Abominable showman: Rise of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin

The Economist features an article about the rise of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, profiling his role in creating the mercenary group. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

One day in 2017, an armoured black bmw drew up outside the headquarters of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg. Inside a hush descended as word spread that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man in charge, had arrived.

A meeting was under way in one of the conference rooms and Prigozhin marched straight into it. He cut an imposing figure: a stocky, bullet-headed man in his mid-50s, flanked by bodyguards. But many of his employees had never met him. The Wagner Group – a private military company (pmc) in a country where such organisations were supposedly illegal – did not officially exist. Prigozhin kept such a low profile that a junior executive attending the meeting that day didn’t recognise him. According to a former employee who witnessed the scene, the young man got up to introduce himself. Prigozhin simply stared at him. Then he took the man by the sleeve of his jacket, led him into the corridor and punched him, hard, in the face.

Few Russians would have trouble recognising Prigozhin today. The Wagner Group has become the world’s best-known mercenary force and its leader, more than any general, is the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Prigozhin issues a stream of combative communiqués on Telegram and VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook. He confronts the military establishment, affording Russians a rare view of power struggles that would ordinarily be cloistered. Though he seems to have failed in an attempt to replace Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defence, he remains a powerful political actor, thanks in part to the huge following Wagner has built on social media.

For all Prigozhin’s notoriety, his role within the Kremlin’s power structures remains unclear – perhaps that’s the way Vladimir Putin likes it. Vagueness over Wagner’s position in the chain of command provides the government with threadbare deniability for the group’s war crimes in Ukraine. Some young Russians see Prigozhin as a hero betrayed by corruption and incompetence in the sclerotic military establishment. Others think he is a gangster who struck it lucky, or that he is a tool of the security services, who might be ditched when his purpose has been served. A few believe that he could usurp Putin. Prigozhin himself has been tight-lipped about future ambitions, but it is looking increasingly likely that he will be an important player in his country’s future – if he survives the shivs and poisons of his enemies in the Russian elite. To understand what this mercurial figure might do next, it is instructive to look at the transformations of his past.

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was born in 1961 and received as good a start in life as the Soviet Union could offer. He attended the 62 Sports Boarding School in Leningrad, a prominent institution that regularly produced Olympic athletes. According to a document that hackers claim they stole from Prigozhin’s lawyers, he might have been a professional skier himself but for an injury.

Instead he made his first mark on the public record as a criminal. In 1979, aged 18, Prigozhin was given a two-year suspended sentence for theft. While still on probation, he committed a series of burglaries. There wasn’t much worth stealing in Soviet-era Leningrad. In February 1980, Prigozhin and an accomplice broke into an apartment and stole a vase, a napkin holder and six wine glasses.

Minor infractions led to more brutal ones. One evening Prigozhin and his cronies went out celebrating the theft of 250 roubles from a man they had lured down a dark alley. Prigozhin noticed a young woman in a “beautiful” coat, according to testimony given by one member of the gang. They followed the woman into the street and one of them asked her for a cigarette. As she opened her handbag, Prigozhin grabbed her from behind by the neck and began to strangle her. She tried to scream but he gripped her harder. She blacked out and slumped to the ground. One of the muggers took her boots; Prigozhin ripped off her gold earrings. A court jailed him for 13 years. He had just turned 20.

Soviet prisons were pitiless places. Laura Piacentini, a criminologist who lived among prisoners when the country opened up after the fall of communism, says the system was devoted to the “relentless pursuit of utterly brutal, hideous, deeply inhumane violence”. Inmates were housed in barracks of between 50 and 100 people. The guards encouraged the prisoners to impose discipline. Daily life was run by vory v zakone – thieves who kept the code.

There wasn’t much worth stealing in Soviet-era Leningrad. In February 1980, Prigozhin and an accomplice broke into an apartment and stole a vase, a napkin holder and six wine glasses

The vory had strict rules and a sense of honour, however perverse. Piacentini suspects that they may have despised Prigozhin for ganging up on a lone woman and treated him badly as a result. The vory also governed the prison’s economy. They could wangle you a tape deck or a television and organise protection for your family on the outside. In many ways, Prigozhin’s time in prison gave him the right skills to thrive in the new Russia that was emerging outside it.

Prigozhin was released in 1990, as he was approaching his 30s. He says his fresh start began by selling hot dogs in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). “We made the mustard in my apartment in the kitchen. My mother added up our takings there. I made $1,000 a month. There were mountains of roubles, so much it was difficult for my mother to count,” he told a newspaper. He quickly ditched fast food for gastronomy. One of his restaurants was in the cellars of St Petersburg’s historic customs house and run by a ruddy, bewhiskered English maître d’. Another was on a converted river boat that had once been a floating disco.

