 And it's Rondo, director of the Future Frontlines program and a professor of practice at the Center of the Future of War at Arizona State University. And I'm Ben Dalton, I'm a fellow at the Future Frontlines program at New America as well. We wanted to talk a little bit about oligarchs and oligarchy, specifically as they pertain to Russia. And I thought maybe we could start just with a very brief history lesson for those who are not clear. When you say oligarch in the Russian context, what does that really refer to and how did that sort of come to be? The oligarchy in Russia is roughly 30 years old. It starts really with a collapse of the Soviet Union, where you saw an accumulation of capital and power kind of come into the hands of a lot of Communist Party elites, in particular, Communist Party elites that were associated with the security agencies were some of the first to get their hands on major levers of capital in the country as the Soviet collapse happened. There was a major reorganization of the entire economy, you know, factory managers, industry leaders who were clever enough to figure out that their best route to power and wealth was to take essentially the shares of state-owned property for their own good and then consolidate that into value that could then be transmitted as money, right? Those folks became the power brokers inside Russia very early on in the 1990s. Right. So you mentioned that a lot of these were connected to state security services, the Communist Party. You know, could you talk a little bit about the specific positions that enabled them to sort of get these former state-run industries at bargain-based rates? Well, a good example, actually, one of the most famous examples who, you know, is Mikhail Korokovsky. He was, you know, an oil baron, oil magnate who now, of course, resides outside of Russia, is probably one of the most well-known dissident oligarchs out there who started his career in the youth wing of the Communist Party. So he was kind of a pioneer, as they say. He worked his way up in this elite functions of the youth party. And he also was very clever in his consolidation of his understanding of how to use state-run companies or enterprises. Probably a better way to describe them rather than companies and convert value from those companies. So theoretically, anybody who was a Communist Party member and worked in a factory or an enterprise of some sort was a joint shareholder in some way or another. And all the property was collectively owned by the state. But the people were theoretically the joint shareholders. In reality, as the collapse occurred, the question became, well, what is the value of this particular enterprise or industry? Right. Let's say a pipeline factory or, you know, some sort of machine-making factory. You might have lots of different parts and products that would go out into the market, right? Technically, those would be controlled by the state. When the collapse occurred, then it became a question of, well, how do we privatize this property that has been basically collectively owned? And the leaders of those enterprises typically were the ones in charge of that reorganization process. And so, of course, they naturally understood that they kind of were sitting in a catbird seat in terms of taking the most shares, right, or perhaps redistributing them to friends and family members. And that's really kind of the origin story of the oligarchy. Khodorkovsky is a good example of somebody who kind of did that early experimentation. He was, of course, very close to Moscow power brokers that kind of gave him the leeway to do that. And that eventually led to the formation of a bank and an oil company known as Yukos. There are other stories like this, of course, Boris Barzovsky, very famously built an entire media empire similarly out of state-run enterprises that were reapportioned and reshared out as a result of the privatization process. Yeah, see, I'm glad you mentioned Khodorkovsky because I wanted to ask you about the relationship between oligarchs and the seat of government power as represented by Putin himself because Khodorkovsky and Putin had a very famous falling out that that resulted in Khodorkovsky spending several years in prison and now lives in exile. Are there still multiple poles of power in Russia represented by Putin versus the oligarchs? Or has he managed to successfully sort of fully put them under heel, so to speak? That is a really good question. I think the jury is kind of out on that and I'll explain why. So I mean, we have to go back now to like the late 1990s, early 2000. So Putin now, you know, is being elevated as president in 1999, 2000. He has been the chosen one. And part of the bargain there is that the oligarchs, the early days of oligarchs that supported Yeltsin would support Putin in exchange for not being prosecuted under anti-corruption laws, right? Or any myriad of laws that could have been applied in the instance of like a Barozovsky or somebody else who was close to Yeltsin, tax fraud, you name it. There are many options available at the time, of course. So the bargain with the so-called Yeltsin's family, the family they're often called was, you know, Putin will be elevated to power. Those kind of who had supported him along the way, particularly wealthy, you