This is the Popular Front podcast with me, Jake Hanrahan.

We're focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict all across the world.

Popular Front is completely independent.

In this episode, we're speaking to John Lechner.

He's a writer and researcher, and he's mostly been focused. In this episode, we're speaking to John Lechner.

He's a writer and researcher, and he's mostly been focused on the Kremlin-linked PMC Wagner,

the pro-Russia war crimes mercenary unit that's caused trouble all over the world from Ukraine to Syria to Africa and more.

John has interviewed over 40 Wagner fighters.

He's going to give us an idea of what they're up to now that their leader, Progogian, was killed probably by the Kremlin.

Get more at patreon.com slash popular front.

Before we go into what Wagner is up to right now, maybe just give our listeners a little reminder

of kind of who they are, what happened, and, you know, the end of the first

chapter, if you like, with progogian, you know, getting lit up in a helicopter or whatever it was.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'll make it as brief as I can, but essentially Wagner Group was a Russian private military company, PMC,

that very much had very close ties to the Russian state itself.

But ultimately, it was founded by, as you mentioned,

Yvgeny Prigosian, a guy who was sort of a small-time gangster in St. Petersburg,

who managed to raise himself up to being a restaurateur, and then moved his way up through the Russian elite to eventually get the gig of providing meals to the Russian military in schools, and ultimately

came together with a former Russian military intelligence officer, Dmitri Udgen, in 2014,

to provide mercenaries for the Russian state to support rebels in eastern Ukraine in Donbos,

as the war was kicking off there in 2014 and 2015.

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