and ran away from the
resort and was never returned.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
To the country.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Most of its leadership got picked up by the FSB,
but then the leading commanders of it, which included Dimitri Utkin,
turned up as the head of Wagner.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Remember that's the neo Nazi founder of PMC Wagner, a
guy ironically later deployed to Ukraine to quote denazify the region.
According to Kremlin propaganda, Progosion's role within PMC Wagner began immediately.
He provided the use of show companies and various different
(12:50):
complicated networks of bank accounts to pay for Wagner's fuel,
medical equipment, body armor, and more. However, from the very start,
EMC Wagner was backed by the Russian Armed Forces.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
The GRU actually hosts them physically and really controls everything,
but he provides the sort of contracting nexus to run
everything through. And yeah, Ukin was the sort of effective
commander of this group, and they were based at the
sort of gru's tenth Spets Lance Brigade headquarters, so physically
(13:25):
located on the territory of their base is the Wagner
Training Center, which again makes the whole like, oh, Wagner
GRU separation is the same thing in a lot of cases.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
From the beginning, the Kremlin denied any involvement with PMC Wagner.
Of course, that was a lie. Soon Wagner mercenaries began
doing the dirty work for Putin.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Back in twenty fifteen, they first publicly appeared. The Kremlin
was officially denying any involvement in Ukraine, so they were
still trying to use systems to obscure.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
For anyone unaware the U. The Ukraine War did not
start on February twenty four, twenty twenty two, when Russia
launched the full scale invasion. The war actually began in
April twenty fourteen, when Russia armed and assisted pro Russian
factions in the Dombas region in East Ukraine. They did
this because the people of Ukraine ousted their previous pro
(14:20):
Russian leader. It was a revolution that Putin and his
many supporters did not like, and so, perhaps taking a
note from America's playbook, Russia started the war in the
East to try and reverse the will of the Ukrainian people,
the people who'd launched their successful revolution. At first, the
(14:41):
Kremlin said that no Russian forces were there, trying to
create this illusion that the Dombas uprising was the same
grassroots revolt as the Maidan Revolution in Kiev. This was
simply not true.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
They did send in regular troops twice in two big
waves August twenty fourteen and in January February twenty fifteen,
but they were still trying to cover their assis as
much as possible.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I have personally reported from the ground in Ukraine more
than ten times since twenty sixteen when I first went
to the front lines in the East.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Do you think that was fift I told you.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yes, you did tell it that was me embedded with
the Ukrainian military in twenty sixteen in Avdivka. As you
heard there, we were getting shelled pretty heavily from the separatists.
I managed to work on both sides, although full disclosure,
I was later banned from the separatist region. Whilst in
the separatist controlled areas of the Dombas, I encountered many
(15:53):
regular Russian troops commanding separatists militias. They also had a
ton of Russian military equipment. They had load of Russian tanks.
For example. The next clip of audio you'll hear is
from a documentary I made in the separatist region in
twenty sixteen. At this moment, I am stuck in a
front line trench with a separatist commander who says that is,
(16:18):
we took all these tanks from the Ukrainians, to which
I responded, of course he was lying. When the translator
said it back to him, he just started laughing. The
whole thing was absurd, and everybody knew it. At that time.
No reporters could operate in the separatist regions without a minder.
(16:41):
This person sticks to you twenty four seven to make
sure you don't photograph anything incriminating that could expose their
help from Russia. This was frankly ridiculous because, as I said,
everyone knew what was going on anyway, at those times, PMC.
Wagnin was also all over the dombasly suspect, I encountered
(17:01):
them at the ruins of Donyetsk Airport.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
So we've been taken to the Net's airport, which is
quite symbolic place for the separatists here dn R, because
whoever controls this of a minder told us controls the
entrance to the net. I've been fighting for this for
two and a half years now. Right now the DNR
control it. And over here as the frontline with Ukrainian.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Positions, a unit of very well equipped fighters controlled the
frontline debt. Their commander, a man in his late twenties
called Serge Lim, even told me he wasn't actually from
the Dombas, not from Ukraine at all. He came from Russia.
But he said that he traveled to fight in Ukraine
as a volunteer to help out the Russian separatists possible sure,
(17:47):
as he took me on a tour of the destroyed airport,
though it was clear that this guy was not new
to conflict. I've worked in dozens of war zones across
the world, including Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere. And
trust me, you can tell who's an novice volunteer and
who's properly trained and experienced. Serge Alam was definitely not green.
(18:11):
His unit was part of the Sparta Battalion, whose commander,
nicknamed Motorola, was also from Russia. This unit, at the
destroyed airport frontline where we were, had around a dozen
Russian military ural trucks parked up at their base in
the ruins, all with Russian plates. When my colleague tried
to film them, the fighters went berserk and made us
(18:33):
delete the footage. In contrast, as we were walking over
this pit in the airport, we had to walk over
this beam below there were clearly the remains of soldiers,
and the separatists started laughing, saying, hey, look it's dead Ukrainians,
old bodies of Ukrainian servicemen down in that pit there.
