christian dog ran, nbc news. teamwork making the dream work. and on that note, i wish you a good night. from all of our colleagues across the networks of nbc, thanks for staying up late. i will see you at the end of tomorrow. it s really good to have you here. before he became the editor of the most important english language magazine and the world, david remnick was a moscow correspondent for the washington post. he in fact won the pulitzer prize for his landmark 1993 book about the last time russia fell apart at the end of the soviet union. david remnick is gonna be here joining us live in just a few minutes, as we all try to make sense of this latest news that burst out this weekend. everybody in the world trying to figure out whether russia may be falling apart again, whether vladimir putin may be teetering, after 23 years consolidated, increasingly dictatorial power in russia. again, david remnick will be joining us live on that story in just a moment. we a
prigozhin? reporter: well, kim, first of all, you know, yef gu againny prigozhin didn t even have a public profile by the full-scale invasion of ukraine. his usefulness was that he wasn t a public figure and through his businesses, he was able to provide denial services to the russian government, whether it be, you know, providing mercenaries to fight in syria, activities in ukraine s donbas region, as well as the interference in u.s. elections in 2016 through the notorious network of troll farms that he operated. it was only after the full-scale invasion, and wagner s ability to deliver some kinds of battlefield succession, particularly in the fighting against bakhmut in eastern ukraine, that prigozhin actually
russian government to explain why it was deploying regular russian in military groups, to assist one of the sites fighting in this civil war in sudan. it s much less controversy for the russian government. instead, this random, for profit, private army turns up there. the wagner group. they turned up to promote russian interests in the sudanese civil war with the russian government being able to say, we ve got nothing to do with this. they ve done the same thing in sudan, in libya, in mali, in syria, wherever russia wants to exert armed military influence, but they don t want to explain that that is what they are doing with the regular military. also, of course, ukraine. prigozhin s wagner group has had a lot of attention for its battlefield succession, successes in ukraine. but it s not like the wagner is fighting as an independent force. prigozhin s wagner mercenaries are basically a private augmentation, an adjunct to the