He was once known as “Putin’s chef”, the architect of the president’s most important influence operations. Who was Yevgeny Prigozhin and why did he turn on the Kremlin?
In 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, Prigozhin created his most powerful entity yet, the Wagner Group, hiring mercenaries from across Russia to join the wave of unmarked “little green men” taking Ukrainian territory. Since then, his, serving as an unofficial arm of the Kremlin not just in Ukraine, but across Africa and Syria, where they have also taken over lucrative oil fields or gold and diamond mines. “Criminality has been a constant feature of Prigozhin’s career,” says Horvath.
Having reportedly fallen out of favour with Moscow, Prigozhin was back in the fold. The Russian army had proven weaker than anyone guessed, hollowed out by decades of corruption, and increasingly it was Wagner filling the gaps, leading charges against Ukraine’s seasoned soldiers. Prigozhin was awarded a Hero of Russia medal last June.
As Prigozhin called on Russia’s National Guard and soldiers to join his mutiny, he insisted this was not a coup against Putin but a “march for justice” to “save Russia”. Yet, in the same breath, he raged that the war on Ukraine was built on a lie: Russia had never been under threat from Ukraine; Moscow’s elites just wanted to get rich off its resources and so had deceived Putin.
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