Something strange is going on. Who is killing Russian billionaires?
Another Russian oligarch has been found dead. Report suggests that he hanged himself, fell out of a window, slashed his wrists, was poisoned, murdered, his whole failing.
Last year, more than a dozen Russian oligarchs died in the space of nine months. Many of the deaths are suspicious with links to the Kremlin. This is sad Oligach, an investigation into these recently dead Russian billionaires. It's created by me jake Hanrahan and my colleague Sergei Slipchenkov. Sad Oligach is a H eleven production for Kulso Media and iHeartRadio.
Last month, on August twenty third, Yevgeny Progojin sixty two, boarded one of his private jets and was parked on the runway at an airport in the West African country of Mali. Progoson had been seen three days prior in a propaganda video for the Kremlin backed Mercenary firm that he led, PMC. Wagner. In the video, he says, quote for those talking about whether I'm alive or not, well, basically I'm fine. Those words were soon to be a very bad omen on board Progosion's jet was also the
founder of PMC. Wagner his name was Dmitri Utkin. Utskin fifty three was a lifelong Neo Nazi with ESS's tattoos etched into his neck and a swastika tattooed across his chest. He named his Mercenary firm after Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer. Wagner was also his call sign when he served as a Special Forces of so In Russia's GIU. It will probably come as no surprise to now discover that both Progosion and Ukin were avowed war criminals, and Wagner prides
itself on brutality and the mass murder. Progosian's plane took off bound for Russia. It's roughly a fifteen hour flight. As the plane traveled across the world, Ukin and Progosion went about their business making plans that would never happen in broad daylight. As progosions jet made its way from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, the plane began to nosedive. Footage shows the burning jet plummeting vertically to the ground. It crashed in the village of cusan Kino in the Taywa
region that's just sixty miles north of Moscow. Everyone on board was killed, burned alive, were obliterated on impact.
Or go here.
Within hours, the was footage of PMC. Wagner fighters crying at a makeshift grave for Progosion and Ukin. To truly understand what a huge event this was for Russia, we need to understand who Progosian was and how he made history in the country. To do this, I spoke to extremism investigator Pierre Vaux, who spent almost ten years research in PMC. Wagner.
Progosion graduated from school in nineteen seventy nine when he was eighteen, and within a year he was in prison. So he studied at a boarding school for sports, and he apparently excelled in cross country skiing. But pretty much immediately after finishing school he was charged and given suspended sentences for theft.
Suspended sentences didn't put Progosion off. He went on a crime spree shortly after dodging prison for the first time. He was involved in armed robbery, breaking into houses, and various other criminal enterprises. This culminated in a horrific scene when Progoson and three of his associates followed a woman home to rob her. Instead of just taking her belongings, though Progosion personally strangled the woman with his bare hands
until she passed out. After being caught for these crimes, Progoson was sent to prison for a full decade, doing time in a penal colony.
This is one of the signs that you see from personal accounts of him is that he's generally reported as being a sadist. So he spent the whole of the nineteen eighties in a penal colony, and he didn't emerge until he was released a few years early in nineteen ninety.
So this is exactly as the Soviet Union is collapsing, and when he went in nineteen eighty is the sort of height of Soviet stagnation and paralysis and very conservative and staid, and when he comes to it's capitalist, free for all, and he was he kind of thrived in that environment. He was told this story about how he'd sold hot dogs at the main market in Petersburg and
that they mixed the mustard in his mother's apartment. The thing is no one else has ever corroborated that, so it's hard to say how much of this sort of rags to richest story is necessarily true.
Considering Progosion spent the first part of his life as a violent criminal and then the latter part of his life as a violent war criminal, I personally think it's quite possible that this humble Beginning's tale about selling hot dogs through the collapse of the Soviet Union is nonsense or at best a half truth.
It looks like he was actually involved in the whole load of different businesses around that time. So he was working at a used car lot where he was apparently ripping people off. He was working as helped run a supermarket chain in Petersburg, and what he quickly got in with was a couple of well known businessman slash gangsters in Petersburg, and by the mid nineties they fronted him enough money to buy his first restaurant. This is really
how he kind of entered high level politics. So he bought this restaurant and he got an English guy, Anthony Gear to be the sort of frontman for it to give it a degree of class.
