Putin appeared to acknowledge Mr. Prigozhin’s dying in televised remarks Aug. 24, when he expressed his condolences to the households of the folks killed within the crash. Mr. Prigozhin’s title had appeared on the aircraft’s manifest. Putin spoke of Mr. Prigozhin prior to now tense, describing him as “a person of complicated destiny” who “made severe errors in his life.”
The U.S. intelligence neighborhood believes Mr. Prigozhin “possible” died within the crash and is exploring the likelihood an explosion introduced down his aircraft.
In an ascent that he owed virtually solely to the favor of Putin, his longtime patron, Mr. Prigozhin represented an unlikely case examine in rise up.
For years, he was denounced by the West as a Kremlin henchman and hailed by Russian state media as a patriot. Together with his weathered options and bulldog demeanor, he match effectively into each narratives.
His guns-for-hire non-public army firm, the Wagner Group, despatched fighters throughout the Center East and Africa to bolster Russian pursuits — and Mr. Prigozhin’s personal agenda — typically in brutal trend. He attacked in our on-line world as effectively, working a troll manufacturing unit that roiled Western elections and bankrolling efforts to plant fervently nationalist, pro-Kremlin views in social media.
Mr. Prigozhin (pronounced pree-GOH-zhin) first crossed paths with Putin in Russia’s post-Soviet bacchanal of extra within the Nineteen Nineties. After serving practically a decade in jail for theft, Mr. Prigozhin opened a family-run scorching canine stand that made him flush with rubles. He went right into a on line casino enterprise, then joined with different buyers to open the most popular restaurant in St. Petersburg.
The restaurant, New Island, turned a favourite hang-out for Putin, a former KGB officer who then served as a high aide to town’s mayor. Putin appreciated Mr. Prigozhin’s swagger. Mr. Prigozhin admired Putin’s standing and connections. They each had been supremely formidable.
As Putin climbed to energy — beginning in 1999 when he turned prime minister below President Boris Yeltsin — favors began to move Mr. Prigozhin’s method. First got here profitable meals service contracts with faculties and the army for Mr. Prigozhin’s catering firm, Harmony, incomes him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”
Putin then cleared the way in which for Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary corps. Within the calculation of the autocratic president, Mr. Prigozhin was a helpful opportunist with a ruthless streak.
He occupied an unparalleled position. His militiamen helped perform Russian aims by backing shaky international governments and nailing down mineral rights and different concessions. Wagner and its founder had been enriched by cuts from the cash move and facet offers.
Western leaders and rights teams lengthy noticed Mr. Prigozhin as Putin’s shadowy enforcer — a capo in camouflage allegedly linked to potential battle crimes. As a result of Wagner was portrayed as a personal group, it supplied a political protect for the Kremlin for messy practices corresponding to focusing on opposition in Russia-friendly states together with Mali and the Central African Republic.
In 2023, Putin acknowledged what was extensively suspected: Wagner was a full-fledged arm of the Kremlin, receiving as a lot as $1 billion in state funds through the first 12 months of the Ukraine battle.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s predictions of a lightning victory had been quashed by Ukraine’s unflagging resistance and a surge of Western army help.
Mr. Prigozhin noticed the battle as his probability to make historical past by turning the tide for beleaguered Russian forces.
His fighters, amongst them prisoners recruited from Russian prisons, made some quick good points in early 2023 with ways that had been savagely environment friendly. In fast-moving assaults, the previous inmates typically led the cost as expendable fodder. “I’m taking you alive,” a Wagner video recruiting pitch to prisoners declared. “However I don’t at all times return [you] alive.”
Wagner advances, though non permanent in some locations, had been a uncommon bit of fine information for Putin. However his alliance of comfort with Mr. Prigozhin quickly started to indicate fissures.
In a rustic the place dissidents are sometimes the goal of suspected state-ordered hits, Mr. Prigozhin stood aside along with his public outbursts over what he referred to as the Kremlin’s inept army planning and flawed ways.
Mr. Prigozhin’s rising frustration exploded late on June 23, when he and Wagner forces left Ukraine and swept into the southern Russian metropolis of Rostov-on-Don, seizing army headquarters and successfully taking two generals captive.
The following morning, he despatched Wagner tanks and personnel carriers rolling towards Moscow. Wagner gunners introduced down Russian helicopters and a army surveillance aircraft. A panicked Putin denounced the “armed mutiny” because the world watched, surprised, amid the unprecedented problem to his strongman rule.
A quick-hatched intervention conveyed by a Putin ally, Belarusian authoritarian chief Alexander Lukashenko, stored the disaster from rising. “Prigozhin was a monster Putin created and allowed to develop,” mentioned Ariel Cohen, a Russia analyst on the Atlantic Council suppose tank’s Eurasia Middle. “It’s a timeless lesson: Watch out what you want for.”
For embarrassing him on a world scale, Putin took systematic revenge, dismantling a lot of Wagner. Russian state media, in the meantime, broadcast pictures supposed to discredit Mr. Prigozhin’s commando persona, together with of the mercenary chief in wigs and crude disguises, corresponding to an Islamist-style beard and wraparound sun shades.
But Putin and Mr. Prigozhin additionally appeared for some technique to coexist. They met secretly, together with a gaggle of Wagner militiamen, 5 days after Mr. Prigozhin’s revolt.
