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Hello and welcome to Angry Planet.

I'm Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Gault.

Nobody outside the Kremlin, and maybe inside the Kremlin too, knows exactly what happened over the last weekend.

We do know that Yevgeny-Pricosian led something that looked like a rebellion against Vladimir

Putin's government.

Columns of troops and tanks turned toward the motherland,

and elements of the Wagner group

made it inside 200 miles of Moscow. What did the Prokosion really want though? And what happened to end the

crisis? And is the crisis actually really over? Joining us today is Mark Katz of George Mason University.

He's a long-time Russia Watcher and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in addition to his teaching duties.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Can we start with just the absolute basics? Like what's your view of what happened last weekend?

Well, it is complicated.

Certainly, Putin had promoted this fellow pre-Gosian as sort of an alternative to his state security services.

Pro-Gosian built up the Wagner group. They were able to operate sort of deniably,

although everyone knew they were acting on behalf of Russia, whether in the Middle East or North Africa or elsewhere in Africa.

And then of course with the war on Ukraine, Wagner fighters were recruited to fight against Ukraine and

...