Now, this is of course a warped perception of Britain from back in the eighties to the nineties. We're now best known for throwing plastic chairs, getting hammered and birthing football hooliganism, and we love it. But back then, the thin veneer of British classiness was a thing more commonly known and used for advertising. So Progosion has this pretend British aristocrat type running the restaurant that he purchased through
a loan from his organized crime community. The restaurant was at market Fancy, a place where rich people go to eat slowly. They began to garner an elite clientele. After establishing himself here, Bragojin opened another restaurant in the late nineties. This was called New Island. It was situated on the river in Saint Petersburg. An aimed to cater to the rich and powerful. That worked so much so that the head of the International Monetary Fund was taken there for a luxury meal.
The key moment was in nineteen ninety nine where the IMF's head was in the country while the Russians were trying to get alone and they wanted He wanted to find a restaurant to go to, and also wanted to tour of the river and the waters in Petersburg, so someone in the Russian entourage invited him to New Ireland, and as a result of that, the negotiations were successful
and Russia got an IMF loan. After that, you start seeing Russian leadership using this as a regular venue to bring foreign guests to Putin brought over Jacques Shirak, George W. Bush, the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshira Mauri on one of his other restaurants as well. I found an interesting mention in an old newspaper review of it. They had a portrait of Prince Andrew on the wall as one of their honored guests.
Legally, there's not much we can say about Prince Andrew other than that he was a close friend of international pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Oh and also that he was accused of sexual activity with an underaged girl from Epstein's circle of the abused and trafficked. Anyway, Progoson's restaurant New Ireland became the go to plays for the Russian elite, not just rich people, but also powerful rich politicians who'd later go on to shape the country into
the authoritarian regime Russia has now become. This is when Progosim first started getting close to the Kremlin and its various tentacles.
Putin personally held his birthday party on New Island, so he's doing really well at this point. He's got access personal, very close access to top people. He then opens his own catering company, Concord, and they get really wealthy contracts. They start contracting and supplying all of the food for schools in the area, and by twenty ten he's sort of dealing with local police and eventually starts becoming the
major supply to the army. He's in a position where he's getting loads of business in through contacts, particularly through the government, also through the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which is like the large of fire ambulance and stuff, and at that point it was headed by Sergei Shoigu, who's now the Defense Minister. There's an interesting sort of alignment. It's the same people that he's been both dependent on and in conflict with since the mid two thousands for
all this money. And it's really interesting reading interviews with him back then, because even back in twenty ten, when he was saying, Oh, our next big target, we want to break into the army. He was very paranoid, and he was report he was talking to the interview about, Oh, there's all these parents protesting against our school food because people as claying that it's poisoned.
Spoiler. Literally hundreds of kids did get food poison in because the food from Progosions catering company wasn't up to hygienic standards.
He's got this constant paranoia that he's being undermined by business rivals who are orchestrating protests against him, and you can kind of see he's projecting his own methodology onto other people. At the same time, he was as intimidating journalists who are investigating him.
And his companies.
Already, he built a huge empire, making millions and millions and millions of rubles through this catering empire. But then in late twenty thirteen, he suddenly starts popping up in connection to the Troll Factory, the Internet research agency, which obviously is most famous for what it was involved within America and stuff during the twenty sixteen elections by paying people to sit there writing comments on various newspaper comments
pages Twitter, read it anything you'd name it. They had people pasting pro Russian arguments or making up narratives on it at the same time. By the summer of twenty fourteen, this is by when he finally admitted it, he started funding and providing the shell companies for the Wagner Mercenary Group.
So Wagner was basically a reconstruction of a mercenary outfit that had already existed since mid to twenty thirteen, which fought in Syria, which was called Slavonic Core and I say four It had one engagement and pretty much lost miserably to j hll Islam and ran away from the resort and was never returned.
To the country.
Most of its leadership got picked up by the FSB, but then the leading commanders of it, which included Dimitri Utkin, turned up as the head of Wagner.
Remember that's the neo Nazi founder of PMC Wagner, a guy ironically later deployed to Ukraine to quote denazify the region. According to Kremlin propaganda, Progosion's role within PMC Wagner began immediately. He provided the use of show companies and various different complicated networks of bank accounts to pay for Wagner's fuel, medical equipment, body armor, and more. However, from the very start, EMC Wagner was backed by the Russian Armed Forces.
