Global Courant
Yevgeny Prigozhin was once a key player in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, leading a private army of mercenaries that led the Russian offensive in key war zones.
Prigozhin recruited thousands of convicted criminals from prison into his Wagner group – no matter how serious their crimes, as long as they agreed to fight for him in Ukraine.
Before Russia launched what has become Europe’s worst armed conflict since World War II, Prigozhin was accused of meddling in US elections and expanding Russian influence in Africa.
How did a man of dark beginnings achieve such influence and a reputation for terrifying brutality?
Dark beginnings
Yevgeny Prigozhin comes from St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin’s hometown.
He received his first criminal conviction in 1979, aged just 18, and was given a two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for theft. Two years later, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for robbery and theft, nine of which he served behind bars. After his release from prison, Prigozhin set up a chain of businesses selling hot dogs in St. Petersburg. Business went well, and within a few years, in the illegal 1990s, Prigozhin was able to open expensive restaurants in the city.
It was there that he began mixing with the powerful of St. Petersburg and then with Russia. One of his restaurants, called New Island, was a boat that floated up and down the Neva River. Vladimir Putin liked it so much that – after he became president – he started taking his foreign guests there. And most likely the two met for the first time.
“Vladimir Putin … saw that I had no problem personally serving dignitaries,” Prigozhin said in an interview. “We met when he came with Japanese Prime Minister Mori.”
Yoshiro Mori visited Saint Petersburg in April 2000, at the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s rule. Putin trusted Prigozhin enough to celebrate his birthday on New Island in 2003.
Years later, Prigozhin’s Concord catering company was contracted to supply food to the Kremlin, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef”. Firms linked to Prigozhin also won lucrative food contracts from military and state schools.
How the “notorious” Wagner was born
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, signs began to emerge that Prigozhin was no ordinary businessman. A covert private military company said to be linked to him was initially reported to be fighting Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbass region.
Commonly known as Wagner – after the call sign used by one of its top early commanders. He is said to have been fascinated by Nazi Germany, which appropriated the 19th-century composer’s works for propaganda. Ironically, the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine is a major stated objective of President Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022.
Over time, the mercenary group gained a fearsome reputation for brutality. Wagner members are accused of torturing a Syrian prisoner with a sledgehammer, beheading him and then setting his body on fire in 2017.
The following year, three Russian journalists were killed while investigating Wagner’s presence in the Central African Republic. In 2022, Wagner was again accused of murdering a man with a sledgehammer, on suspicions that he had “betrayed” the group in Ukraine. Prigozhin described the unverified footage of the brutal murder as “the death of a dog”. After members of the European Parliament called for Wagner to be designated as a terrorist group, he claimed to have sent politicians a blood-stained sledgehammer.
For years, Prigozhin denied having anything to do with Wagner and even sued people who claimed he did. But then, in September 2022, he said he had founded the group in 2014. The US, EU and UK have all imposed sanctions on Wagner, but it is allowed to operate in Russia, even though the law prohibits mercenary activities.
For years, he has been accused of being behind so-called “bot factories,” which used social media accounts and websites to spread pro-Kremlin views. Such efforts were led by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), best known for meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
Former FBI director Robert Mueller, who was appointed to investigate allegations of collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia, concluded that the IRA carried out a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify dissent. political and social in the USA. It then evolved into an operation to support Trump and disparage his election rival, Hillary Clinton, Mueller’s report said.
The US imposed sanctions on the IRA and Prigozhin personally for interfering in the 2016 presidential election and then attempted to interfere in the 2018 election. Ukraine is another major target of the IRA’s disinformation campaigns and, according to the UK, “cyber soldiers” with suspected links to Prigozhin have attacked countries including the UK, South Africa and India. As with Wagner, after denying any involvement and suing people they accused of disinformation campaigns, Prigozhin claimed in February 2023 that he had “conceived, created and directed” the IRA.
The Ukrainian war
All this time Prigozhin avoided the spotlight, usually communicating with the media through statements issued by his hotel company, Concord. That changed after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Months into the campaign, it was clearly stalling and Prigozhin’s services were again in high demand. After years of denying Wagner’s existence, on July 27, 2022, the Kremlin-controlled media suddenly admitted it was fighting in eastern Ukraine. Prigozhin also began posting videos on social media in which he boasted about Wagner’s exploits in Ukraine. At the time, no other private military company in the world had access to so much equipment, including fighter jets, helicopters and tanks. A video released on March 3 showed Yevgeny Prigozhin speaking in Bakhmut.
But it soon became clear that Prigozhin’s relations with the Russian military were very strained. He repeatedly criticized Russia’s highest authority, claimed that the defense ministry starved Wagner of ammunition, and at one point even accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov of treason. After tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed in Ukraine, Prigozhin was allowed to recruit in prisons. He personally visited many prisons to promise convicted criminals that they would be able to return home free and with their sentences lifted after six months of fighting for Wagner in Ukraine – if they survived. UK intelligence estimates that around half of the prisoners Wagner has placed in Ukraine have either been wounded or killed. As Prigozhin’s relationship with the defense ministry deteriorated, he was barred from recruiting more prisoners in early 2023.
Why does the Kremlin need Prigozhin?
A major reason is that the Russian government could use Yevgeny Prigozhin for its own purposes while denying direct involvement And why did Prigozhin end up in this role? According to journalist Ilya Zhegulev, who has studied Prigozhin’s biography in detail, there are several reasons.
“He never refused to do dirty deeds. He had nothing to lose from his reputation,” argues Zhegulev.
Prigozhin’s past was another reason, he adds. “Putin doesn’t like people with an extremely clean reputation because they are difficult to control. From this point of view, Prigozhin was an ideal candidate.” In a rare interview in 2011, Prigozhin said he once wrote a children’s book where the main character “helped the king save his kingdom” and then went on to do “something really heroic”.
Today “coup d’état”?
Resentments had long been simmering, but today it appears that the war is on: The Russian mercenary group Wagner, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, claims to have seized military facilities in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, while Vladimir Putin accused his former right-hand man for treason. Prigozhin has called for a rebellion against the Russian army, even though he denies any plans for a coup. Meanwhile, without mentioning his name but implying it, Putin vowed to severely punish the people behind this rebellion. Prigozhin declared this morning that he had crossed into Russia and Ukraine with his forces to overthrow the military leadership of Moscow and that he had already taken control of military structures and the airport in Rostov.
Global Courantl
