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Frankly, that seems to be the problem.

Welcome to Angry Planet.

Hello.

Hello and I'm Matthew Gault.

The Shine has come off Russia's regular military forces.

We've all seen the pictures in Ukraine of burned out vehicles

and crashed drones, everything already starting to rust in the snow.

Casualties for the Russian military are estimated to be over 100,000.

But the Russian army isn't the only force in Ukraine fighting on Moscow's behalf.

The Wagner group is there too too and we know far less about them and what they're doing.

To help us get a better view, we're joined by Jason Blasekis. He's director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the

Middlebury Institute of International Studies, as well as being a senior research fellow at the Sufine Group.

He also wrote an op-ed for Newsweek on Wagner just last week.

So thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Can we start at the very beginning,

which is really what we like to do?

What is the Wagner group when, when was it founded and why?

So the Vaudner group was founded in 2014.

And during its founding, it was not an organization that had a press release to announce its formation.

...