The way Prigozhin tells it, his success came through hard work. But others believe there’s more to it than that. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch who was jailed by Putin in 2005, claims that organised crime and the restaurant scene in St Petersburg were enmeshed. Two of Prigozhin’s partners in the restaurant business owned a casino, and it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have encountered mobsters in this milieu: St Petersburg, says Khodorkovsky, was like “a Russian Chicago”. Members of Prigozhin’s circle remember the day that the deputy mayor responsible for, among other things, casinos, dined at one of his restaurants. His name was Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s rise to power carried Prigozhin in its slipstream. After Putin became president in 2000, Prigozhin became the caterer of choice at grand state occasions, earning him the nickname, “Putin’s chef”. The role offered him proximity to the most powerful man in the country, not to mention various world leaders. Photographers snapped him whipping a cloche off Putin’s dinner and hovering next to President George W. Bush.

Candace Rondeaux, who lived in St Petersburg in the 1990s and is now an expert on Wagner, has argued that there was nothing trivial about Prigozhin’s restaurateur role. Putin, a political novice when he came to power, used lavish banquets to impress his fellow heads of state. This was no easy task for Prigozhin, who had to battle food shortages and Russia’s reputation for abysmal cuisine. He crafted elegant menus out of traditional ingredients. When Bush was in town, Prigozhin served up Astrakhan tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, crayfish with gooseberry marmalade and fried smelt with turnips and baby courgettes (Bush had the steak).

Prigozhin’s skill at organising big events made him invaluable to a government that relied on manipulating appearances. The flamboyance of his set-pieces sometimes verged on satire. According to leaked emails, at the birthday dinner of Sergei Ivanov, head of the presidential administration, guests were offered “Somali ostrich meat, crocodile, grey shark, and piranha”. (Putin had the steak.)

When Bush was in town, Prigozhin served up Astrakhan tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, crayfish with gooseberry marmalade and fried smelt with turnips and baby courgettes

His position was one that required great trust. There is a long tradition of political poisoning in Russia. A former American intelligence officer told me that the role of the official chef is more important in the Kremlin than anywhere in the West: “You really have to trust your personal chef. Big deal.” Putin knew that better than anyone – his grandfather had been Stalin’s personal chef.

According to Rondeaux, the Wagner expert, those who provide household services to the leader and his inner circle can go very far in authoritarian systems. “The drivers for St Petersburg’s rich and powerful, the butlers, the maids, the cooks, they rose too. They are [today] the royal courtiers of Putin’s Russia.” Prigozhin earned contracts to supply food to schools, prisons and the entire Russian army. Reportedly this earned him a fortune. More importantly, he preserved Putin’s trust.

Very few employees of the Wagner Group speak to the media. One who was willing was Marat Gabidullin, a grizzled veteran who says he left his position in Russia’s official armed forces in 1993. (It wasn’t possible to verify all the details of his story, but it was consistent with the available facts.) Gabidullin says he struggled to settle into civilian life after leaving the paratroopers. He tried to work as a bodyguard but shot a Siberian mobster, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison. An old army buddy told him about the Wagner Group, and he signed up. He served first in Ukraine, where conflict broke out in 2014 between the government and Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country, and then Syria, where Russia propped up the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Gabidullin says that in 2016 he was engaged in a firefight with a band of jihadists near Palmyra in Syria. He didn’t hear the explosion that tossed him up into the air. Everything blurred, his only sensation the pain from dozens of pieces of shrapnel lacerating his flesh. He spent two months in a coma in hospital. When he woke up, still groggy, someone handed him a phone. “It’s Yevgeny Viktorovich.” It was, said Gabidullin, “like being phoned by God”. Prigozhin told him that the Wagner Group would pay for whatever treatment he needed. He promised Gabidullin a medal and cushy office job. Prigozhin had never worn a uniform himself (except for prison robes), but he regarded his fighters as comrades.

How exactly Prigozhin went from a chef to something resembling a military commander remains unclear. Gabidullin says that, in the early days, the Wagner Group was known simply as the Company, and deployed soldiers-for-hire across the world from Crimea to Syria, and Libya to Congo. In Syria, they trained local mercenaries and served as shock troops for the regime. In Libya, they fought for a rebel commander backed by Russia. In the Central African Republic, Wagner “instructors” supported the government during the country’s civil war.

