The leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a versatile man, with a variety of catering businesses that earned him the nickname “Putin’s Chef,” and illegal activities that have brought him under international sanctions.
Businessman, ex-convict, founder of a ‘troll factory’ (disinformation machine that tries to interfere in political opinions and decisions via the internet) and mercenary, Prigozhin is now the rebel who challenges Russian President Vladimir Putin.
With more than 25,000 men from his private army, which is considered illegal in Russia, but which has fought alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, Yevgueny Prigozhin launched an uprising against the military command on Friday because of the “chaos” in which, he says, the war is transformed and the “100,000 Russian soldiers” who died according to him because of the Defense Ministry.
In recent months, Prigozhin has harshly criticized the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of Staff, Valery Gerasimov, continuously challenging them in audio and video filled with insults, shouts, and accusations of incompetence and disorganization in Ukraine’s war strategy. .
His experience as the leader of the feared Russian mercenaries, known for their brutality and use of torture methods against their own members and enemies, he gained, according to reports from former fighters and videos of the group, in countries such as Sudan, Mali, Republic of Central African or Libyan.
However, Prigozhin was not always the leader of thousands of fighters for Wagner, a group he eventually acknowledged he had founded in 2014 only in September 2022, when “the genocide in Donbass began”, as he said, in line with the argument of Putin in February 2022 to start the war against Ukraine.
Born 62 years ago in St. Petersburg, Prigozhin started out as a criminal businessman and spent 10 years in prison in the 1990s, with no motive ever revealed.
When he got out of jail, he started selling hot dogs and earning $1,000 a month, as he reported to a portal in his hometown in 2011, in one of the rare interviews he gave at the time.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, however, aspired much more and managed to make good contacts in the business community and later also in the Russian political elite.
Soon the man, from the extreme right, managed to open his first restaurant and enter the world of ‘catering’ for gala dinners or with distinguished guests from Russia.
Vladimir Putin was already president at the time and sometimes took his guests, including foreign leaders like George Bush, to Prigozhin’s restaurants in St. Petersburg, according to photos from the time.
Through his company Concord, Prigozhin won government contracts for “catering” and for supplying schools in Moscow, eventually earning the nickname “Putin’s chef”.
According to a 2017 investigation by currently-detained Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni, Prigozhin was reported to have been awarded state contracts worth at least €2.5 billion, including one for the supply of food to the Russian military.
However, his ambitions did not stop there. Although he never publicly implicated Putin in his illegal initiatives, Yevgeny Prigozhin decided to serve the Russian state through another facet, when he founded the famous St. Petersburg troll factory, which accused the US of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
It was only in February this year that Prigozhin acknowledged being the founder of this structure, who in 2016 launched a campaign on social media to manipulate public opinion in the US in the run-up to the presidential election that Donald Trump would win.
“I was never just the funder of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, created it and managed it for a long time. It was created to protect the Russian information space from the West’s crude and aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian positions,” said he then.
In November 2022, Prigozhin first responded to allegations of alleged meddling in US elections, saying that Russia “did and will do it”: “Gentlemen, we have done it, we will continue to do it and do it – in the future,” he said.
As a result, the US sanctioned Prigozhin and three of his companies, including Concord Management and Concord Catering, for influencing political processes in the country.
In February 2022, the businessman decided to return to focus on his group of mercenaries and sent his fighters to Ukraine, where trouble began with the Russian military command, which initially did not give credit to the “Wagnerists” when they took a seat . , enraged Prigozhin.
The conflict erupted this year during the battle for control of Bakhmut, which was finally taken by mercenaries in May in what was Ukraine’s longest battle to date, and during which Prigozhin accused Shoigu and Gerasimov of letting their men die from a lack of ammunition.
Since then, the businessman’s attacks on the Russian Ministry of Defense have increased, including in relation to alleged attacks by Ukrainian drones on the Kremlin and the south of Moscow or Russia’s inability to defend regions bordering Ukraine, such as Belgorod against enemy attacks and bombardments.
Yevgeni Prigozhin accuses the military leadership of lying and deceiving the Russians and Putin of hiding the real situation on the war front. To some Russians he is the only one who speaks the truth, while to others he is a dangerous and brutal man who now rebels against the highest power structures.
Source: DN
