From a hot dog stand to founding Russia’s most powerful private army, the Wagner Group.
In two decades, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin became one of the most powerful men in Russia and was until recently one of the closest figures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Prigozhin He was on the passenger list of a plane that crashed this Wednesday in Russia with 10 people on board and presumed dead.
The fleeting rebellion led by Prigozhin at the end of June, when the group came close to Moscow, strained the relationship between the two men.
On June 23-24, Wagner’s fighters crossed into Russia from Russian-held Ukrainian territory and advanced on the capital, some 200 km away.
Hours later, Prigozhin announced the withdrawal of his men and the operation “march of justice” was dismantled.
From the moment the June riot collapsed, there was always the feeling that a man who had lived so close to the edge for so long had mistimed his steps.
If you were aboard your own private plane when it crashed en route from Moscow to St Petersburg, that would mark a shocking and violent end to a very turbulent life.
The man who defied the Kremlin for 24 hours
The Russian businessman, known as “Putin’s chef”, started selling sausagesbut very soon he managed to amass a great fortune, which allowed him to move from the world of catering to politics, the media and from there to the business of war.
The United States and other governments accused him of running a “troll factory” In Internetwith which he tried to influence the elections of different countries.
It is calculated that the wagner groupwhich has defended Russia’s interests in countries such as Libya, Syria or the Central African Republic, came to have more than 20,000 mercenaries in the Ukraine war alone, 10% of all Russian troops on the front.
For years, Prigozhin denied his ties to the group or even its very existence, but as the role of this private army grew more prominent in the Ukrainian conflict, the powerful businessman went out of hiding.
In September 2022, Prigozhin appeared in a video addressing a group of prisoners in a Russian jail, urging them to join the fight with Wagner in exchange for their sentences being pardoned.
Dressed in military clothing, he appeared in different videos claiming credit for victories of Russian troops over Ukrainian ones, such as in the Battle of Bakhmut or in the city of Soledar.
The June mutiny was not the first time that Prigozhin had questioned the role of the Russian military commanders in the war in Ukraine, a boldness that demonstrated his power at the time.
In recent months, his criticism has been constant and increasingly open, to the point that tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Defense Ministry have become a great challenge to Putin himself.
But how did Prigozhin’s closeness to Putin come to be?
His origins
Yevgeny Prigozhin, 62, joined the president’s elite circle in 2001, when Putin started dining at his fancy floating restaurant in Saint Petersburg, called New Island.
Though not part of the original group of Putin allies who created a country house club called Ozero, Prigozhin rose to prominence in the president’s hometown of St. Petersburg, reaching the president through the flavors of its cuisine.
In his youth he was jailed for nine years for theft and fraud.
Russia’s “shock therapy” capitalism in the 1990s created many business opportunities for ex-convicts, and when they got out of prison, they made their fortune.
Prigozhin set up a hot dog stand, and then a grocery store. From there he made the leap into restaurants, setting up a chain of establishments and the Concorde Catering company in 1996.
One of these venues is the New Island, which became the most luxurious in Saint Petersburg and Putin’s favourite, to which he brought international leaders and where Prigozhin always he made sure not to be far from the table of the powerful Russian president.
Over the next decade, the company signed lucrative contracts with the Russian authorities to provide care for the schools in Saint Petersburg and Moscow and, later, to feed a large part of the Russian army.
During all those years, and despite being a person very close to Putin, Prigozhin kept a low profile, and his fortune, like that of most Russian oligarchs, was the subject of controversy and secrets.
The documents associated with the sanctions imposed by the United States for his alleged meddling in the 2016 elections indicate that he has three private planes and a luxury yacht, supposedly used by him, his family and his associates, registered in tax havens such as the Islands Cayman and the Seychelles.
The oligarch also ran a pro-Kremlin media group called patriot, which was formed with the aim of “countering” the “anti-Russia” media that “don’t realize the good things that are happening in the country”. Since the start of the Ukrainian war, however, there are hardly any critical media left in Russia.
The portal brings together four Saint Petersburg-based news websites: RIA FAN news agency, Narodnye Novosti, Ekonomika Segodnya and Politika Segodnya.
