Hi and welcome back to Foreign Office. I'm Michael Weiss, Director of Special Investigations

at the Free Russia Foundation and Senior Correspondent at Yahoo News. My guest this week is Jack

Margolan. He's an independent researcher on Russia with a particular focus on private

military companies and the Wagner Group, one of our favorite subjects on this show. Jack,

it's great to have you on. I was going to do kind of a brief praisy of where we stand with,

you know, Yavgene put her gojans two minutes of hate, his denunciations of the Russian Defense

Minister and the Chief of the General Staff and the sort of, you know, what's the state of play

between Wagner and the M.O.D. But I mean, I've been following your Twitter account for a while,

and especially lately, because you've been doing all this great granular analysis of what's

happening, particularly around Bach Moot. Why don't you explain? Because I sort of go back and forth

this to trying to make any kind of coherent analysis of what's happening as opposed to, okay,

well, this is interesting and funny, and I literally have Shoigu's denunciation. I'm sorry,

the gojans denunciation of Shoigu and Gerasimov as my ringtone now, because I find this so amusing.

But give us your expert analytic opinion. I mean, is Wagner now challenging the Russian

Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin for power in any way, or is this all kind of Kabuki theater?

Great question. And I'm sure that anybody who's followed this has seen many different

reads on it that kind of branch from the end of the spectrum where pregojian is just Putin's

mouthpiece, and this is all for show. And it's, as you say, like some very elaborate Kabuki theater

all the way to pregojian is angling for the top spot and wants to see his power from Putin.

I tend to think that both of those are a bit extreme and stretch what we know, and that the truth

likely lies somewhere in between that's probably a little bit less exciting, but I think

really interesting for how we understand the Russian system and how it's changing over the

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