Good evening. This is John Bacheler. The show begins tonight with my colleague Katrina

Venonhovel in the nation who's written a 1,500 word essay. On Pagotian, he

have Gennie Pagotian, the now confirmed by Moscow deceased leader of the so-called

Wagner Group. I learned from Katrina that the Wagner Group, a private military

company, it was not unique or is not unique depending on its status. In any fashion

in Russia, many of the oligarchs, perhaps all of them, have their own private

armies. Some of them are used in the similar fashion that the Wagner Group is

with deniability for the Kremlin. The Wagner Group is a gangland organization. It

robbed, it trafficked, it murdered, it did for hire in Africa the worst of the

worst. Gennie Pagotian was a gangster, a mob boss, that's his conduct. Yet he worked

comfortably alongside the other leaders in the Kremlin, Gideon Rockland of the

financial times, the foreign correspondent. As an essay in these last hours, comparing

the Kremlin's under Vladimir Putin to a mafia gang, a mafia state in which

everyone is beholden to everyone else for criminality at the same time. They

steal from each other, or they attempt to. And Putin is the Don who holds it all

together as a supervisor, as a presider, not as the absolute dictator the way

Stalin was. In fact, Putin also maintains order as best he can given the loose

knit organizations around him. These are private armies along with the state

security apparatus, which is itself a large private army. We then go on to

discuss other matters in the future. There are many things we don't know about

how the Wagner Group was used and how it's being used now and what the plans are

for. Also tonight, a discussion with Afrafik of globally news that the army in

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