A Hollywood screenwriter would have trouble finding a villain like Yevgeny Prigozhin. Brutally cruel, terrifyingly effective, he was a warlord in Africa and Ukraine, the head of an economic empire whose tentacles stretched across the world, and he was also the author of a bold coup d’etat that would put him in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal can transfer.
Now he is said to have died in a plane crash, which was certainly not an accident.
Kremlinologists will grapple with the significance of this matter for weeks to come.
Was he murdered by the military high command, which he so sharply denounced for the bungling of the Ukraine war?
Was it revenge for Vladimir Putin’s clique on a man who, for a hectic few hours, seemed on the verge of overthrowing the regime?
Was it the Ukrainians who had every reason to take revenge on the individual who personally ordered the most barbaric torture and murder of their fighters?
Prigozhin (left) illustrated the intersection of business, dirty tricks and government that characterizes Putin’s (right) 24 years in power
Perhaps it was a sign of weakness that an increasingly paranoid and unworldly Putin apparently had to resort to the assassination of his rogue ally (Image: Alleged Crash Site)
But as smoke billows from the crash site and rumors circulate, one thing is clear: Prigozhin exemplified the intersection of business, dirty tricks, and government that has characterized Putin’s 24 years in power.
As with Putin, his background was anything but gilded. Both grew up in the rough Soviet streets of what was then Leningrad. Both were juvenile tearaways.
But while Putin found redemption and discipline through judo, studied law, and joined the KGB, Prigozhin embarked on a darker path.
Prigozhin’s public appearances in the two months since his failed coup against Putin’s regime
JUNE 23 Prigozhin announces a “March for Justice” to stop the “spreading of evil by the country’s military leadership”.
In a series of audio recordings released by the Telegram news service, he announces that his 25,000 troops will march on Moscow, adding: “Wagner’s commanders have made a decision.” This is not a military coup. It is a march for justice.”
JUNE 24 Prigozhin says his fighters captured army headquarters in Rostov-on-Don “without firing a single shot” and claims to have local support.
But that evening he suddenly announces a retreat and says on Telegram: “Now is the moment when blood could be spilled.” “We turn our convoy around.” He then disappeared from public view for almost three days.
JUNE 27 Prigozhin breaks his silence and denies that his march was a coup. He says: “Our goal was not to overthrow the existing regime, which is legitimately elected, as we have said many times.”
JULY 3 Prigozhin calls on the Russian public to stand up for the Wagner paramilitaries as the group continues to recruit troops for the war in Ukraine.
JULY 6 Selfies of Prigozhin in various wigs and disguises are released by the Russian security services in an attempt to undermine his fearsome public image.
JULY 14 A photo of Prigozhin sitting in his underpants on an unmade bed in a tent leaked online. Data accompanying the photo shows that it was taken between June 12 and 11, days before he announced the armed uprising.
JULY 19 In a video shot in a field, Prigozhin says: “What is happening at the front is a disgrace that we do not have to take part in. Therefore, it was decided that we will stay here in Belarus for some time before he “leaves to Africa”.
JULY 27 Prigozhin is photographed shaking hands with Freddy Mapouka, Chief of Protocol to the President of the Central African Republic, on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg.
One reason could be that he was disadvantaged in a deeply anti-Semitic country because of his Jewish origins.
A gangster, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a violent robbery and the pathetic looting of a woman’s earrings and boots, prized in the shortage-ridden Soviet Union.
Like many in the Soviet criminal underworld, he found his metier in the anarchic capitalism that followed the collapse of communism.
The sly, ruthless skills that served him well in prison helped him become a successful businessman in 1990s St. Petersburg. He started out as a hot dog salesman and later told an interviewer that “the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them.”
Coincidentally, those years also marked the birth of the man who would become his protector—and perhaps his archenemy.
Putin came to St. Petersburg as a failed spy, but quickly found a key job in managing the city’s economic relations with foreign companies.
As Catherine Belton, a leading expert on Russian power structures, points out in her book Putin’s People, the seemingly anonymous local bureaucrat quickly found common ground with the city’s gangsters and foreign trade companies.
