By Ellen Knickmeyer - AP
The millionaire mercenary chief who long benefitted from the powerful patronage of President Vladimir Putin has moved into the global spotlight with a dramatic rebellion against Russia’s military that challenged the authority of Putin himself.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is the
62-year-old owner of the Kremlin-allied Wagner Group, a private army of inmate
recruits and other mercenaries that has fought some of the deadliest battles in
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, Prigozhin abruptly
escalated months of scathing criticism of Russia’s conduct of the war, calling
for an armed uprising to oust the defense minister, and then rolling toward
Moscow with his soldiers-for-hire.
As Putin’s government declared
a “counterterrorism” alert and scrambled to seal off Moscow with checkpoints,
Prigozhin just as abruptly stood down the following day. As part of the deal to
defuse the crisis, he agreed to move to Belarus and was seen late Saturday
retreating with his forces from Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia where
they had taken over the military headquarters.
It was unclear what was next for Prigozhin, a former prison inmate, hot-dog vendor and restaurant owner who has riveted world attention.
Prigozhin and Putin go way
back, with both born in Leningrad, what is now St. Petersburg.
During the final years of the
Soviet Union, Prigozhin served time in prison — 10 years by his own admission —
although he does not say what it was for.
Afterward, he owned a hot dog
stand and then fancy restaurants that drew interest from Putin. In his first
term, the Russian leader took then-French President Jacques Chirac to dine at
one of them.
“Vladimir Putin saw how I
built a business out of a kiosk, he saw that I don’t mind serving to the
esteemed guests because they were my guests,” Prigozhin recalled in an
interview published in 2011.
His businesses expanded
significantly to catering and providing school lunches. In 2010, Putin helped
open Prigozhin’s factory, which was built on generous loans by a state bank. In
Moscow alone, his company Concord won millions of dollars in contracts to
provide meals at public schools. He also organized catering for Kremlin events
for several years — earning
him the nickname “Putin’s chef” — and has provided catering and
utility services to the Russian military.
In 2017, opposition figure and corruption fighter Alexei Navalny accused Prigozhin’s companies of breaking antitrust laws by bidding for some $387 million in Defense Ministry contracts.
Prigozhin also owns the Wagner
Group, a Kremlin-allied mercenary force that has come to play a
central role in Putin’s projection of Russian influence in trouble spots around
the world.
The United States, European
Union, United Nations and others say the mercenary force has involved itself in
conflicts in countries across Africa in particular. Wagner fighters allegedly
provide security for national leaders or warlords in exchange for lucrative
payments, often including a share of gold or other natural resources. U.S.
officials say Russia may also be using Wagner’s work in Africa to support its
war in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, Prigozhin’s
mercenaries have become a major force in the war, fighting as counterparts to
the Russian army in battles with Ukrainian forces.
That includes Wagner fighters
taking Bakhmut, the city where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place.
By last month, Wagner Group and Russian forces appeared to have largely won
Bakhmut, a victory with strategically slight importance for Russia despite the
cost in lives. Prigozhin has said that 20,000 of his men died in Bakhmut, about
half of them inmates recruited from Russia’s prisons.
Western countries and United
Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous
human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African
Republic, Libya and Mali.
In December 2021, the
European Union accused the group of “serious human rights abuses,
including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and
killings,” and of carrying out “destabilizing activities” in the Central
African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Some of the reported incidents
stood out in their grisly brutality.
In November 2022, a video
surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor getting beaten to death
with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was
recaptured. Despite public outrage and a stream of demands for an
investigation, the Kremlin turned a blind eye to it.
As his forces fought and died
en masse in Ukraine, Prigozhin raged against Russia’s military brass. In a
video released by his team last month, Prigozhin stood next to rows bodies he
said were those of Wagner fighters. He accused Russia’s regular military of
incompetence and of starving his troops of the weapons and ammunition they
needed to fight.
“These are someone’s fathers
and someone’s sons,” Prigozhin said then. “The scum that doesn’t give us
ammunition will eat their guts in hell.”
Prigozhin has castigated the
top military brass, accusing top-ranking officers of incompetence. His remarks
were unprecedented for Russia’s tightly controlled political system, in which
only Putin could air such criticism.
In January, Putin reaffirmed his
trust in the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery
Gerasimov, by putting him in direct charge of the Russian forces in Ukraine, a
move that some observers also interpreted as an attempt to cut Prigozhin down
to size.
Asked recently about a media
comparison of him to Grigory Rasputin, a mystic who gained influence over
Russia’s last czar by claiming to have the power to cure his son’s hemophilia,
Prigozhin snapped: “I don’t stop blood, but I spill blood of the enemies of our
Motherland.”
Prigozhin earlier gained more
limited attention in the U.S., when he and a dozen other Russian nationals and
three Russian companies were charged with operating a covert social
media campaign aimed at fomenting discord ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 election
victory.
They were indicted as part of
special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election
interference. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned Prigozhin and
associates repeatedly in connection with both his election interference and his
leadership of the Wagner Group.
After the 2018 indictment, the
RIA Novosti news agency quoted Prigozhin as saying, in a clearly sarcastic
remark: “Americans are very impressionable people; they see what they want to
see. I treat them with great respect. I’m not at all upset that I’m on this
list. If they want to see the devil, let them see him.”
The Biden White House in that
episode called him “a known bad actor,” and State Department spokesman Ned
Price said Prigozhin’s “bold confession, if anything, appears to be just a
manifestation of the impunity that crooks and cronies enjoy under President
Putin and the Kremlin.”
As Prigozhin grew more
outspoken against the way Russia’s conventional military conducted fighting in
Ukraine, he continued to play a seemingly indispensable role for the Russian offensive,
and appeared to suffer no retaliation from Putin for his criticism of Putin’s
generals.
Media reports at times
suggested Prigozhin’s influence on Putin was growing and he was after a
prominent political post. But analysts warned against overestimating his
influence with Putin.
“He’s not one of Putin’s close
figures or a confidant,” said Mark Galeotti of University College, London, who
specializes in Russian security affairs, speaking on his podcast “In Moscow’s
Shadows.”
“Prigozhin does what the Kremlin
wants and does very well for himself in the process. But that’s the thing — he
is part of the staff rather than part of the family,” Galeotti said.
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