know, oligarchs who were kind of pulling away from Yeltsin were maybe reluctant backers of Yeltsin because he was, of course, kind of in ill health, mentally and physically, had decided to sort of switch tack and move on to supporting Putin. I kind of count Mikhail Korokovsky as among them at first, although kind of one of those distant stars in the constellation of oligarchs. There are many more powerful insiders who were responsible for Putin's elevation very early on. But progressively, they lost their empires usually from some sort of scheme in which the taxation authorities of Russia would be brought to bear on a given company, right? Barozovsky is a very famous example. There are so many others where that ultimately resulted in a total reshuffle. But the place that, you know, there was the greatest reshuffle, the two, I think, places where you had the biggest reshuffle was in the energy industry. And, you know, in the early days in the 1990s, obviously, energy still mattered for the Russian economy. It was very of the central pillar of the Russian economy. And that reorganization of, you know, several oil and gas majors that, you know, basically resulted with Putin's closest friends ending up as the CEOs of Gazprom and Rosneft, people who had been with him since, you know, his days in the KGB, who had been close to him in one way or the other, ultimately were elevated to power in those positions, smaller scale Russian oil majors that had perhaps done deals with BP or Shell or other outside foreign oil industry magnets and empowers basically found themselves now in a very weak bargaining position when it came to joint sharing and production agreements. So that reconciliation of power was a pretty big one. And it kind of went on for a very long time. I think, you know, you could sort of say it started in earnest around 2002 or three. So only just a couple of years after Putin took power. And then, you know, its completion ended really, you know, I think with with Khodorkovsky's imprisonment. And and I think you could also say there are probably some other way stations. There are some other points along the road where there are important pivot points where Putin was able to consistently bring his inner circle of sort of wealthy power brokers closer and closer and to tighten the net, basically. He's been very successful at that for a variety of reasons. Yeah. And although this is a different story that we can't really get into right now, he's done similar things just in terms of appointing some of his oldest cohorts to very prominent positions within the Russian military. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I mean, so oligarchs are very much in the news right now because the other thing that they're kind of notorious for is stashing, you know, untold sums of wealth in various foreign instruments all around the world. Can you talk about some of the strategies that that Russia's oligarchs have used to protect their wealth, why they felt it was necessary to do so? And then maybe we can get into what Western authorities are beginning to do to kind of crack down on that. Well, this is actually a really interesting, I think, untold story. Right. One of the things that some scholars like Karen Dowisha, you know, the late scholar from Indiana University, who wrote very famously about Putin's kleptocracy, she has done a great job of documenting how actually, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, upper echelons and the KGB and the SBR, which are the two main intelligence bodies at the time, they fully understood what was about to happen. In fact, like many party members among the elites anyway seem to understand that the economic collapse would then lead to the political collapse. And there's plenty of historical evidence to show that, you know, there was a bit of planning that took place, you know, two to three years before the actual collapse actually happened. And Dowisha writes about this. It's quite interesting, actually, that some members of the KGB, again, close to Putin, made a concerted decision that a strategy for protecting the state wealth was to purchase, you know, things of value abroad, in particular in the United States, interestingly. So there are actually sort of lots of origin stories about how this, you know, Soviet wealth migrated over to the United States, migrated also to the United Kingdom, a very other well-known haven for, you know, Soviet collapse, rubles, that that then, you know, transformed into pockets of real estate, you know, pockets of, you know, heavy industry purchases or light industry purchases in places like Chicago, you know, places like, you know, Pennsylvania, you name it. You see that evidence of that kind of Russian footprint now starting to kind of come up to light. But this, I mean, that's not 30 years ago, but that whole kind of strategy was deployed by, you know, elites within the security services as a means of protecting the state wealth. And the idea was then that it would be recalled once things were reconciliated. But once things were reconciliated, you know, Putin was in power and the strategy was to reconciliate to his friends. And so that's why we talk about some Putin's wallets. Really what we're really talking about are this, this other sort of secondary strategy