Hi, and welcome back to for an office. I'm Michael Weiss, Director of Special Investigations

at the Free Russian Foundation and Senior Correspondent at Yahoo News. This week I'm joined

by my friend and my colleague and a long time watcher of the Russian far-right, but also

the war in Ukraine. Pierre Vaux, he formerly was a senior analyst at the interpreter magazine,

which I found it in, I want to say, 2012. That's how far back this goes. Well, before the first

invasion of Ukraine and the takeover of Crimea, Pierre and I recently co-authored a report called

Vile Bodies, which is about the strange kind of consortium of cult members, spooks, and fascists

who were really the vanguard of Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Kind of a dramatist

persona of characters you'll now have heard of Igor Gyrkin, who's become a leading godfly of

the prosecution of the current war, Stodemusov, who was the deputy governor of Haerson, who recently

bit it in a car crash just before the withdrawal from Haerson several months ago, who else we got

Olga Kolegina, who's a probable GRU officer who's turned up at various points along the timeline

that we deal with Crimea, Lugansk, and now possibly even again in Ukraine, this time reinvented as a

medic. But our report, you can read it at the Free Russia Foundation, and when I tweeted out,

I'll send that relevant link. But the real reason I wanted Pierre on the show this week, and apologies

for the absence, but I was traveling all of last week in the midst of the, what shall we call it,

a mutiny, a coup, a push, an insurrection led by Evgeny Purgozhin and his Wagner operatives,

which culminated in their reaching from, I think, about 120 miles of Moscow after having taken

the city of Rostovandon, the headquarters of the southern military district, which is responsible

for Russia's conduct of the war in the four, quote unquote, a next oblast of Ukraine. And everybody

who, I mean, even amateurs are clearly wondering what the hell happened in Russia,

was this a coup, was this some kind of demonstration of grievance and a protest against

...