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Yevgeny Prigozhin has earned the respect of Vladimir Putin through the success of his personal militia on the battlefield—at least compared with the disastrous performance of the regular army.
Like the Russian president, Prigozhin is also from St. Petersburg, and he started small. He was imprisoned for a series of petty robberies during his final years in the Soviet Union, and after his release he began selling hot dogs in kitchens around the city.
Business soon took off, and he opened a restaurant where Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, dined occasionally.
After Putin became president, Prigor served catering for state visits and other high-level events, winning valuable public tenders through his company Concord, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef”.
His commercial success provided him with a springboard into other fields. He set up a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency to manipulate the 2018 US election using fake social media accounts and news stories.
This, combined with his wealth of private jets and yachts, and expanding business empire, landed him on the U.S. sanctions list.
The U.S. government has labeled his business a “transnational criminal organization.”
Prigozhin dabbled in the war in 2014, when he set up a private military company that allowed Russia, in part denial, to achieve its goals in Ukraine, such as annexing Crimea and fomenting war in eastern Ukraine. He said last year that he did so because of the very low quality of Russian paramilitaries who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.
“It didn’t take long for me to realize that . . . was a liar,” he said. “So I . . . I did it myself . . . and from that point on, a group of Patriots was born that became known as Wagner.”
Wagner has since grown into a well-equipped gun-for-hire group working in conflict zones around the world.
Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine last year gave Wagner a bigger public profile. Within months, the formerly secretive organization opened its official headquarters in a St. Petersburg skyscraper, established its own social media channels and launched a recruitment drive across the country with billboards and posters.
Prigozhin once vehemently denied any links to the group but has since become its public spokesman.
He was filmed traveling to a Russian prison, addressing a group of prisoners and promising amnesty if they joined Wagner and fought in Ukraine. He built an army that, at its peak last fall, was estimated at fifty thousand men. His fighters are also credited with Russia’s only battlefield victory since the first week of the war: taking the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut after months of hard fighting.
But it also brought Prigozhin into conflict with his erstwhile benefactor.
He quickly became frustrated with the regular army’s defeat and blamed the military for causing his troops to run out of ammunition.
He criticized the top ranks of the military with angry, foul-mouthed rants. In a video this spring, Prigozhin stood next to rows of corpses and blamed the Ministry of Defense for the deaths of Russian soldiers in Bakhmut’s “meat grinder.”
“Shoigu, Gerasimov, where the fuck are the weapons?” he yelled into the camera, calling out Army Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. “You’re sitting in an expensive nightclub and your kid enjoys making YouTube videos . . . these people are dying so you can get fat in a plank office.”
As his rhetoric has escalated, so have his clashes with the military. Prigoren accused the military of shooting Wagner soldiers. An army colonel in turn accused the Wagner fighters of kidnapping and torturing Russian soldiers.
Wagner’s heroics on the battlefield meant the Kremlin accepted Prigozhin’s words. Prigozhin became bold, and his goal was to overthrow Shoigu.
This month, the conflict intensified, with the Ministry of Defense ordering all irregular units (of which Wagner is by far the largest and most prominent) to sign formal contracts to incorporate them into its structure. Prigozhin refused. Putin appears to be on the side of his generals.
On Friday night, Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel that the Wagner camp in eastern Ukraine had been hit by rockets from Russian troops.
“The commander of the Wagner PMC has decided. The evil spreading by the country’s military leaders must be stopped,” he said in a voice memo.
He said he was withdrawing troops from the field and redirecting them to Moscow.
“Those who ruined the lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers will be punished,” he threatened.