where to ensure that Russian wealth is not targeted for sanctions, for a variety of reasons, either because of accusations of organized crime, involvement of, you know, in some sort of international illicit scheme of some sort to ensure that that kind of, you know, targeting doesn't occur, Putin adopted this secondary strategy of developing friendships or cultivating friendship ties that would allow him to park money in other locations in other people's names. And so when we talk about that, you know, Putin's wallets, we're not just talking about like, oh, that's, you know, that's just his personal wealth. It's really for also moving the levers of state, right? Like it's a really important thing, you know, that you have like Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, right? He has properties all over the world. And it's assumed, I think, widely that some of those properties are meant as fail-saves or when the state has a situation like it has now, where there is the imminent collapse because of default on debt. We've talked a lot about, I mean, you've heard a lot this last couple of weeks about these sort of skepticism that this will, will this work, you know, will sanctions on oligarchs work. That depends what you mean by work, right? If you mean by, you know, that if sanctions are only effective, if we see the likes of Oleg Deripaska, you know, who famously, of course, was the head of Russo, one of the largest aluminum export companies in the world. And if we see the likes of Deripaska or even Roman Abramovich, right? Crying out, you know, against the war publicly, that that is evidence that the sanctions are working. I disagree with that definition wholeheartedly. Sure. I remember when the Panama Papers came out however many years ago, and it was found that, I think it was like a professional concert celloist, some elite musician who had close ties, yeah, had like hundreds of millions of dollars stashed somewhere. How does a professional musician get that kind of wealth is obviously an important question. I did want to ask you, you mentioned Abramovich. He was in the news actually just today because he seems to have been caught in some kind of crossfire. He, you know, alleges that he was poisoned early March when he was in Kiev actually, meeting, discussing some kind of basically just engaging in political talks between Kiev and Moscow acting as a vector. Could you talk about their political utility to Putin apart from just sort of being places to sort of stash money or as a backup? Like they're clearly like important political actors as well on top of that. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, Romana Abramovich is somebody who straddles many different worlds. You know, there are properties in Ukraine that are important for his empire there as well as in Russia and outside of Russia. He uses that wealth and has used that wealth historically to gain influence in the United Kingdom. And obviously in the United States, we know that obviously from the more recent history with the Trump administration that there was of course a lot of intimations about these overlapping ties between the K Street lobbyists like Paul Manafort who serviced those oligarchs on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia border. So they're extremely important because they can go out into the world, they can hobnob with wealthy politicians, influential politicians outside of Russia, influential business people outside of Russia who can change the political calculus of whole governments, right? Brexit is a very good example where we saw the influence of Russian oligarch money having a real effect on how that perceived choice over whether or not to remain in the European Union or not was actually kind of shaped by money from wealthy oligarchs who had very tight relationships with wealthy British elites for a variety of reasons but not the least of course because that's a system that is very well protected inside of the United Kingdom. So if you're a caviar eating, champagne loving, yacht, globetrotting kind of guy or girl, although it's mostly guys, good chance that you're going to have a little bit more political influence than this very towering figure that Putin is, right? And Putin can't just go out there and jump around and say, hey, what is that, the other thing? Because he has to maintain this fiction and that he is a humble servant of the state only. It does seem that for the month plus that this invasion has been going on, it has uniquely kind of unified both sides of the aisle in this country in the United States, maybe more than we've seen for a while. But I'm wondering, have you seen any sort of maybe cold feet at efforts to, for instance, South Dakota is kind of notorious for being a place where people like to stash money because it has very strict privacy laws. Are you seeing any kind of hesitation perhaps from some domestic actors about taking certain measures that might, on one hand, dig up ill-gotten gains, but on the other hand, maybe reveal more than people want? Well, I can't speak to specific people. I will simply say we're already hearing rumblings from certain sectors of the Republican Party, certain leaders within the Republican Party complaining that there are some potential unintended consequences of going after