Since Friday evening Yevgeny Prigozhin, the millionaire founder and head of the Wagner mercenary group, has been accused by the Russian state of “inciting armed revolt” and is allegedly leading his private army inside Russia to attack and remove the military leaders of the regular Russian army, which he considered corrupt and inadequate.
The story of Prigozhin’s rise from entrepreneur to oligarch to head of Russia’s largest private army – to, perhaps, insurgent – is extremely remarkable. Like so many of Russia’s personalities of the past two decades, Prigozhin has achieved success and power through his close association with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but unlike many other oligarchs especially with the outbreak of war in Ukraine Prigozhin has achieved considerable rank of autonomy. Prigozhin has long criticized the military leaders of the Russian army but has never openly criticized Putin, and for months analysts who deal with Russia have been wondering about his true relationship with the Russian president.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, similar to Vladimir Putin, came from rather humble beginnings. Born in 1961 in St. Petersburg, like Putin, he was a petty criminal in his youth who spent a few years in prison after being arrested for robbery. Released from prison in 1990, coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin began working as a hot dog seller.
He rose quickly in the career displaying a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit, and within a few years managed a series of luxury restaurants in St. Petersburg. Here he met Putin, who was then deputy mayor of the city. When Putin became president of Russia, Prigozhin began organizing gala dinners with dignitaries invited by the president in Moscow: there are photos of Prigozhin with George W. Bush, with the then Prince Charles of the United Kingdom, with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and so many others. It was during this period that Prigozhin became famous as “Putin’s cook” or “the Kremlin’s chef”.
Prigozhin quickly diversified his activities. In 2014 he founded the Wagner paramilitary group, which operated in numerous conflicts around the world, often to support Russian national interests, and just as often committing violence, atrocities and war crimes. The Wagner group is today considered one of the most efficient mercenary groups in the world, often accused by international organizations of war crimes and the use of torture systems.
Furthermore, in 2018, the US government accused Prigozhin of having financed and created the “troll farm” that allegedly attempted to influence the US election won by Donald Trump by spreading fake news on social media.
The Wagner group began fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine shortly after the start of the invasion, and in recent months it has assumed a fundamental role in some battlefields, such as that of the town of Bakhmut, where done Wagner’s mercenaries faced the bulk of the operations and suffered most of the losses.
If before the war the Wagner group consisted almost exclusively of ex-servicemen and policemen, later Prigozhin began to go to prisons to conscript prisoners, promising that their sentences would be abolished if they spent at least six months fighting at the front. In this way, the membership of the Wagner group grew enormously. In recent days Prigozhin has said he has 25,000 men at his disposal, but past estimates spoke of many more people.
Thanks to his military contribution, Prigozhin has gained exceptional influence in Russia: according to many analysts, it would be today the second most powerful person in the country after Vladimir Putin.
Along with his political influence, Prigozhin has also increased criticism of the military leaders of the Russian army, probably with the intention of increasing his autonomy and hitting internal opponents in the Russian power system. Prigozhin has been criticizing Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the other military high commands of the army for months, calling them inept and corrupt and accusing them of boycotting the Wagner group. The allegations have gradually increased in severity, up to the last few days, in which it seems that Prigozhin is organizing an open revolt against the regular Russian army.
However, Prigozhin has never openly criticized Vladimir Putin, but only the army leaders.
Due to the activities of the Wagner group and his involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin has been subject to legal action and sanctions in numerous Western countries. CLS’s legal documents show some of the operations Prigozhin may have put in place to keep his trades going and try to avoid fines. Prigozhin, for example, owns Meroe Gold, a Sudanese gold mining company. Meroe Gold was placed under sanctions in 2020, but the Financial Times he discovered that from that moment on other non-sanctioned companies would begin to operate in his place but still attributable to him. In at least one case, in fact, an air cargo shipped from Sudan to Russia that was officially supposed to contain biscuits actually carried tons of gold.