The deserter’s brains are bashed in with a sledgehammer, a method of execution that has become Wagner’s trademark. Prigozhin called the video “excellent director’s work”

In 2014 and 2015, men from the group served in Ukraine as “ghost soldiers” – troops in uniform without identifying insignia. They raided territory controlled by Ukrainian forces, carried out sabotage missions and took “hostages”. Their job was to unify the competing armed separatist groups under one command. Later, rumours circulated that the Wagner Group arranged the deaths of several separatist commanders who were unwise enough to make trouble.

After Gabidullin recovered, he joined Prigozhin’s staff as his personal assistant. The job gave Gabidullin a ringside view of the organisation. Media coverage at the time suggested that the Wagner Group’s income came from its control of Syrian oil wells and refineries. But Gabidullin is dismissive of this explanation: The Syrian oil industry was “rusting”, in a “state of collapse”. As far as he could tell, the Wagner Group didn’t make any money and Prigozhin never paid taxes. Instead, says Gabidullin, the state transferred funds to pay for operations the Kremlin required.

In 2017, at the height of Wagner’s deployment in Syria, Gabidullin reckoned that the group spent $175m, including $25m in pensions to the families of dead mercenaries. Prigozhin was able to acquire tanks, armoured vehicles, rocket launchers and small arms.

Though some believe Prigozhin is a mere creature of the Kremlin, he did seem to have a certain amount of latitude to act on his own initiative. According to Gabidullin, in February 2018 Prigozhin took the “sole decision” to send his men to seize oil wells in Kurdish-controlled territory. Prigozhin didn’t realise that American special forces were operating in the area, a major intelligence failure. When the Americans saw the mercenaries moving in, they rang the hotline to the Russian ministry of defence, wanting to make sure they weren’t about to start a world war if they repelled the attack. The Russians assured the Americans that they didn’t have anyone in the area. The Americans bombed the Wagner soldiers, and, according to Gabidullin’s estimate, more than 100 died.

Accounts differ as to how the debacle was allowed to happen. Some say that Prigozhin had received permission from the Kremlin for the raid, but the ministry of defence decided to disavow him because they wanted to cut him down to size. Gabidullin says there is a simpler explanation. The Russian general who answered the call had orders “not to interfere” with Wagner, and was simply obeying these instructions to the letter.

In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine. At first the Wagner Group didn’t seem to have a role in the “special military operation”, as the Kremlin called the invasion. In fact, Prigozhin’s battle-tested mercenaries were so conspicuously absent in the early days of the war that theories began to circulate about why they weren’t there. According to Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch, Putin did in fact order the Wagner Group to assassinate Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, at the very outset of the invasion. Khodorkovsky is now an opposition figure and gathers intelligence about the regime from his base in London. He says Prigozhin’s rivals in the security establishment tipped off the Ukrainians; supposedly, the operation ended so ignominiously that Prigozhin fell out of favour. (Khodorkovsky won’t say how he knows this.)

Bakhmut did not fall quickly. Prigozhin was left to rage against “slackers” in the rear, eating “off golden plates” while his men were sent home in coffins

Whatever the reason for their initial absence from the battlefield, Wagner Group fighters began to be spotted there within a few months, after Ukraine resisted more fiercely than expected.

The Wagner Group’s role was clarified in September 2022, when a remarkable video popped up on Twitter. It showed Prigozhin in a prison yard, drumming up recruits. Hundreds of men stand around him as he tells them that “God and Allah can get you out of here – in a coffin. I can get you out of here alive.” All they had to do was fight for Wagner in Ukraine. He dangled a promise many found impossible to resist: “You will not return back to prison under any circumstances.” He gave them five minutes to decide whether or not to accept his offer.

Until that moment, Prigozhin had sued journalists who suggested he had any kind of relationship with the Wagner Group. Now, he was talking openly about it. Soon, hardly a day went by without a statement by Prigozhin or a video on social media, often showing him in full battle dress near the front line. He opened a new headquarters in St Petersburg, a shiny glass tower with “pmc Wagner Group” over the door in huge Cyrillic letters. The insatiable demand for bodies on the frontline seemed to make him untouchable. He was the salesman the Kremlin needed. (He also finally admitted to having founded a collective of online trolls that sought to interfere in the American elections in 2016 – another claim he had previously denied.)