It’s not exactly clear when Putin and Prigozhin first met, but a likely explanation lies in the gambling industry.
Prigozhin soon expanded into casinos. One of Putin’s responsibilities in the city government was to regulate these mob-infested venues.
Putin was also familiar with Prigozhin’s fancy restaurants – a marked improvement on his initial fast-food venture. On my own trips to Russia’s second city in the 1990s, I avoided such places like the plague, not least for fear of suffering collateral damage in a gang shootout.
According to former Deputy Minister of Information Policy of Ukraine Dmytro Zolotukhin, Prigozhin’s restaurants often served as venues for mafia meetings and parties.
But my worries were unfounded. Political protection meant his empire was untouchable.
And when Putin came to power, so did the man who had become one of his closest associates. Prigozhin became Putin’s cook.
In 2001, he personally served a meal hosted by Putin, then President of Russia, for visiting French President Jacques Chirac.
The same thing happened to US President George W. Bush in 2002. In 2003, Putin celebrated his birthday at Prigozhin’s New Island Restaurant. Extensive orders in the catering trade and in the military followed. Prigozhin became a billionaire.
His wife Lyubov Prigozhina, described as a pharmacist and businesswoman, owned many businesses which have since grown into a boutique chain in St. Petersburg, a spa in the Leningrad region and a boutique hotel.
He also lived in a $105 million estate in St. Petersburg, which included a home for his daughter Polina, who boasted on social media that the family’s yacht — named St. Vitamin — had “six bedrooms , a dining room, a kitchen and rooms for the family” had staff, two decks and a patio.
But for all his wealth, the shaven-headed ex-convict was still just a background presence on the Russian political stage.
All that changed when people started asking questions about who was running Russia’s effective disinformation campaigns.
Attention turned to the Internet Research Agency, an anonymous-sounding company based in an anonymous office building in St. Petersburg. Hundreds of staff there, young people chosen for their English skills, poisoned the wells of Western democracy. Their job was to spread scary stories, spread fake news, and increase polarization.
This “lie factory” worked with Russian spies whose job was to hack and leak supposedly private emails.
Wagner would intimidate opponents, fix media problems, and provide bodyguards in exchange for a lucrative cut in natural resources
When Hillary Clinton’s campaign suffered this fate, it proved a crucial factor in her losing the 2016 US election.
Initially, Prigozhin denied any connection to the deal, just as he was initially to do with the now notorious mercenary group, the Wagner Group.
But both entities have become central to Putin’s disruptive, vindictive, anti-Western foreign policy. While the Internet trolls spread cynicism, apathy and discord in Western societies, the Wagner mercenaries focused on Africa and other distant lands, where they offered leaders “dictatorship in a box” – a potent mix of military force and dirty tricks.
In Syria, Prigozhin’s Wagner troops helped shore up genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad; In Africa, the group offered its services in Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali, among others.
Wagner would intimidate opponents, fix media problems, and provide bodyguards in exchange for a lucrative cut in natural resources.
Western spies tried in vain to interest their governments in this sinister new development. No one could believe that Russia was back in Africa, a continent it had all but left after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee warned in a report just last month that the British government had underestimated Wagner for a decade. “We have received no evidence of serious government efforts to track the network’s activities in other countries.”
Also, it was initially difficult to convince anyone that Russia’s disinformation campaigns could actually have an impact on powerful Western democracies.
Even greater wealth flowed into Prigozhin’s coffers. There was a villa on the Black Sea coast – private jets, a fleet of luxurious cars including a popular American Cadillac, not to mention a stable of thoroughbred horses once ridden by his privately raised daughters in show jumping competitions across Europe.
It was the Ukraine war that finally catapulted Prigozhin and Wagner into the limelight. His soldiers of fortune helped conquer Crimea and establish Russian puppet states in eastern Ukraine.
After the full-scale invasion in 2021, his forces became synonymous with war crimes against the Ukrainian victims of the Kremlin aggression. He gave up the pretext that he was not connected to Wagner.