Russian oligarch wealth that the Biden administration may come to regret. We'll see its early days. I do think what's interesting is this multilateral task force, I think bodes very well for the potential success of these sanctions in uncovering more webs of interconnection than most people are probably aware of. One of the things we have to understand is that in order to build and hide money, to sort of build money laundering empires, right? You need multiple different localities and you need multiple different kind of vehicles with which to do that. And so what's been really remarkable about this particular turn of events in last month or so, what distinguishes this effort from past efforts to come crack down on Russian oligarchs is that now you have about a dozen nations, Japan, Australia, France, et cetera, et cetera, along with the United States and the United Kingdom who have bonded together and said, we're gonna set up a task force to actually track down assets that are tied to these individuals. And I mean, it'll be interesting to see how they prove the case. I think that's now the work ahead is trying to develop new theories and new methodologies before surfacing these types of connections and understanding the vehicles that are used. Of course, people are very concerned about crypto as an escape hatch. It would take an awful lot of crypto to migrate all of that wealth that we're talking about. We're talking about dozens of Russian oligarchs. So actually, I think it's something that we would actually see and feel in the crypto market pretty quickly. We're not seeing that yet, but it's possible that we will see it in the next couple of months. What do you think about that actually? You're the crypto guy. Well, I mean, so on the one hand, crypto is very good at anonymizing things, but on the other hand, it's extraordinarily hard. It's almost, it's very transparent. So everything is out publicly on the blockchain. And I think it's actually quite a bit easier to, for instance, block wallets, wallet addresses than people imagine. So for instance, we saw this recently with what happened in Canada with some of the donations that were coming in to support the trucker convoy there. I believe the Canadian government actually was able to freeze transfers from a variety of wallet addresses that it was able to identify or donating to exchanges in Canada, which effectively makes it possible to actually complete that transaction. So with the exception of a few kinds of technologies, Monero, for instance, most of these are actually quite easy to track, almost uniquely easy to track and therefore uniquely easy to track down and block. And on top of that, I think that crypto has grown a lot, but there's not really liquidity large enough to disguise or hide a couple billion dollars that are trying to get sort of shuffled out of the country. Right, and in this instance, we are talking about tens of billions of dollars, most likely, right? I mean, let's just, we wanted to count like every yacht, every known yacht that might be targeted and intercepted because of these sanctions. Some of these are a hundred million, some are more than that, some are a couple hundred million, right? So let's say that there's, I don't know, 20 of these. And that's a, that is a huge wave of cash value, right? That's trying, you know, that's looking for a place to land. And I think what's so interesting about this approach is the kind of all the different avenues that have been cut off for the Russian oligarchs make it almost impossible for them to be stealthy, right? They might want to transfer wealth in some way or another. The question will be, what are the corresponding banks, right? That own that wealth, right? Or have access to have lines that are connected to the empire of a given Russian oligarch. There's that, there's also, you know, can't get certain types of cash, right? Can't get dollars very easily. Maybe you have a lot of dollars, maybe that's been a strategy for you is just to bank a lot of cash. That could be useful, but only for so long, right? Eventually you'll run out of cash if you're not able to take in more money. So this kind of starvation strategy is pretty unique, I think. I mean, and I think that one thing that's worth raising here is, you know, I was talking to a friend actually the other day, he spent some time in Russia and it was a bit skeptical. You know, again, it's sort of, well, little sanctions work. Is it, is it enough to seize the yacht or a $20 million mansion in Park Avenue or something like that? I think if you think in the short term, you know, that this is a short term conflict between Russia and Ukraine and then therefore between Russia and the United States and NATO partners, then sure, it might look a little bit like, same old, same old, but if you really kind of step back and I think recognize the seeming intent of these sanctions and the overall strategy, which is sort of economic war against Russia, it really seems to be that the objective is to ensure that Russia is never able to resurrect itself from the grave that it is digging for itself now. Right, yeah. It's going to be very hard to turn some of these systems back on or to even try to, if that is something that people want to do down the line. Right. It's not to say that people