Yevgeny Prigozhin: Who is the man who organized the Wagner group and admitted meddling in the US elections

THE Yevgeny Prigozhin moved for years in the dark. Lately, however, he has been drawing more and more attention and bragging about what he was accused of. Whether it is meddling in the elections of foreign countries, or the mercenary organization Wagner, his infamous paramilitary organization, the so-called “Putin’s chef” now openly states that he is the man for the Kremlin’s dirty work.

His latest admission, yesterday: on the eve of the US midterm elections and after years of denials, this businessman reputed to be close to President Vladimir Putin bragged about running election manipulation operations.

“We had meddling (in the US election), we have meddling and we will continue to have meddling. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do it,” he told the social networking platform VKontakte from the news service of Concord’s company.

The shaven-headed 61-year-old man, who is subject to Western sanctions, admitted what he has been accused of for years, as the US portrays him as the organizer of influence operations carried out on social media during his US presidential election 2016, most often to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy over Donald Trump’s.

Pillars of the homeland

A few weeks earlier, he had graciously admitted that he founded the Wagner paramilitary organization in 2014, which operates in Ukraine as well as in Syria, but also in Africa, to advance the interests of the Kremlin where the latter wants to operate covertly.

“These guys, heroes, defended the Syrian people, other peoples of Arab countries, poor Africans and Latin Americans, they became pillars of our country,” he said at the end of September.

In October, with this advertising motif, he drummed up the headquarters of the “private military company Wagner” in a glass building in St. Petersburg.

This shift from shadow to light began in mid-September, when he appeared in a video released online speaking to inmates at a Russian penitentiary, urging them to join Wagner and go fight in Ukraine in exchange for amnesty.

He has since publicly admitted that his organization operates in Ukraine’s battlegrounds, notably Bakhmut, a city on Ukraine’s eastern front that has been battered for months and which Moscow hopes to capture after a series of military setbacks in the rest of the country.

Prison

Yevgeny Prigozhin knows the prison world well, having himself spent nine years in Soviet-era detention for common criminal law offences.

He is released from prison in 1990, during the collapse of the USSR. Hailing, like Vladimir Putin, from St. Petersburg, sets up a successful hot dog business for the first time.

He then embarks on various ventures in the catering industry, including a luxury restaurant in St. Petersburg where the then-young Putin dined, who later moved from the secret services to the city council.

After Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000, a Prigozhin catering company will operate in the Kremlin.

This still earned him the nickname “Putin’s Chef” and the reputation of becoming a billionaire thanks to the government contracts he acquired.

This money he would therefore use to found Wagner, a private army originally made up of hardened veterans of the Russian military and special services.

In 2018, while this organization, already noticed in Ukraine, Syria and Libya, is suspected of infiltrating Africa, three Russian journalists investigating the affairs of the paramilitary company are murdered in the Central African Republic.

Yevgeny Prigozhin had already come out of reserve in 2021 to attack Alexei Navalny, then Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy and anti-corruption campaigner, who had claimed in one of his highly popular video investigations among Russian youth that a contractor of Concord distributed spoiled food to schools.

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