E333 - The Wagner Group and the New Era of Private War w/ John Lechner

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Danny and Derek welcome journalist and author John Lechner to discuss his book, Death is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Warfare. The conversation cuts through the mainstream narrative of the Wagner Group to explore the true history of Yevgeny Prigozhin, from his start as a product of post-Soviet "gangster capitalism" in 1990s St. Petersburg to his ascent as Vladimir Putin's de facto military entrepreneur. They analyze how Prigozhin leveraged the Russian state’s grand ambitions with limited resources to create a self-funding war machine in Syria and across Africa, ultimately turning his own military success in Bakhmut into a fatal political challenge to the decadent Moscow bureaucracy—a challenge that ended with a suspiciously accidental plane crash.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to American Prestige.
0:02.7	To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com.
0:08.4	Find the link in our show notes.
0:13.0	That's kind of conversation to your soul.
0:18.4	That's conversation.
0:19.5	To be a soul. Thank you. Hello, Hello, Prestige Head
0:21.6	and welcome
0:22.6	here,
0:23.6	and Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always
0:37.6	with my friend and comrade, Derek Davison. And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today.
0:42.6	John Lechner, John's a journalist, and he's also the author of Death Is Our Business, Russian
0:48.6	mercenaries and the new era of warfare. John, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I guess the first question is kind of warfare. John, thank you so much for joining us.
0:55.1	Thank you for having it.
0:56.6	I guess the first question is kind of obvious for this one, but I'll ask it anyway.
0:59.8	What made you want to write a book about this topic, about the Wagner group?
1:04.0	And maybe we could get into sort of this changing notion of warfare from almost a theoretical
1:08.7	level before we dive into the book proper.
1:11.2	Sure. Yeah. I mean, so I was a Russian studies guy in college. Really, my first love is
1:20.7	languages and linguistics. And I kind of choose the parts of the world where I am based on kind of the languages that I find interesting.
1:31.8	And so I had spent a little bit of time in Russia before going to college,
1:36.4	became a post-Soviet studies guy in college, and then like a lot of idiots,
1:41.7	thought that I could somehow go work in investment banking as really
	...

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