Welcome to the rest of his politics with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell.

And today we have a very special guest which is Richard Engel. So Richard and I have known each other

for some years but most recently we bumped into each other on another aeroplane and he had just come

from an extraordinary series of meetings and encounters as we've been following the figure

of Pregozion. Pregozion just remind listeners is of course the head of the Wagner group,

the man that recently led a mutiny against Vladimir Putin. And Richard had been bringing this

documentary together over a couple of years following the story through he was in Syria, he was

in the Central African Republic going to Ukraine and expecting to bring it out in the autumn and

was beginning to worry that people weren't really going to be that interested in who Pregozion

was or who the Wagner group was. When suddenly this whole story broke and we're very lucky to have

Richard with us today because I don't know anyone who knows more about Pregozion. So thank you

Richard for joining us. It's a real pleasure. Thank you very much. It was extraordinary. I've been

covering Pregozion following this guy who first was in the shadows and then burst into sort of the

public domain during the latest war in Ukraine and we were working on it and we've been in Africa and

we had the material and we're starting to go through it and process it and write it and then suddenly

we look around and he's crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia. His men are on the attack and

they're marching toward Moscow and we all look and they said, okay, well this has just changed.

This is real. We got to get this out immediately so we crashed together. We had the material,

you know, a lot of the material already and suddenly it became immensely timely. So it's just

coincidence would have it. You know, we were following this guy because we thought he was an

interesting and important and he had an important network. So Richard, you're a long-term foreign

correspondent with NBC and this has already gone out on NBC and we're going to put this interview

...