Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is the head of the Wagner mercenary group

Yevgeny Prigozhin he is the leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner. He is also known as “Putin’s cook” (now Putin’s ex-cook) because he was among people closest to the Russian president and for its many restaurant business and in catering. Prigozhin is basically an oligarch turned military leader. In 2023, however, Moscow accused him of attempting a coup d’etat

Prigozhin announces control of Russian military sites in Rostov

The Wagner troops, also suspected of having links with the Russian secret services, do not operate only in Ukraine but have connections all over the world: from Syria to Libya to the Central African Republic. The first tensions with Moscow began in April 2023 when Prighozin launched an appeal demanding the stop the invasion of Ukraine to prevent the Ukrainians from gaining the upper hand by taking advantage of the tiredness of the soldiers

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According to the American analysts of the Isw think tank, the objective would have been to create the conditions to exploit a possible failure of the Russian army and gain consensus in Moscow on the political level. In May, Prighozin accused Russian military leaders of death of his mercenaries on the battlefield, of lack of ammunition and threatened retreat from Bakhmut

Putin after Prigozhin’s attack: “We will punish those who choose treason”

In June 2023, Prigozhin finally threatened to march on Moscow to overthrow the Russian military leadership in open conflict with the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, accused of sending young people to war without a strategy. The reply in Moscow was that the National Counter-Terrorism Committee opened a criminal case against Prigozhin “per call for armed rebellion”

But who is Prigozhin? More than probably one death sentence in RussiaPrigozhin is wanted by the FBI for meddling in the US elections. Regarding the past, the man had ended up in prison on charges of pimping, robbery and fraud. Once he got out, in 1990, he restarted as a hot dog seller, opening a kiosk with his stepfather. Then he made his fortune with a chain of grocery stores, catering for schools and the army and opened his first restaurant, the “New Island” inspired by the floating boats on the Seine

The idea conquered the Russian President Putin, who started organizing lunches and dinners there. The large public contracts would have allowed Prigozhin to finance Wagner and other “covert” activities such as propaganda and disinformation of Moscow. In 2013 the Internet research agency was born in St. Petersburg, a building in which young computer scientists are hired in charge of disseminating fake news. In 2016, the company was reconnected to Prigozhin. The agency allegedly worked to have Hillary Clinton lose in the election to Donald Trump

Also according to Navalny (Putin’s number one opponent in Russia), while Wagner was fighting in Syria Prigozhin would get a percentage of the sale of oil drawn from wells protected by mercenaries. Born in Leningrad in 1961, he graduated from a track and field college in 1977 and went cross-country skiing. His father and stepfather were of Russian-Jewish descent, while his mother is of Russian ethnic descent

Married to the pharmacist Ljubov’ Valentinovna Prigozhina, owner of a network of boutiques known as “Muzej šokolada” in St. Petersburg, he would have two children Pavel and Polina and a house in Gelendzhik, right where Putin would have had a billion euro building built. In 2022 he received the honor of Hero of the Russian Federationas well as other various medals of merit for the country over the years

Gradually the invasion of Ukraine, where Wagner would come to deploy up to 50 thousand men, turned into a kind of private war for Prigozhin. Camouflage is Prighozin’s working outfit that he is reputed to be cruel mannot only for the many accusations of war crimes but also for actions aimed at his men: “A dog’s death for a dog”, he commented after the shock video of a Wagner deserter in Ukraine, killed with a chainsaw

Who are the military of the Wagner group