Yevgeny Prigozhin: The Rise and Death of Putin’s Mercenary

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who led a mutiny against ‘Putin’ in June, died under mysterious circumstances yesterday.

But first, it’s helpful to discuss his unlikely rise in the former Soviet state.

Prigozhin was born on June 1, 1961, in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Russia, nine years after Putin. His father died when he was young. Prigozhin’s first public appearance was as an 18-year-old when he was caught stealing and then receiving a suspended sentence of two years and six months in prison. He served his sentence working at a chemical plant.

By 1980, he was out and had joined a gang. With the gang, he engaged in a burglary spree before being caught after choking a woman on the street during a robbery. Thus, the following year, he was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment in a high-security penal colony for robbery, theft, fraud, and involving minors in criminal activity.

However, he only spent nine years in detention because the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reduced his sentence due to good behavior, noting that he had exhibited “corrective behavior.” Immediately after his release, he started attending the Leningrad Chemical and Pharmaceutical Institute to pursue a pharmaceutical degree, but failed to complete his studies.

Then, his entrepreneurial spirit emerged. He started with hot dogs, then ventured into the grocery store business before entering the realm of casinos. However, it wasn’t until he entered the restaurant business in the late 1990s that his life changed. He founded a floating restaurant that became one of the most fashionable dining spots in the city of Saint Petersburg. Vladimir Putin, then deputy mayor, enjoyed visiting. In fact, Putin was so fond of it that when he became president and French President Jacques Chirac came visiting in 2001, Prigozhin personally served them food. He also had the privilege of hosting US President George W. Bush in 2002. In 2003, when Putin celebrated his birthday, the celebration took place at New Island, the restaurant. Prigozhin came to be known as “Putin’s chef”.

Throughout the 2000s, Prigozhin grew closer to Vladimir Putin. By 2003, he parted ways with his business partners and established his own independent restaurants. Notably, one of Prigozhin’s companies, Concord Catering, secured numerous government contracts. He received hundreds of millions in government contracts for providing meals to school children and government workers. In 2012, he secured a contract worth US$1.2 billion over one year to supply meals to the Russian military.

It is believed that he used a portion of these proceeds to establish the Wagner group, a private military contractor in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. The Wagner group gained international recognition as a Kremlin-affiliated mercenary group. Their operations extended to various regions in Africa and the Middle East. In February 2018, Wagner attacked US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria in an attempt to seize an oil field. The group provides largely effective security services for these local leaders in exchange for slices of gold, diamond and other natural-resource businesses. They are involved or implicated in several African countries including the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Libya, and Niger. Prigozhin supported the 2023 Nigerien coup d’état. For his numerous human right violations and disinformation campaigns, he is subject to sanctions imposed by Australia, the European Union, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In July 2022, the U.S. State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about Prigozhin on criminal charges of interference with the US political and electoral processes.

Naturally, a Russian mercenary group would be expected to participate in the ongoing war in Ukraine, and Wagner is no exception. In September 2022, a leaked video exposed Prigozhin attempting to recruit convicts to reinforce Russian forces on the front lines in the war. He told the convicts, “Nobody goes back behind bars,” and to those uncomfortable with the idea, he said, “It’s either prisoners or your children—you decide.” The group has been captured on video in the midst of the conflict, both killing fighters and suffering casualties.

It was concerning the issue of casualties during the war that he would clash with the Russian military and, by extension, Putin. On October 1, 2022, he commented about the Russian army commanders, stating, “All these bastards ought to be sent to the front barefoot with just a submachine gun.” On May 5, 2023, he announced that, due to a lack of ammunition, his fighters would leave Bakhmut, a captured city in Ukraine, on May 10, 2023. He held Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the Russian Armed Forces Gen. Valery Gerasimov responsible for “tens of thousands” of Wagner casualties, declaring, “They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.” Prigozhin lamented that “the children of the elites smother themselves with creams and showcase this on Instagram, YouTube, and so on, while ordinary people’s kids return home torn apart in zinc-lined coffins.”

This may have contributed to the tension between him and the Russian military, and consequently, Putin. The Russian military in particular wants to have the Wagner group under control. In June, Prigozhin defied orders to sign a contract placing his troops under the Defence Ministry’s command. In a video released on June 23, 2023, Prigozhin stated that the Russian government’s justifications for invading Ukraine were based on falsehoods. In defiance of Putin’s justification for the invasion, he argued that the war was unnecessary for “demilitarizing or denazifying Ukraine.”

He did not stop there. On the same day, Prigozhin alleged that regular Russian armed forces had launched missile strikes against Wagner forces, resulting in a significant number of casualties. He called for a response, asserting, “…the evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped.” In response, the Federal Security Service (FSB) filed criminal charges against Prigozhin for inciting an armed rebellion. Subsequently, Wagner withdrew from Ukraine, occupied the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and commenced an advance on Moscow. In the midst of the conflict, Wagner shot down an Ilyushin Il-22M airborne command post plane and several military helicopters. President Putin denounced these actions as treason, vowed to suppress the uprising, and said those involved “will suffer inevitable punishment”.

Following discussions between Prigozhin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, charges from Moscow were dropped against him and his team, and Wagner halted its march on Moscow. As part of the agreement, Prigozhin relocated to Belarus, and Wagner troops were slated to return to Ukraine. However, these plans were abandoned due to Wagner’s refusal to sign military contracts.

Yesterday, on August 23, 2023, while flying from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, a Wagner-associated Telegram channel claimed that Prigozhin’s jet was shot down by Russian air defenses. The Wall Street Journal confirms that all 10 people aboard the plane perished.