#195 Marat Gabidullin - Wagner Group Commander / Russian Mercenary
April 28, 2025
1 hr 45 min
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Episode 195 · April 28, 2025
#195 Marat Gabidullin - Wagner Group Commander / Russian Mercenary
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Shawn Ryan Episodes Around April 28, 2025
Episode 248 of 373 — walk the feed in the order it was published.
#195 Marat Gabidullin - Wagner Group Commander / Russian Mercenary
#196 Joshua Broome - "Rocco Reed," Inside The Adult Film Industry
Summary
Marat Gabidullin, born in Siberia and raised in Uzbekistan, served in Soviet airborne forces until 1994, then spent three years in prison for shooting a crime boss. After security work in Russia, he joined the Wagner Group in 2015, rose to lead a reconnaissance company, and was badly wounded near Palmyra in 2016. He later advised the ISIS Hunters Battalion and fought at Khasham, but quit Wagner in 2019, briefly ran a Redut detachment in Syria, and left disillusioned. Gabidullin’s 2022 memoir denounced Wagner and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; he now lives in France.
Journalist and researcher John Lechner reports from conflict zones and specializes in Russian PMCs. His book Death Is Our Business (Bloomsbury, 2025) charts the rise of Wagner, following earlier work such as Beginner’s Chechen and upcoming Circassian and Sango language texts. A former policy analyst for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and an emerging-markets banker at Deutsche Bank and Lazard, Lechner holds degrees from Harvard (Slavic Languages) and Georgetown (MSFS). Fluent in five languages and conversant in several others, he is a recognized expert on Russian foreign policy and has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. He lives in Washington, DC.
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Guest Links:
Marat Gabidullin
FB - https://www.facebook.com/share/15TBVmf2mt/
Book - Moi, Marat, ex-commandant de l'armée Wagner - Les dessous de l'armée secrète de Poutine enfin révélé https://a.co/d/csNMjFH
Book - Ma vérité https://a.co/d/bLZYssf
John Lechner
X - https://x.com/JohnLechner1
IG - https://www.instagram.com/johnalechner/
FB - https://www.facebook.com/john.lechner.5
Book - Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare https://a.co/d/7rKXhnI
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