are not, haven't already been thinking about these strategies or that there isn't some sort of failsafe here, that there hasn't been a plan for insulation. There was a great piece by Benjamin Wallace Wells this week in New Yorker about Dalip Singh, who is kind of the man behind the sanctions, the brain behind US sanctions and how he was sort of faced with his problem essentially. How do you cut it all off? Right. And I think that there is a lot of maturity and a lot of sophistication within the United States Treasury and a lot of experience in dealing with Russia over the last 20, 30 years. And there's certainly a pretty clear-eyed assessment. But yes, of course, Russia has been preparing for this moment and that its central bankers and its financiers are very smart and adept at their work and at their jobs. So there certainly has been a lot of thinking about that. When we've seen other types of economic warfare failed before, I'd have to say this is pretty comprehensive. It does seem like one potential sort of pressure valve that oligarchs themselves may be looking at is the Gulf States. So I know Abramovich, for instance, back in when the prior round of sanctions was imposed, was actively sort of seeking out real estate investments there. How does that add to the already fairly complex, I'll say, diplomatically relations between the Biden administration and some of these Gulf States? Yeah, it's such a good question. I mean, I've been really thinking about and reflecting on the fact that the UAE in particular, we know, has been kind of this repository for all kinds of ill-gotten gains for many years from all over the world. I mean, warlords in Afghanistan, dictators in Africa, I guess it's kind of like most icely in Star Wars. It's like the place you go when you want to get deals done and a deal of pirates and cashing your chips and so forth. But the other thing that's probably maybe underappreciated is that the UAE is a place where gold refining is really a key industry. And I've been thinking a lot about the gold reserve strategy that Russia seems to have adopted in the lead up to this invasion. And I seem to kind of accelerate after the first incursion in Ukraine in 2014, which is go get more gold, figure it out and find a way to get it refined in the UAE and then convert it into reserves. Right. You know, my suspicion is that a lot of the things that we've seen in terms of certain types of actors like Russian mercenaries is really part of that larger strategy, which is to kind of manage the risks that will come from interdiction because of a sanctions regime that's imposed by the United States or the EU. And so and, you know, the UAE, I think, and other gold states have been a big part of that interdiction management strategy. So I'm certain that the White House is giving some thought to how to deal with the Emiratis, how to deal with the Qataris, maybe even the Omanis, right? On the other hand, maybe it's a small ball problem in a way since it is kind of all contained in the one region. What's really important to understand is that like every part of this schema of sanctions, you know, has a lever that then results in like a reaction somewhere else in the ruby Goldberg machine that Russia has pulled together in order to protect itself from economic warfare. So, you know, this debate now or this demand from Russia that the EU should pay for its gas in rubles. You know, is a pretty good sign, actually, that the right leavers have been pulled because now Russia really seems to have very few alternatives but to demand that money is paid in rubles. But it's kind of an interesting fit. It's a conundrum for Russia, if you think about it, pay me in this worthless currency so I can make more of this worthless currency. I don't know the I mean, there may be a logic there. It just seems a strange logic. What, you know, what will you do with those barrelfuls of rubles? Yeah, I will say some there was a government official who floated the idea that friendly nations could buy their their oil and gas using Bitcoin. So. Ah, OK. Well, this is interesting. I mean, so we know that, you know, India, of course, has agreed to extend the terms of an existing pre-existing contract that started before the war began so that they will buy 15 million barrels of oil from from Russia. But then you have to really think about what that means. Russia, on a given day, can export up to four million barrels. So what what India said is we'll cover four days worth of your losses at a deep discount. You know, and I get that, you know, it's not that Russia makes no profit because right now oil prices being as high as they are, of course, that discount is kind of offset, right? But still, then if you're moving to a situation where friendly countries pay in crypto, I mean, it's traceable. So I mean, what is what is the imagination? Where does that lead you to? Like, does it is it's just sort of like Modi, you know, calls up a few friends and says, you know, we need some oil and why don't you drop some Bitcoin over to Vladimir's wallet and then it'll be all good. I mean, ultimately, what it will lead to is those friendly nations will find themselves also frozen out because that's a traceable transaction. Right. Right. So you have to wonder, I mean, what's the plan? What's the backup plan? Yeah, I mean, it's just like really big sweeping terms. It's very clear that all of this is a bunch of unintended consequences to an invasion that they thought was going to be over in less than two weeks. And there's a distinct feeling of them just throwing things at a wall and seeing what might possibly work. And it feels very much still like we're in that stage. And while they obviously did take measures to protect themselves, building up these large foreign currency reserves, although obviously some of those were then frozen, a lot of what is happening does not feel to me particularly planned at this stage. Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of planning, right? But there's not a lot of risk management or like the actuarial tables are not very well defined or, you know, the calculus is often some ways. It seems like it was almost like the system was overwhelmed with too many risk factors that had to be calculated for, right? And then it was like, oh, I forgot that like if this plank goes away, the entire castle collapses, it has sparked this debate, which I think is important to touch on, you know, not just in terms of Russian oligarchs, but just sanctions more generally in economic warfare. And of course, there's been this loud chorus of voices saying we should be worried about de-dollarization of the global economy, you know, being one of the trajectories for the outcome of this economic warfare. And I think that's pretty, I think it's pretty sound logic on some level. We certainly know that, you know, China, like Russia, has lots of ideas and plans and for mitigation of risks from the impact of any kind of economic isolation. But I think actually, you know, Russia makes a good case that actually it's pretty hard to do to mitigate those risks. And China, like, is so interwoven into the world economy and into the US economy. It just makes me wonder, you know, in a planned economy where information, you know, control of information is tightly managed by authoritarian structures and where everything is very close hold and very close off, you know, to just, you know, a small number of elites. Is it possible to have enough information to mitigate risks of isolation and to also have a kind of counter strategy of de-dollarization that would be actually effective that wouldn't result in the blowing up of your own economy? Right. Yeah. And also, if you're going to move away from the US dollar as like a global reserve currency, there's truly no still no candidate who's viable to step into that role. I don't think you can see the room and be taking that that role realistically in the short to medium term. Now, not having that available alternative, right, means for an economy as large as China's, it actually makes it quite brittle in some ways, right? Maybe they do. I mean, maybe crypto is that that alternative. It's very possible. I mean, I think the real race comes down to central banks issuing cryptocurrencies. That's, I think, bottom line when it comes to economic warfare, which I think we're going to see continue. This is going to be like, you know, this is one of the best weapons ever employed by the United States so far. It's going to have political costs for the Biden administration, but it won't be the first presidential administration to pay those costs. And it won't be the last. Yeah, the spread of central bank digital currencies is is already very much well underway. And ironically, Ukraine was one of the vanguard countries that was working on rolling that out. That's right. That's right. But then still at the back is the ever present dollar for all of this to work. You need, I think, a number of different conditions to apply. That is sick for, you know, a country the size of Russia, the kind of oil and gas wealth that it has, which, of course, is all embedded in the dollar economy. I mean, you're not going to pull people away and people are going to start paying for oil and gas and renminbi and rubles any time soon. We just know that it doesn't make sense. So, you know, who in Texas would take renminbi for for oil? Right. I don't see it. So or or really Saudi Arabia, that matter, maybe there are some. Anyway, not in the near term, as we said, will we see that kind of conversion happening? So then you have to wonder, OK, what next? Then what are the other conditions? Well, the other condition is then the metaverse has to be a much more substantial place than it is now in the imaginations of the world, right? So that essentially the the fiat currencies that have dictated our social enterprise and exchange for centuries have to somehow become almost fictions. That is to say, the value of a digital world, a metaverse has to be so much more than that of the real world. Then crypto becomes something that can escape fiat currency, whether it's the dollar, renminbi or whatever. And then maybe that's where NFTs come in. Well, I have I have much more I can say on this, but. We have tarade, we have digressed away from Russian oligarchs. But I do think this is the thing to understand about Russian oligarchy and to understand the kind of the impact of these sanctions on the overall economic warfare outcomes and what it means for strategically for Russia. What it really means is that it's going to be really hard for Putin's inner