Who was Yevgeny Prigozhin?
On September 14, 2022, a few days after Russian troops were forced to withdraw from Kharkiv by a Ukrainian counter-offensive, a video of a man talking to inmates at a Russian prison emerged on the Internet. “I am a representative of a private military company. You have probably heard of it. It’s called PMC Wagner,” said the tall man with a shaved head to a group of prisoners and guards who were standing around him in a semicircle. The video shot with a low-quality mobile camera, was published by the team of Alexei Navalny, a jailed opposition leader. The man in the video was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian tycoon with close ties with the Kremlin. His mission: recruit prisoners for Wagner to fight in Ukraine.
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In the video, he said that if the inmates, aged between 22 and 50, agreed to join Wagner, he would give them freedom after six months of service or a hero’s burial if they died in combat. “Do you have anyone who can take you out of prison,” he asked the prisoners. “There are two others who can — Allah and God — but they only take you out in a wooden box. I can take you out of here alive.”
When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Prigozhin was one of the most powerful men in the country. He had the blessings of the Kremlin. He recruited prisoners and his troops were instrumental in seizing several Ukrainian regions, including Bakhmut, Russia’s only significant territorial gain this year. Yet, Prigozhin fell out with Russia’s elite. Earlier in the year, he said the war, in which the Russians suffered huge casualties, could have been avoided. He called Russia’s Defence Ministry leadership corrupt and incompetent. The crisis within Russia’s military complex erupted into an unprecedented mutiny on June 23-24 when Wagner troops launched a march towards Moscow and shot down Russian helicopters. Then, Mr. Putin struck a deal with Prigozhin to avoid bloodshed. Exactly 18 months after the war began, Prigozhin is now a dead man. He was killed in a plane crash northwest of Moscow, according to Russian authorities.
The hotdog seller of St. Petersburg
Prigozhin’s rise and fall were closely linked to Mr. Putin.
Born in 1961 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the former Tsarist capital, Prigozhin grew up in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. At a young age, he was arrested for robbery. According to court papers released by Russian media outlet Meduza, Prigozhin and his accomplices attacked a woman in March 1980 in St. Petersburg, took her gold earrings and left her lying on the street unconscious. There were other reported similar incidents. He was convicted and jailed in 1981 in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. When he was released in 1990, the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, was already on its deathbed.
Prigozhin started a new life, like the post-Soviet Russia, selling hotdogs in St. Petersburg. The subsequent years would see him steadily expanding his business to supermarkets and restaurants. By the mid-1990s, he opened Old Customs House (Staraya Tamozhnya), on Vasilevsky Island of St. Petersburg. It would soon become one of the finest and most sought-after dining locations in the city. Influential people, including celebrities, billionaires and politicians, used to visit the restaurant. One of them was Anatoly Sobchak, the Mayor of St. Petersburg. Sometimes, Sobchak’s young deputy would accompany him to the diner — a former KGB operative, who just started building a political career, called Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
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Putin’s chef
The relationship between Mr. Putin and Prigozhin, probably established in one of those meetings, would flourish in the following years. By late 1990s, Mr. Putin would become President Boris Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, and then his successor. With Mr. Putin in the Kremlin, Prigozhin would go on winning lucrative government catering contracts. His business started booming, so did his influence. As a measure of his growing clout, he was occasionally seen with President Putin and global leaders. He accompanied Mr. Putin when he visited the U.K. in 2003 and appeared in a photograph with Mr. Putin and Prince Charles (now the King of the U.K.). When Mr. Putin hosted George W. Bush in 2006 as part of the G8 Summit, Prigozhin can be seen serving the U.S. leader. In a 2015 photograph released by the Kremlin, Prigozhin can be seen serving food to Mr. Putin, then Brazil President Dilma Rouseff and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This closeness to Mr. Putin and his ever-expanding catering business earned him the nickname, “Putin’s chef”.
Prigozhin’s transformation from an influential Kremlin contractor to a vital player in Russia’s security complex began in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea and started supporting separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine’s civil war. Wagner was founded in the same year, by Dmitry Utkin, a former Lieutenant Colonel in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. (Utkin is also believed to be dead in the plane crash). Prigozhin emerged as the main financier of the group. According to one account, he approached the Defence Ministry in 2014, seeking land to train “volunteers”. Ministry officials were not happy with his demand. Then he told them, “The orders came from Papa,” referring to Mr. Putin.
He got what he wanted and Wagner would train thousands of private soldiers, who would be deployed to Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Initially, the Kremlin denied that it had sent troops to Ukraine — it was technically right as Wagner was not officially part of the Russian defence forces. But there were “little green men” across Ukraine’s Donbas. Within a few years, Wagner became an all-powerful mercenary entity. Mr. Putin’s critics saw Prigozhin as one of their formidable rivals. According to Leonid Volkov, a close aide of Navalny, Prigozhin was “the most dangerous criminal in Putin’s entourage”. A Belling Cat investigation in August 2020 claimed that Prigozhin’s business ventures — government contracts, Wagner and troll farms — were closely linked to the Kremlin. Robert Muller, the Special Counsel who probed alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, indicted Russia-based Internet Research Agency, which was linked to Prigozhin, for running an online campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. He was also wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for “conspiracy to defraud the United States”. In 2021, the FBI declared a reward of up to “$250,000 for information leading to the arrest” of Prigozhin.
Fall from grace
When Russia adopted a more aggressive foreign policy, expanding its strategic footprint in West Asia and Africa, Wagner came handy for the Kremlin — it can send troops to these regions with plausible deniability. In 2015, Mr. Putin sent troops to Syria to back the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war. Wagner soldiers fought alongside Syrian troops and Hezbollah and other Shia paramilitaries against the regime’s rivals. They were also sent to Mali, Libya, Mozambique and the Central African Republic. When Wagner became an integral part of the Kremlin’s foreign security outreach, Prigozhin’s stock rose in Moscow’s fortified elite power circles. But his fall from grace was swifter.
The irony is that the same Ukraine war, which initially turned him into one of the most important players in Russia, also spelt doom for his stature. When Russian troops performed poorly in the war, Prigozhin publicly slammed the defence establishment and asked for the ouster of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Mr. Putin seemed to have tolerated the tensions initially but he was not going to publicly back a private military company owner over his defence establishment. That’s where Prigozhin erred. Mr. Putin’s decision in January to replace Gen. Sergey Surovikin, who was close to Wagner and Prigozhin, with Gen. Gerasimov, the man Prigozhin wanted to be sacked, as the commander of the Ukraine operations was a clear signal on where the Kremlin was standing on the matter. But Prigozhin continued his attacks against the defence brass. When the Defence Ministry, with Mr. Putin’s blessings, moved on to integrate Wagner into the regular Russian army, soon after Bakhmut was captured, Prigozhin launched his mutiny. His fate was sealed on that day.
Wagner’s mutiny had exposed the weak links of Mr. Putin’s regime. His authority was challenged in the streets with weapons at a time when his troops were fighting a prolonged war against Ukraine’s West-backed forces. It was a twin challenge. The day August 23, exactly two months since the Wagner mutiny, saw dramatic developments in Russia. In the morning, the Defence Ministry announced that Gen. Surovkin, who has gone missing since the mutiny, has been sacked. Later in the day, the plane carrying Prigozhin and reportedly Utkin, crashed, killing all passengers. These developments strengthen Mr. Putin’s standing, at least in domestic politics.
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