Shadow Men: Inside Wagner, Russia's Secret War Company

0:00 Speaker 1 There’s so many things happening in the Middle East, so many things happening in Russia, Ukraine. What is today is James Grimaldi with the Will Street Journal for over ten years, and he’s done a detailed study on this new Wagner group.

0:17 And those are the people that President Putin has hired. And how do you say it? Did it? They run their own army? They were hits.

0:29 Speaker 2 Well, I mean yeah, it’s actually been designated by the United States government as a trans national criminal organization, so it’s not really a paramilitary group or private military company in the way we would think about it here in the United States. It’s and it’s been accused of war crimes, so it really kind of goes beyond just your regular

0:54 sort of private military group. But yeah, they’re definitely in Ukraine. They’ve got deployed there fifty thousand personnel, including ten thousand contractors and another forty thousand who are convicts.

1:10 Speaker 1 So in other words, they go to various countries. We’ve seen this in the movies, James. You go to a different countries, you say, well, take away your criminals out, you don’t have to feed them anymore. And if you do, good and you tell the criminals. If you do good, we’ll give you a pardon at the end of the day.

1:29 Wasn’t that in the movie we saw?

1:32 Speaker 2 I think it has been in the movies, And then I mean it goes back to Stalin did that in World War Two, And if you defect, they say they’ll track you down and kill you. And in fact, in our video documentary which you can see on WSJ dot com Slash shadow Man, which is the name of the film,

1:52 we document one particular death by a sledgehammer of a young man who defected and was recaptured and they killed him. So you know, it’s it’s it’s a pretty brutal organization. And they’ve gone beyond just Ukraine. They actually began working on behalf of the Russian government to help out the assades in Syria in exchange for some twenty five percent

2:21 of oil that they were able to recapture when they during their civil war.

2:25 Speaker 1 When President Biden came into office, he closed down the pipeline. He put EPA in charge, and reduced output of the United States oil, so oil went from fifty five to one hundred and ten one hundred and twenty made Russia rich again, and the Russia had an extra billion dollars a day, so they go out and hired They’ve waddened

2:55 the group to attack the Ukraine. Is that a Is that a nice short story?

3:03 Speaker 2 Well, it’s not necessarily the analysis that I’m familiar with. It’s a little bit different than what we study here, which was how the Wogner Group actually operates. I mean, obviously, the war in Ukraine has created a price spike for the price of oil, and there have been enormous sanctions that have been imposed, probably more in the history of

3:28 Europe and the United States government against many of the state owned companies as well as many of the companies that are controlled by Yevgeny Progosian, who is the founder of the Wagner Group.

3:42 Speaker 1 Well, the price of oil did double, and it did make Russia rich again, and they had a lot of excess cash spent.

3:51 Speaker 2 Well, I guess that’s one analysis.

3:55 Speaker 1 Well, so you could use it in your analysis, because it’s true what I said that in.

4:00 Speaker 2 Forty minute documentary, which you can find again at WSHA dot com slash shadow Man, I would commit you to watch it. It is forty minutes, but it’s a very fast forty minutes. You could also find it on YouTube on your smart TV. We don’t go into sort of an economic analysis of Russia. We do go into the

4:20 economic analysis of how this Wagner group actually operates. And what they do is they go into continents like Africa. They’ve gone into the Central African Republican. When they moved in there, they made a deal, they made a deal with the president there and they said, we’ll give you protection, we will give you misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and in return,

4:45 you let us go into your gold mines and your diamond minds and take those back in order to run the Wagner operation and the war machine.

4:56 Speaker 1 Wow wow, So another it is just part of international crime group.

5:04 Speaker 2 It’s definitely a quid pro quo that has been uncovered by US and a number of other groups, and it’s gotten very brutal. I mean there was Basically the Central African Republic is very close to being a rogue state.

5:18 It’s very close to not having civil order. It’s a very dangerous place to go. And the Vargunar group has gone in and promised security for the president there and has gone into areas that are really in civil war and gone to battle with some of the local gangs and groups there. In one case they went in that

5:39 we document in the United Nations documented in our documentary shadow Men. They go into this small village and they engaged in a variety of atrocities alleged by the United Nations, including barying people alive and killing children, and raping women and cutting people’s testicles off and parading them through the streets of this small village, basically terrorism type activity in

6:13 order to fight off this organization, this gang, this part the second part of the country, to ward them off from this gold mine which has now become the first industrialized gold mine in the Central African Republic. And we have video, we have satellite imagery that we’ve obtained that actually show how the Wagner group have developed this mind

6:38 in just the past few years since they made disagreement with the president at the Central African Republic.

6:44 Speaker 1 Where where I find it Wallstreetjournal dot com.

6:47 Speaker 2 Yeah, slash shadow Man. You can also find it on YouTube if you have a YouTube on your smart TV, just put in WSJA and you’ll find Shadowmen. Or you could plug it into any browser a laptop computer to see it. You know, it’s really quite a sprawling enterprise.

7:07 We had reporters from around the world. We had our man in Ukraine, James Marson, who is just a Pulitzer finalist. He’s explaining quite a bit about how Russia has been working, and we recruited to speak to us the former head of the US Treasury Sanctions Agency, who talks about how Prutin wants Russia to become a great power. He wants

7:33 it to control throughout Europe and Asia and Africa and other parts of the world. Its territorial ambitions are really seen through this Wagner group, which you know has been given all kinds of contracts. You know, they call the guy Pregoshan, they called him, they called him Putin Chef because he began as a caterer in the Kremlin and

8:00 he’s grown into this international warlord. It’s a fascinating tale. We really commend your listeners to maybe check it out on YouTube.

8:09 Speaker 1 Shadow Man, Well, I will certainly check it out. Anything else you want to tell the American people, I mean, this is going to tell us. Putin hires these guys. Do you have any idea how much they’re paying them?

8:22 Speaker 2 Yeah, we have actually seen that they’re seeing some of those paychecks. I’m trying to remember what we said, but I think because we weren’t able to quite document exactly what those were, we weren’t able to do that. But we were able to document a number of companies that Putin and the Russian government was paying the Wagner Group,

8:46 and you can see how their contracts skyrocketed. You know, it’s sort of like old fashioned, you know, kind of military industrial complex graft right, and the contract skyrocketed during the Ukraine War. So there’s some detail in our documentary that actually shows what they do. But you know, a lot of the families of some of these prisoners are

9:10 feeling as if this was not such a great deal in terms of what they were getting in return that you know, they may have gotten out of prison, but they became cannon fodder and many of them have been the first to die in the war in Ukraine.

9:24 Speaker 1 Understood, Well, let me tell you something. You’ve done a great job. You’re doing the old fashioned work where the reporters usually actually were investigative reporters. James Grimaldi will Street Journal, thank you so much for doing what you’re doing and helpfully the American people will learn more about this. Thank you so much.

9:44 Speaker 2 All right, thank you very much. I appreciate it.