circle to move cash fast and to move it in large amounts. And this is a situation where the house is on fire. The entire country is no more than two to three weeks away from default. And that's when I think we're going to see alarm bells going off. And I actually think that's also when we're going to start to see some pretty desperate measures on the part of Russia militarily. Right. Where if they need to force Zalinsky to the bargaining table or to a position, you might see some real horrors unleashed on the battlefield. I think that could happen. Yeah. But let's hope it doesn't. Amen. We've talked about a couple of oligarchs by name, but I think we'd be remiss not to mention an oligarch who lives very large in your work. You have any pregosin. Give us a quick sort of backstory on who he is and what his role is in the current conflict. Well, you have any pregosin is, you know, known as Putin's chef. He was close to Putin from his days in St. Petersburg. When Putin was, of course, deputy mayor, he was in charge of foreign affairs, licensing and foreign trade in St. Petersburg. And they're kind of their paths crossed in a number of different ways. But most importantly, just around the trade of food for oil, which was a big deal in the 1990s in St. Petersburg, the entire country really was starving to food. There was just a major food shortage because of the economic collapse, basically. And so this deal was, you know, brokered where a number of different oil companies, including one in St. Petersburg, would sell oil for food and so on. And it just so happened that pregosin, who was a convicted criminal, you know, when he got out of prison, he and his stepfather opened a sausage selling business, basically kiosks, you know, sort of fast food across the city. Anyway, that kind of cross current of, you know, wealth and food and power in the early days of St. Petersburg kind of grew this relationship between Putin, who became a frequent guest at pregosin's restaurants that he opened a few years later in the 1990s. And that, over time, went to another series of relationships that allow pregosin to grow a pretty sizable contracting empire. He catered to government buildings, you know, government agencies, but also most famously provided catering and logistic services for the Russian military for many, many years. And so that relationship kind of blossomed into what we now know today as the kind of the concourt consulting and management company that's been around for many years, but was, you know, according to the FBI anyway, responsible for financing the Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 elections. Now, pregosin is wanted all over the world, not just by the by the FBI, but others as well. You know, in twenty twenty one, the EU decided to put pregosin on their blacklist as well. So he's been an object of much speculation, much scrutiny and, of course, much targeting for sanctions. He's an important player, predominantly in the area of shaping perceptions and influence campaigns. You know, he kind of runs a package deal where mercenaries known as the Wagner group are, you know, deployed to certain locations, Syria, Ukraine, Central African Republic, most famously, as part of a military technical agreement with a local dictator or strongman. And then, you know, the other part of the package is we'll help you out with your elections and with your political problems. And so we'll come in and we'll, you know, shape the environment vis-a-vis Facebook. Usually Facebook is the kind of chosen target area that's where they've kind of tended to specialize. So pregosin kind of plays this role of impresario of irregular warfare for Putin's regime on some level. But he's not, of course, the only one. There are many others like him who do similar services on behalf of the Kremlin. Yeah. And sometimes he was like, his role is to draw fire, to be so flashy, so sort of agro in his approach that, you know, some of the other people who are part of this broader network maybe don't come in for as much public scrutiny. Absolutely. I mean, he's really kind of a decoy, almost. There are, you know, at least, you know, five or six other oligarchs who run defense contracting subsidiaries in Russia that, you know, do everything from repairing SU-35s to making sure that, you know, the guns are cleaned on a big old missile battery. Right. It's not just pregosin. Pregosin isn't actually even a specialist in that. He's a military background. He just happens to have won one of the largest sort of contracting subsidiaries, sort of contracting enterprises willing to work. So it's been he's been important to the narrative around Russia's, you know, ability to project power. And he's also been important to the narrative about who's actually in charge of Russia's risk mitigation strategy when it comes to sanctions. And it's been quite effective, actually. Well, thank you so much. I do hope that you all who are watching or listening to this tune into an upcoming series of events that we are organizing at New America under the broad heading of aftershocks, which is looking at the various knock on effects from Russia's invasion, some of them obvious, some of them less so. And we will be holding these basically every other week throughout the rest of the spring. Hope you tune in.