Its combined audience is estimated to be larger than that of the state news agency. rate or the television station RT.
scandals
In the international arena, his name began to be known after the US authorities accused him of trying to influence the 2016 elections in that country through his Internet Research Agency (IRA)based in Saint Petersburg.
Both Washington, the European Union and the United Kingdom accused Prigozhin of launching disinformation campaigns to manipulate public opinion in different countries with this company, which they describe as a “bot factory”. Prigozhin and his family were, for this reason, subject to international sanctions, and the businessman was on the FBI’s most wanted list.
The US State Department even offered a $10 million reward for information about the involvement of Prigozhin, the IRA and other entities in those attempts to influence American voters in 2016.
Far from denying it, Prigozhin acknowledged in November 2022 that he interfered in the US elections and that he would continue to do so in the future, “with care, precision, surgery and in our own way, as we know how to do.”
But the influence campaigns associated with Prigozhin do not end on US soil.
An investigation carried out by Facebook and specialists from Stanford University (USA) linked it to certain operations of manipulation of the orpublic pinion on social media in africain countries such as Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan.
In fact, a BBC investigation found that the russian group offered money to at least six candidates in the 2018 Madagascar presidential election.
Prigozhin dismissed Facebook’s accusations.
Another UK government-funded investigation revealed how the Kremlin was using such “troll factories” to spread disinformation on a large scale and “manipulate public opinion about the illegitimate war in Ukraine”, trying to rally support for the conflict and for Putin.
“The operation has suspicious links to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the most infamous and far-reaching bot farm, the Internet Research Agency, both of which are UK-sanctioned,” the UK government said in a statement.
The Kremlin’s and Prigozhin’s operations in Africa were not limited, however, to social media.
The Wagner Group is present in different African countries such as Libya, where they support forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar, or Mali, where their mercenaries fight against Islamist militias.
They have also been used in the Central African Republic (CAR) and in Sudan, where Russia has secured gold and diamond mining concessions.
In 2018, youThree Russian journalists were shot dead in an ambush when they were trying to investigate a suspected link between the mines and the group of mercenaries.
A CNN investigation uncovered a CAR government mining contract with Lobaye Invest, a Russian company run by Yevgeny Khodotov, another St. Petersburg businessman linked to Prigozhin’s network.
In Syria
Although perhaps the Wagner Group’s most prominent role, before the war in Ukraine, was played in Syria, where its men fought alongside Bashar al-Assad’s troops and have been in charge of protecting oil wells since 2015.
The group was first seen in Ukraine in 2014, when it participated in the annexation of Crimea.
Then, the streets of the peninsula were filled with men in uniform, but without insignia or flags, who were known as the “little green men.”
Prigozhin’s mercenaries are believed to have been among them, Tracey German, Professor of Conflict and Security at King’s College London, told the BBC.
After that, a thousand Wagner soldiers supported the separatist forces in the Donbace in their fight against the Ukrainian army, and are also believed to be responsible for the “false flag” attacks in the months leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, which Russia used as a pretext to start the war.
Over the months, the role of the Wagner Group was gaining weight in the war, as well as the number of its troops.
According to British intelligence, the group led by Prigozhin began recruiting on a large scale after the Kremlin failed to mobilize enough men for the regular army.
Thousands of them come from Russian prisons, and this could have been done “because of their closeness to Putin,” said Andrei Zakharov, of the BBC Russian Service, a few months ago.
But that closeness was shattered.
In his confrontation with the Russian defense authorities, Prigozhin avoided directly criticizing the president and always blamed his commanders.
But when military chiefs announced plans to place Wagner’s forces and other “volunteer detachments” under the main command structure, Prigozhin seemed to crack.
As he prepared to launch his “march for justice” in June, he questioned the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and accused the defense minister of responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers.
The Kremlin denounced as “hysteria” suggestions that Prigozhin’s revolt had made a dent in the power of the Russian president.
As minimum, it was the beginning of the end of Prigozhin’s extraordinary and enduring Russian influence on Putin’s leadership.
* This note was originally published in January 2023 and updated on August 23 after the plane crash in which Prigozhin was allegedly traveling.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC News World. Download the latest version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
See original article on BBC