Instead, he used his experience as a convict to his advantage to recruit the dregs of the Russian penitentiary system. The grim trade he offered them was that they could enjoy their freedom if they survived the meat grinder on the front lines.
But Prigozhin was also fighting on another front — against the regular Russian military, as the disaster of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine last year became increasingly apparent.
His profanity-laden videos were compulsive viewing, in which he unleashed tirades against then-Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Everything was someone else’s fault. He berated the Russian army for its cowardice and those in the military supply chain for not supplying ammunition.
He, too, has not spared Putin his criticism. We have one “lucky grandpa,” he says, snarling at the camera, “but how do you win a war,” he asks sarcastically, “when that grandpa turns out to be a complete idiot?” “Grandpa” is a name that Russians often give to their President. Prigozhin turned his fire on his own modern tsar. It was amazing behavior.
Just hours before the crash last night, he released a video that appeared to show him in his old sphere of activity, Africa
Beating deserters to death with a sledgehammer is one thing. Fighting patriotic Ukrainians is another. But taking on the Tsar was something else entirely. With the mysterious coup attempt in June of this year, relations finally collapsed. Prigozhin captured the strategically important city of Rostov without a fight and set off in a convoy for Moscow.
He shot down Russian helicopters and a valuable spy plane.
But within hours he had backed down. His coup attempt failed. Many expected to see him behind bars or dead by the end of the day. Instead, he went into hiding and apparently moved his base of operations to the Russian satellite state of Belarus.
Pro-Kremlin media released photos of a security raid on his palatial neoclassical mansion in St. Petersburg, which features a helipad, indoor pool and spa, and extensive facilities including a basketball court.
Pictures taken late last month revealed stashes of assault weapons and ammunition, along with stockpiles of gold bars and packages of white powder, a stuffed alligator and a framed photograph showing the severed heads of some of the disgraced warlord’s enemies. There are also shots of fake passports and a collection of his wigs, as well as a number of images said to show Prigozhin in disguise. Such derisive reporting is usually a harbinger of shame and jail. But Prigozhin recovered. His confiscated property was returned. Could it be that he had so much “kompromat” – blackmail material – that he was still untouchable?
He still appeared to be on friendly terms with Putin, and recently appeared – in demonstratively casual jeans – at a summit of African leaders in St. Petersburg that Putin also attended. Many wondered if this extraordinary figure managed to escape doom and if she would play a role in the next act of Russia’s political drama.
Just hours before the crash last night, he released a video that appeared to show him in his old sphere of activity, Africa.
But it seems he overestimated his influence. Marat Gabidullin, who published his memoir My Truth, The Man Who Defied The Kremlin, describes him as “a well-paid puppet” who also “tends to overestimate his own genius.”
The big questions now are: What will happen when Putin takes power? What does this mean for Russia’s growing influence in Africa? Who will win the lucrative remnants of Wagner and other parts of the multi-billion dollar warmongering empire?
One thing is clear, because it was like that from the beginning. In modern Russia property rights have no meaning and life is worthless. Prigozhin’s death makes Putin’s fate a little easier. The man who has come closest to successfully defying the Russian leader in the past 24 years has gone. His ragtag army of thugs, thugs and sadists may be angry – but they are leaderless. No one else in Wagner has his charisma, bravery or nerves of steel. But Prigozhin was not just a threat to Putin. He was also a major asset. It is thanks to Wagner’s adventures abroad that Russia is gaining semblance of global geopolitical reach.
The war in Ukraine would have been an even greater catastrophe without Wagner mercenaries. And the war continues to pose daunting challenges for Putin as he drags on and belies his promise of quick victory.
Western support for the Kiev leadership has proved far stronger than the Kremlin had anticipated. NATO countries’ recent decision to deploy F-16 aircraft will increase pressure on Russia’s fragile hold over its occupied territories — and without Wagner troops to fill the gap.
Perhaps it was a sign of weakness that an increasingly paranoid and unworldly Putin had apparently had to resort to the assassination of his rogue ally. Be that as it may, Prigozhin’s rise and fall perfectly embodies the murky, gloomy world of modern Russia.