Who's Afraid of The Wagner Group?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Briefing Room's David Aaronovitch is joined by a team of experts to find out more about the Wagner group, the mysterious private organisation, that's acknowledged by the Russian government to have been supplying soldiers to fight its war in Ukraine. Wagner's leader, Yevgheny Prigozhin, was once known as Vladimir Putin's 'chef'. Soldiers fighting for him won the battle for Soledar - one of few military successes for Russia in Ukraine in recent months. Has his prowess on the battlefield re-invigorated Russia's army - or turned Prigozhin into a potential rival to Putin?
Joining David Aaronovitch in The Briefing Room are: Samantha De Bendern, Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Joana De Deus Pereira,Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute Europe Marina Miron, Post-doctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London Andras Racz, Senior Research Fellow of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin
Produced by: Daniel Gordon, Ben Carter, Kirsteen Knight Edited by: Richard Vadon Sound engineer: James Beard
PHOTO: Graffiti praising soldiers from the Wagner Group (Getty)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.4 | I'm David Aronovich. Welcome to the briefing room, the audio mind space where you, me and top experts, come together and inside 28 minutes wrangle a big issue. |
| 0:17.3 | It's a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. |
| 0:24.3 | Twelve months on, much of the fighting and dying on the Russian side is being done not by conventional soldiers, |
| 0:27.4 | but by men employed by a private army, the Wagner Group. |
| 0:32.2 | So today, what is the Wagner Group? |
| 0:35.4 | And will Vladimir Putin come to regret using it to fight his war? |
| 0:43.0 | The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a year old, and the brutal war has spawned two innovations, |
| 0:49.6 | the mass use of small munition-carrying drones and the mass mass deployment in a conventional conflict of a private army, the Wagner Group. |
| 0:59.7 | So what is the Wagner Group? |
| 1:02.4 | And what do we know about its leader, Yvgeny Pregozhin? |
| 1:06.0 | And could Wagner be as much of a threat as an asset to Vladimir Putin? |
| 1:11.0 | Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:19.2 | As we often do on the briefing room, let's start with some history. |
| 1:22.9 | How and why was the Wagner group created? |
| 1:26.3 | Andres Ratz is Senior Research Fellow of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. |
| 1:32.5 | Andres Ratz, when did Russia start using private military companies? |
| 1:38.1 | The first time Russia created something resembling to a private military company was in 2013. |
| 1:51.0 | That formation called Slavonic Ports was put in action in Syria, but due to the lack of experience, due to the lack of elaborated operational standards, it blatantly failed. |
| 1:57.0 | It failed because the cooperation mechanisms with the Syrian army were not yet established. |
| 2:02.6 | There was not proper intelligence provided, there was no proper weaponry provided. |
| 2:06.6 | So after one skirmish with Syria's resistance fighters, the Russian private military company Slavonic Corpse was defeated, |
... |
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