The GRU actually hosts them physically and really controls everything, but he provides the sort of contracting nexus to run everything through. And yeah, Ukin was the sort of effective commander of this group, and they were based at the sort of gru's tenth Spets Lance Brigade headquarters, so physically located on the territory of their base is the Wagner Training Center, which again makes the whole like, oh, Wagner GRU separation is the same thing in a lot of cases.
From the beginning, the Kremlin denied any involvement with PMC Wagner. Of course, that was a lie. Soon Wagner mercenaries began doing the dirty work for Putin.
Back in twenty fifteen, they first publicly appeared. The Kremlin was officially denying any involvement in Ukraine, so they were still trying to use systems to obscure.
For anyone unaware the U. The Ukraine War did not start on February twenty four, twenty twenty two, when Russia launched the full scale invasion. The war actually began in April twenty fourteen, when Russia armed and assisted pro Russian factions in the Dombas region in East Ukraine. They did this because the people of Ukraine ousted their previous pro
Russian leader. It was a revolution that Putin and his many supporters did not like, and so, perhaps taking a note from America's playbook, Russia started the war in the East to try and reverse the will of the Ukrainian people, the people who'd launched their successful revolution. At first, the Kremlin said that no Russian forces were there, trying to create this illusion that the Dombas uprising was the same grassroots revolt as the Maidan Revolution in Kiev. This was simply not true.
They did send in regular troops twice in two big waves August twenty fourteen and in January February twenty fifteen, but they were still trying to cover their assis as much as possible.
I have personally reported from the ground in Ukraine more than ten times since twenty sixteen when I first went to the front lines in the East.
Do you think that was fift I told you.
Yes, you did tell it that was me embedded with the Ukrainian military in twenty sixteen in Avdivka. As you heard there, we were getting shelled pretty heavily from the separatists. I managed to work on both sides, although full disclosure, I was later banned from the separatist region. Whilst in the separatist controlled areas of the Dombas, I encountered many regular Russian troops commanding separatists militias. They also had a
ton of Russian military equipment. They had load of Russian tanks. For example. The next clip of audio you'll hear is from a documentary I made in the separatist region in twenty sixteen. At this moment, I am stuck in a front line trench with a separatist commander who says that is, we took all these tanks from the Ukrainians, to which I responded, of course he was lying. When the translator said it back to him, he just started laughing. The
whole thing was absurd, and everybody knew it. At that time. No reporters could operate in the separatist regions without a minder. This person sticks to you twenty four seven to make sure you don't photograph anything incriminating that could expose their help from Russia. This was frankly ridiculous because, as I said, everyone knew what was going on anyway, at those times, PMC. Wagnin was also all over the dombasly suspect, I encountered them at the ruins of Donyetsk Airport.
So we've been taken to the Net's airport, which is quite symbolic place for the separatists here dn R, because whoever controls this of a minder told us controls the entrance to the net. I've been fighting for this for two and a half years now. Right now the DNR control it. And over here as the frontline with Ukrainian.
Positions, a unit of very well equipped fighters controlled the frontline debt. Their commander, a man in his late twenties called Serge Lim, even told me he wasn't actually from the Dombas, not from Ukraine at all. He came from Russia. But he said that he traveled to fight in Ukraine as a volunteer to help out the Russian separatists possible sure, as he took me on a tour of the destroyed airport, though it was clear that this guy was not new
to conflict. I've worked in dozens of war zones across the world, including Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere. And trust me, you can tell who's an novice volunteer and who's properly trained and experienced. Serge Alam was definitely not green. His unit was part of the Sparta Battalion, whose commander, nicknamed Motorola, was also from Russia. This unit, at the destroyed airport frontline where we were, had around a dozen Russian military ural trucks parked up at their base in
the ruins, all with Russian plates. When my colleague tried to film them, the fighters went berserk and made us delete the footage. In contrast, as we were walking over this pit in the airport, we had to walk over this beam below there were clearly the remains of soldiers, and the separatists started laughing, saying, hey, look it's dead Ukrainians, old bodies of Ukrainian servicemen down in that pit there. To see kind of a jacket for boots that they
thought was funny. They didn't mind us filming that, but the trucks no make of that.
What you will soar gonna provided a way of moving people in there, like these are not Russian troops, they are members of a private military organization. The other thing though, was that because they were directly controlled by the g are you and private and non ideological in that way, like a lot of them are ideological, but you could use them. What they were used for was to clean up separatist fighters in Ukraine who were out of there, who you know, displeased the leadership.