There was, however, a warning for the prisoners who signed up: “Those who arrive [at the front] and on the first day say this is not a place for them, we mark them as deserters and execute them by firing squad.” Wagner posted a video of a former prisoner named Yevgeny Nuzhin who had been freed from a 24-year sentence for murder in order to fight in Ukraine. He deserted but was recaptured. In the video Nuzhin can be seen in a dark basement. His head is taped to a brick wall, then his brains are bashed in with a sledgehammer – a method of execution that has become Wagner’s trademark. Prigozhin called the video “excellent director’s work”. He visited a Wagner unit to present them with a sledgehammer engraved with the words, “For killing rabbits”, meaning those who fled from fighting.

“He is a difficult man, not a simple man. It’s a mistake to think of him as some kind of stupid criminal…He’s very smart and very dangerous.”

Britain’s ministry of defence says there were, at one point, around 50,000 Wagnerovtsy in Ukraine, four out of five of them former prisoners. Prigozhin was determined to find glory for Wagner alone. In January he announced that his “musicians” had taken the town of Soledar, in eastern Ukraine. “I want to emphasise that no units other than the Wagner fighters took part in the assault on Soledar.” (This wasn’t true. The Russian army fought there as well.)

Then he moved farther east to the town of Bakhmut, which he also claimed Wagner would capture by itself. But Russia’s generals weren’t prepared to help. According to Khodorkovsky, both Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of general staff, see Prigozhin’s men as cannon fodder whose job is to clear minefields by walking through them and identify enemy positions by drawing fire. Khodorkovsky says Prigozhin wanted heavy artillery to clear the way for his men, as would happen for regular units, but the Russian defence establishment wasn’t willing to use up its limited supply of shells making things easier for the mercenaries.

Bakhmut did not fall quickly. Prigozhin was left to rage against “slackers” in the rear, eating “off golden plates” while his men were sent home in coffins. Russian state tv, which used to lionise Prigozhin, has barely given him any attention this year, suggesting his enemies in the political establishment have gained the upper hand.

But Gabidullin, his former employee, says Prigozhin is at his most creative when he’s backed into a corner. “He is a difficult man, not a simple man. It’s a mistake to think of him as some kind of stupid criminal…He’s very smart and very dangerous.”

At the end of May, Prigozhin claimed to have seized Bakhmut, at the cost of 20,000 Wagernotvsy lives. He gave a bitter television interview, attacking Shoigu, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, and other members of “the elites” for sending their children abroad while ordinary Russians sent theirs to the front. He almost spat at the camera: “You sons of bitches. Gather up your offspring and send them to war.”

Moscow is now abuzz with speculation about Prigozhin’s political ambitions. He has established himself as a showman, a provocateur and a wit, if a somewhat crude one. When the European Parliament criticised Wagner, he sent them a violin case, a reference to his “orchestra”. Inside was a sledgehammer spattered with red paint – or was it blood? He says he’s going to run for president – of Ukraine.

Gabidullin suspects that his old boss doesn’t want the top job in his home country. “The president of Russia is responsible for everything, all mistakes, all failures,” Gabidullin says. Instead, he thinks Prigozhin would like to move into the role left by the death last year of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist politician who acted as a licensed critic of the regime. “That’s a very comfortable place. He doesn’t have to deal with any problems, but he can speak openly…making money from his status.”

Fiona Hill, formerly the official in charge of Russia policy on America’s National Security Council, is also drawn towards the theory that it is politically useful for Putin to be opposed from the right: it makes him seem reasonable by comparison. She believes that this calculation is behind a recent slew of articles in the Russian press talking up the possibility of a Prigozhin presidency; it may also explain why his seemingly rash broadsides against the Kremlin have gone unpunished. Prigozhin, says Hill, has “definitely perfected bombast” and could easily step into the bogeyman role that Zhirinovsky played.

Hill has an intriguing take on the power dynamic between Putin and his convict-chef: she thinks one reason the president keeps Prigozhin so close is to look tough by association, an image he dearly craves. When Hill was researching Putin’s biography a few years ago she came to suspect that all the stories that make up the Russian leader’s personal lore – the scrappy kid fighting in the courtyard of his Leningrad apartment block; his kgb personality assessment saying that he suffered from a “diminished sense of danger” – came from Putin himself.

“Sometimes I wonder how tough Putin really is,” she says. “Having sat right next to him, he doesn’t really exude it himself in person...his physicality is tightly wound but he’s not physically intimidating.” Perhaps Prigozhin suspects his boss is not as powerful as he pretends to be. Perhaps, suggests Hill, he looks at Putin and asks himself, “Why not me?”