The leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a multifaceted man, with a variety of catering businesses that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef” and illegal activities that have landed him under international sanctions.
Businessman, ex-convict, founder of a factory of ‘trolls’ (disinformation machine that tries to interfere in opinions and political decisions through the Internet) and mercenary, Prigozhin is now the rebel who challenges the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
With more than 25,000 men from his private army, which is considered illegal in Russia but has been fighting alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a rebellion against the military command on Friday due to the “chaos” in which, according to him, , the war has been transformed and the “100,000 Russian soldiers” he says have died because of the Ministry of Defense.
In recent months, Prigozhin has been harshly criticizing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, constantly challenging them in audio and video clips full of insults, shouting, and accusations of incompetence and disorganization in war strategy. in Ukraine. .
His experience as the leader of the feared Russian mercenaries, known for their brutality and the use of torture methods against their own members and enemies, according to accounts of ex-combatants and videos of the group, was acquired in countries such as Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic or Libya. .
However, Prigozhin was not always the leader of thousands of fighters for Wagner, a group that he finally acknowledged having created in 2014 only in September 2022, when “the genocide began in Donbass,” he said, in line with the argument put forward by Putin. in February 2022 to launch the war against Ukraine.
Born 62 years ago in St. Petersburg, Prigozhin started out as a criminal entrepreneur and spent 10 years in prison in the 1990s, with no motive revealed.
When he was released from prison, he began selling hot dogs and earning $1,000 a month, he told a hometown portal in 2011, in one of the few interviews he gave at the time.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, however, aspired to much more, and was able to make good contacts in the business world and, later, in the Russian political elite.
Quickly, 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.
By then, Vladimir Putin was already president and would sometimes take his guests, including foreign leaders such as George Bush, to Prigozhin’s restaurants in St. Petersburg, according to photographs from the time.
Through his company Concord, Prigozhin won public contracts for catering and supplying schools in Moscow, eventually earning the epithet “Putin’s chef.”
According to a 2017 investigation by currently detained Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Prigozhin was allegedly awarded state contracts worth at least 2.5 billion euros, including one to supply the Russian military with food.
However, his aspirations 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 created the notorious St. Petersburg troll factory, which the US accused of interfering in the US presidential election. of 2016.
It was not until February of this year that Prigozhin acknowledged having been the founder of this structure, which launched a campaign on social networks in 2016 to manipulate public opinion in the US ahead of the presidential elections that Donald Trump would win.
“I was never just the funder of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, created it, managed it for a long time. It was created to protect the Russian information space from the crude and aggressive Western propaganda of anti-Russian theses.” he said.so.
In November 2022, Prigozhin responded for the first time to accusations of alleged meddling in the US elections, saying that Russia “did it and will do it”: “Gentlemen, we did it, we continue to do it and do it, in the future “. ,” he said.
As a result, the United States sanctioned Prigozhin and three of his companies, including Concord Management and Concord Catering, for influencing the country’s political processes.
In February 2022, the businessman decided to refocus on his group of mercenaries and sent his fighters to Ukraine, where problems began with the Russian military command, which initially did not give due credit to the ‘Wagnerists’ when they took over some town. . , angering Prigozhin.
The conflict erupted this year during the struggle for control of Bakhmut, which was finally taken over by mercenaries in May, in what was Ukraine’s longest battle so far, and in which Prigozhin accused Shoigu and Gerasimov of leaving die to your men from lack of ammunition.
Since then, the businessman’s attacks on the Russian Defense Ministry have been on the rise, including in relation to alleged Ukrainian drone strikes against the Kremlin and south Moscow or Russia’s inability to defend regions bordering Ukraine, such as Belgorod, from enemy raids and bombardments.
Yevgeni Prigozhin accuses the military command of lying and deceiving the Russians and Putin of hiding the real situation on the war front. For some Russians he is the only one who tells the truth, while for others he is a dangerous and impertinent man who now stands up against the highest structures of power.
Source: TSF