Remember that guy Motorola that I just mentioned, Well, he was eventually killed in Donyetes in twenty sixteen when a bomb blew up in the elevator of his apartment block, was planted in the ceiling and detonated. When Motorola entered, his whole head was blown in two. Motorola's friend Givi, was also a commander of a Russian separatist militia known as the Somali Battalion, named after pirates in Side. He was killed in twenty seventeen in his Donjet's office when
a thermobaric rocket was fired through the window. He burned to death. The rocket used was a Russian RPO Schmelround. The guy who was the head commander of all these pro Russian units and separatist Donyetsk was also killed him. In twenty eighteen, he was targeted with a bomb inside a cafe in Donyetsk, which blew up as he went for coffee. He was blown to bits. It's worth noting that all three of these dead separatist commanders were war criminals.
They sometimes committed these acts on camera and on the record admitted to regularly executing prisoners of war and much worse now the Russian separatists all blowing these deaths on the Ukrainian special forces. They deny that many believe as Pierre said that it was Russia clearing house with the help of Wagner. I guess we'll never not.
Wagner's first ever appearance was on January two, twenty fifteen, when they assassinated the commander of a unit called GBR Batman in Lhansk.
GBR Batman was another pro Russian separatist unit fighting in the Dombas against the Ukrainians.
That he just waited for. This paramilitary commander, who was a separatist commander driving down the road, ambushed him. Five loads of Thermobarrat missiles into his car, killed everyone. Then a few days later, they were involved in besieging another base used by another paramilitary Cossack group in Krasnadonna in the hands so they were basically used as a death squad to go and enforce Kremlin control over their various
paramilitary groups. Then a few weeks later they were finally thrown into proper battle in the bouts of it, in the big offensive there, and all the survivors from that said that they were just using human wave tactics.
Human wave tactics is exactly as it sounds, soldiers sent up over the trench in waves. They keep going. Everybody drops, another wave comes an awful tactic that gets a lot of people.
Killed horrific casualties as a result of it. Their image they always like to present is very important. The image is like, oh, we're special forces, where you know operators were really capable and elite. They're not. They never were. What they were actually used for in almost every conflict was meet disposable, deniable cannon.
Foddow, which is what Progosion started mouthing off about in a big way on telegram mostly and through various different or Wagner associated propaganda channels. That's what he was kicking off about right in Ukraine.
Yeah, because he was saying that the Ministry of Defense was withholding ammunition from them. I don't know what it was that really caused this in no way because this is in a way how they'd always operated. It's just I think, I mean, there's also the potential that on a human level, something does eventually snap on you when you're surrounded by that many corpses on a daily basis.
The battlefields outside Bakhmu work. I mean, you've seen the drone videos and stuff, and the piles and piles of corpses around there and people still trying to advance through them. It was horrific. So, yeah, there's some change in him where he sort of finally decides that this is not an acceptable way to use the personnel he's getting. I wonder if also it's the fact that he was using penal conscript stuff, and I think his own identity as a convict was quite important penal conscripts.
Let me explain that. So, when it became clear that invading and taking over Ukraine was not going to be the walk in the park Russia thought it was, the Kriminin realized it needed a lot more men for its ongoing groundwar. They conscripted young men, then older men, then older men still, then literal prisoners, rapists, murderers, and other various convicts were released from many prisons across Russia on the condition that they fight in Ukraine under PMC. Wagner.
The deal was that if they survive, they can go home a free man after the fighting is done. Now, of course, at least two of these fighters that we know of that survived returned home and immediately started committing murders again. But anyway, that's the penal conscripts. As you can probably tell by now, Yevgeny Progosian's life was a brutal but extremely eventful one. He was worth over a
billion dollars when he died. For weeks before that, at sixty two years old, he was out in a field, bed in a tent on the front lines of East Ukraine, watching his men get butchered. In amongst this savagery which he was so used to, something happened, and Progosian decided to turn it against his old friend Vladimir Putin. He took PMC. Wagner, turned around and rode back into Russia
with the aims of destabilizing the Kremlin. We'll be covering Progosion's mutiny on Putin in the second half of this episode next week. The final conclusion to sad Oligach said. Oligarch is a H eleven production for Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio, hosted, produced, researched and edited by me Jake Hanrahan and Sergey Slipchenko. Co produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music by Sam Black, artwork by Adam mcdoyle, soundmix by Splicing Block. Go to Jacanrahan dot com for more information.