To see kind of a jacket for boots that they
(18:57):
thought was funny. They didn't mind us filming that, but
the trucks no make of that.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
What you will soar gonna provided a way of moving
people in there, like these are not Russian troops, they
are members of a private military organization. The other thing though,
was that because they were directly controlled by the g
are you and private and non ideological in that way,
like a lot of them are ideological, but you could
use them. What they were used for was to clean
(19:25):
up separatist fighters in Ukraine who were out of there,
who you know, displeased the leadership.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Remember that guy Motorola that I just mentioned, Well, he
was eventually killed in Donyetes in twenty sixteen when a
bomb blew up in the elevator of his apartment block,
was planted in the ceiling and detonated. When Motorola entered,
his whole head was blown in two. Motorola's friend Givi,
(19:53):
was also a commander of a Russian separatist militia known
as the Somali Battalion, named after pirates in Side. He
was killed in twenty seventeen in his Donjet's office when
a thermobaric rocket was fired through the window. He burned
to death. The rocket used was a Russian RPO Schmelround.
(20:15):
The guy who was the head commander of all these
pro Russian units and separatist Donyetsk was also killed him.
In twenty eighteen, he was targeted with a bomb inside
a cafe in Donyetsk, which blew up as he went
for coffee. He was blown to bits. It's worth noting
that all three of these dead separatist commanders were war criminals.
(20:37):
They sometimes committed these acts on camera and on the
record admitted to regularly executing prisoners of war and much
worse now the Russian separatists all blowing these deaths on
the Ukrainian special forces. They deny that many believe as
Pierre said that it was Russia clearing house with the
(20:59):
help of Wagner. I guess we'll never not.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Wagner's first ever appearance was on January two, twenty fifteen,
when they assassinated the commander of a unit called GBR
Batman in Lhansk.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
GBR Batman was another pro Russian separatist unit fighting in
the Dombas against the Ukrainians.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
That he just waited for. This paramilitary commander, who was
a separatist commander driving down the road, ambushed him. Five
loads of Thermobarrat missiles into his car, killed everyone. Then
a few days later, they were involved in besieging another
base used by another paramilitary Cossack group in Krasnadonna in
the hands so they were basically used as a death
(22:02):
squad to go and enforce Kremlin control over their various
paramilitary groups. Then a few weeks later they were finally
thrown into proper battle in the bouts of it, in
the big offensive there, and all the survivors from that
said that they were just using human wave tactics.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Human wave tactics is exactly as it sounds, soldiers sent
up over the trench in waves. They keep going. Everybody drops,
another wave comes an awful tactic that gets a lot
of people.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Killed horrific casualties as a result of it. Their image
they always like to present is very important. The image
is like, oh, we're special forces, where you know operators
were really capable and elite. They're not. They never were.
What they were actually used for in almost every conflict
was meet disposable, deniable cannon.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Foddow, which is what Progosion started mouthing off about in
a big way on telegram mostly and through various different
or Wagner associated propaganda channels. That's what he was kicking
off about right in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, because he was saying that the Ministry of Defense
was withholding ammunition from them. I don't know what it
was that really caused this in no way because this
is in a way how they'd always operated. It's just
I think, I mean, there's also the potential that on
a human level, something does eventually snap on you when
you're surrounded by that many corpses on a daily basis.
(23:34):
The battlefields outside Bakhmu work. I mean, you've seen the
drone videos and stuff, and the piles and piles of
corpses around there and people still trying to advance through them.
It was horrific. So, yeah, there's some change in him
where he sort of finally decides that this is not
an acceptable way to use the personnel he's getting. I
(23:55):
wonder if also it's the fact that he was using
penal conscript stuff, and I think his own identity as
a convict was quite important penal conscripts.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Let me explain that. So, when it became clear that
invading and taking over Ukraine was not going to be
the walk in the park Russia thought it was, the
Kriminin realized it needed a lot more men for its
ongoing groundwar. They conscripted young men, then older men, then
older men still, then literal prisoners, rapists, murderers, and other
(24:26):
various convicts were released from many prisons across Russia on
the condition that they fight in Ukraine under PMC. Wagner.
The deal was that if they survive, they can go
home a free man after the fighting is done. Now,
of course, at least two of these fighters that we
know of that survived returned home and immediately started committing
(24:47):
murders again. But anyway, that's the penal conscripts. As you
can probably tell by now, Yevgeny Progosian's life was a
brutal but extremely eventful one. He was worth over a
billion dollars when he died. For weeks before that, at
sixty two years old, he was out in a field,
(25:08):
bed in a tent on the front lines of East Ukraine,
watching his men get butchered. In amongst this savagery which
he was so used to, something happened, and Progosian decided
to turn it against his old friend Vladimir Putin. He
took PMC. Wagner, turned around and rode back into Russia
with the aims of destabilizing the Kremlin. We'll be covering
(25:33):
Progosion's mutiny on Putin in the second half of this
episode next week. The final conclusion to sad Oligach said.
(25:58):
Oligarch is a H eleven production for Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio, hosted, produced, researched and edited by me Jake
Hanrahan and Sergey Slipchenko. Co produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music
by Sam Black, artwork by Adam mcdoyle, soundmix by Splicing Block.
(26:20):
Go to Jacanrahan dot com for more information.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.