Yevgeni Prigozhin, from Putin’s ‘chief’ to enemy of the Russian army

Born in 1961 in what used to be Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Yevgeni Prigozhin is a product of Russia’s transformation, educated on the streets and a born survivor, buoyed by the sweeping political and economic changes the country underwent in the 1990s. wild environment that allowed radical transitions like that of the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, a former hotelier.

Prigozhin’s first major experience with the system came in 1981 when, at the age of 20, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for theft, nine of which he spent behind bars. When he was released from prison, Prigozhin found another world. He was liberated in 1990, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, a land of opportunism where the Wagner leader began to prosper with hot dog sales. In just five years and after buying part of a supermarket chain, he finally opened his own restaurant.

The place was the epicenter of the network of contacts that Prigozhin would build over the next few years as he expanded the business. One in particular: New Island, a ship sailing on the Neva River, where Russian President Vladimir Putin began taking his guests.

Prigozhin, in an interview collected by the BBC, puts his first meeting with Putin around April 2000, at the start of the president’s term, during a visit by then Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Three years later, Putin would celebrate his birthday on Prigozhin’s ship.

The first phase of the relationship between the two had a purely commercial character. Prigozhin founded a catering company, Concord, contracted by the Kremlin to supply food to the country’s military and public schools, and Wagner’s leader remained more or less in the background for the next decade.

A leaked document from Russian law firm Capital Legal Services, which counted Prigozhin among its clients, describes that the Wagner leader spent the 2000s through Concord in the hospitality industry. Absent from this biography, collected by the portal “The Intercept”, is nevertheless his decisive turn to the arms trade with the creation of the group of mercenaries, first introduced to the public in 2014.

diary sources Guardian They point out that Wagner’s creation had a lot to do with the concept of “plausible deniability”, as Russia had by then banned private military companies. “I think it was Prigozhin who raised the issue directly with Putin. Perhaps Russian military intelligence was involved, but I suspect that this project was entirely in Prigozhin’s hands,” said a former Russian defense ministry official, who was not anonymous.

The ministry provided Prigozhin with land in Molkino, in southern Russia, the group’s first training base, which began to grow in importance from there. Intervening first on behalf of separatists in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, then expanding to Syria, where Russia was an ally of Damascus in the civil war, and from there to Africa, where it is acting, according to the US and its allies, as an armed force of the military juntas that have come to power in recent years, such as in Mali.

The United States has also accused Prigozhin of organizing online troll groups to interfere in the 2016 US election through a series of pro-Donald Trump Facebook and Twitter campaigns.

After years of denials, and already in the middle of the Ukrainian war, Prigozhin finally confirmed that he founded the group of mercenaries in 2014, in a decision that gave the organization a face and made him a star on social networks, constantly announcing the group’s operations against Ukrainian forces.

However, as the months have passed, his rejection of the strategy proposed by the Russian Defense Ministry, which he accused of depriving his men of ammunition during campaigns as intense as the one in the city of Bakhmut, has prompted the current crisis. .