After weeks of silence on the small print of the assembly, Putin insisted that Mr. Prigozhin was neutralized. “Wagner doesn’t exist,” Putin advised the Russian enterprise newspaper Kommersant. Putin praised the Wagner fighters for his or her Ukraine battles and mentioned they might stay as an auxiliary-style unit within the Russian army — however not below Mr. Prigozhin’s command.
Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin was born in what was then Leningrad (later identified by its pre-revolution title, St. Petersburg) on June 1, 1961. His mom was a hospital nurse who remarried after the dying of her husband when Mr. Prigozhin was younger. His stepfather was a coach at a sports activities academy, which supplied a spot to Mr. Prigozhin as a promising cross-country skier.
He didn’t make the lower to change into knowledgeable within the Soviet sports activities system. After leaving the academy in 1980, Mr. Prigozhin fell in with road gangs and was arrested for small-time thefts as a juvenile. At 18, he was convicted of collaborating within the theft of a lady on a Leningrad road.
Mr. Prigozhin “grabbed her neck, squeezing till she misplaced consciousness,” in keeping with the Guardian, citing official paperwork made public by the Russian investigative information web site Meduza. One attacker took her footwear, whereas Mr. Prigozhin “deftly eliminated her gold earrings.”
He was in jail till 1990, returning to a metropolis that was quickly altering below the reforms of Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev. Mr. Prigozhin loved success along with his mom and stepfather as scorching canine distributors as quick meals turned synonymous with the brand new occasions. He rolled the income right into a on line casino funding.
In 1995, Mr. Prigozhin and a enterprise associate opened their first restaurant, Staraya Tamozhnya, or the Previous Customs Home, serving French delicacies. Two years later, the floating New Island restaurant, created from a rusting ship, opened its doorways. Extra eating places with ties to Mr. Prigozhin adopted in Moscow.
Mr. Prigozhin performed maitre d’ in St. Petersburg as Putin — who beloved to indicate off his house metropolis — dined in 2001 with French President Jacques Chirac and President George W. Bush in 2006. British royalty additionally stopped by New Island, together with the long run King Charles III.
It was Putin’s obsession with Ukraine, and what was misplaced within the 1991 Soviet collapse, that made Mr. Prigozhin trade his dinner jackets for fatigues.
Mr. Prigozhin and a gaggle of Kremlin insiders began to assemble a mercenary drive shortly after Putin’s land seize of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. A 12 months later, Wagner was a part of Russia’s army surge into Syria to help its embattled ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, amid a civil battle and threats from the Islamic State extremist group. Wagner models protected Syria’s oil fields and, as compensation, acquired a slice of Syria’s petrodollars, in keeping with Western officers.
So long as Putin felt he may rely on Mr. Prigozhin, Wagner was allowed to develop, reaching an estimated 50,000 fighters at its peak. Mr. Prigozhin’s private fortune swelled, too, elevating him to billionaire standing, with playthings corresponding to a 122-foot yacht, St. Vitamin.
For years, Mr. Prigozhin refused to even acknowledge his ties to Wagner. Lastly, in September 2022, he publicly embraced his position as a Wagner founder. (The title is believed to be impressed by a Wagner chief, former Russian army officer Dmitry Utkin, as an homage to German composer Richard Wagner, whose music was favored by Adolf Hitler. Utkin was additionally on the manifest of the crashed aircraft.)
Mr. Prigozhin was linked by U.S. officers to the Web Analysis Company, a St. Petersburg-based group accused of being a hub for bogus social media accounts, faux information and different efforts to disrupt elections, together with the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Within the post-election report overseen by particular counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director, one part described how Web Analysis Company trolls in Russia, posing on Fb as right-wing activists primarily based in america, persuaded a protester in 2016 to face in entrance of the White Home with a signal that learn “Comfortable fifty fifth Birthday, Expensive Boss” to coincide with Mr. Prigozhin’s birthday.
The Justice Division in 2018 indicted Mr. Prigozhin, the Web Analysis Company and others on fees of interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (The case was dropped in early 2020 over worries it may expose labeled materials.)
Mr. Prigozhin basked within the accusations. “We now have interfered, we’re interfering and we’ll proceed to intervene,” he mentioned in 2022. After the FBI put Mr. Prigozhin on its most-wanted checklist and the Treasury Division positioned him below further sanctions, Mr. Prigozhin appeared unfazed.
“Individuals are very impressionable folks,” he was quoted telling the RIA Novosti information company on the time. “They see what they need to see. … In the event that they need to see the satan, allow them to see him.”
Mr. Prigozhin’s dying doesn’t shut the books on worldwide probes into alleged Wagner atrocities.
In early 2023, United Nations investigators referred to as for probes into potential battle crimes by authorities forces and Wagner Group models in Mali. In designating Wagner a “transnational felony group” in January, the Treasury Division imposed sanctions on Wagner-related companies and accused Wagner personnel of participating “in an ongoing sample of significant felony exercise, together with mass executions, rape, little one abductions, and bodily abuse within the Central African Republic and Mali.”
Mr. Prigozhin was married to Lyubov Valentinovna Prigozhina. That they had two youngsters — a daughter, Polina, and a son, Pavel — however a whole checklist of survivors was not instantly out there.
In mild of the vary of his actions, Mr. Prigozhin generally questioned why he was dubbed “Putin’s chef.” He most popular one other moniker.
“Putin’s butcher,” he mentioned in an interview posted to his Telegram channel, “and every little thing would have been wonderful.”
