On the First Anniversary of Yevgeny Prigozhin's Death
On this month in FAFO history
If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.
One year ago this month Yevgeny Prigozhin made a spectacular fall from being Vladimir Putin’s closest ally to suddenly dying in a suspicious plane crash. It was such an abrupt change.
In fact Prigozhin's life was full of dramatic changes. He was born in 1961 in the Soviet Union in the city that was then-named Leningrad but is now known as St. Petersburg. At the age of 18 he was headed for a life of crime when he was caught stealing and he was given a suspended sentence of two years and a six month prison sentence. After he was released he joined a gang where he was involved in a burglary spree. He was caught by the authorities when he choked a woman on the street during a robbery followed by he and his accomplices stealing the woman's earrings and boots. In 1981 he was given a harsher sentence: 12 years in a high-security penal colony. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reduced his sentence to 10 years for good behavior.
After his release from prison in 1990 he decided to go straight. He began selling hot dogs with his mother and stepfather at an open air market in Leningrad where he claimed that the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them. From 1991-1997 he became the manager of a grocery store chain that was founded by a former classmate. At the same time he became the CEO of a chain of gambling casinos in St. Petersburg. There's a possibility that he may had met Vladimir Putin during that time because Putin was the chairman of the supervisory board for casinos and gambling.
In 1995 Prigozhin went into the restaurant business with the opening of the Old Customs House in St. Petersburg. In 1997 he opened a second restaurant, called New Island, which became one of the most fashionable dining spots in St. Petersburg. This restaurant had brought Prigozhin to new levels of success in 2001 when he served Vladimir Putin and French President Jacques Chirac, again in 2002 when he served US President George W. Bush, and in 2003 when Putin celebrated his birthday in New Island. Over time Prigozhin was given the nickname Putin’s Chef.
On the surface it seems like an inspirational story about a criminal who had turned his life around and is now a successful restaurateur whose patrons included Vladimir Putin. Had he stayed in the restaurant business he could've been hailed as a genuine hero for turning his life around and being very successful at making an honest living. He could've been a role model for convicted criminals who also want to turn their lives around and go straight.
But, in a case of not being able to take the thug out of the man, Prigozhin co-founded the notorious Wagner Group, a private military company, with Dmitriy Utkin in 2014 around the same time that Russia annexed Crimea.
The Wagner Group recruited many of its men from prisons, where they were invited to fight in exchange for receiving a paycheck and a full pardon for their crimes. Prigozhin himself would visit these prisoners while trying to establish a rapport with them by talking about the time that he was in prison himself. The people recruited into the Wagner Group included convicted rapists and murderers.
The Wagner Group soon gained a reputation for its war crimes on the battlefield in numerous countries. In Ukraine they were accused of killing and torturing civilians in Kyiv and Bucha. In Libya the US military accused the Wagner Group of planting landmines in and around Tripoli. In Mali they were accused of committing mass executions against civilians. They were also accused of doing the same in the Central African Republic. It seems like everywhere the Wagner Group went, death and destruction followed.
With a group whose ranks included convicted violent criminals, it shouldn't be a surprise that they would go on to commit atrocities in other countries. But a bigger surprise for Russia would come after the men who survived their time in the Wagner Group returned to civilian life with full pardons. These men would commit new crimes, which included kidnapping, rape, and murder.
Prigozhin also founded the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an Internet troll farm that was instrumental in affecting the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, which resulted in Donald Trump being elected as president. In 2016 Samantha Bee traveled to Russia where she interviewed just two of the employees on such a troll farm who were using social media to encourage Americans to vote for Donald Trump.
Yevgeny Prigozhin's cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin began to go south last year when he started having second thoughts about the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. He made public posts where he called for an end to the war in Ukraine saying that Russia had already won the special military operation.
When that statement was ignored he made a video showing his men lying dead on a battlefield after a recent battle. He angrily called out “SHOIUGU!!! GERASIMOV!!” while accusing Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov of not providing enough ammunition so the soldiers in his group could adequatly fight and they ended up dead. That video soon went viral.
In late June 2023, soon after that video went viral, Prigozhin decided to take the Wagner Group and travel across the border from Ukraine to Russia. They initially seized Rostov-on-Don then headed towards Moscow. It was heavily speculated that the Wagner Group was going to overthrow Vladimir Putin. While the Wagner Group was heading towards Moscow the YouTube channel 1420 did street interviews of some locals in Moscow for their reactions to stories that the Wagner Group was headed to Moscow in tanks and their reactions were interesting to say the least. The most jaw-dropping responses were the ones who said that they didn’t want to talk politics. That’s right, some people actually thought that talking about tanks approaching their city was “too political” to discuss openly. I foud it shocking that many of these people had taken a such detached point of view regarding tanks headed to Moscow to the point where their potential safety could be endangered because they weren’t willing to directly face the reality of their current situation.
About a few days later the Real Ukraine YouTube channel conducted their own interviews with the locals in Kyiv regarding that incident and the locals were more relaxed as they freely gave their opinions regarding what happened. It is a stark reminder of the vast difference between the people living in Russia and the people living in Ukraine in terms of being able to actually voicing their opinions without fear of being sent to prison.
There was a surprise development when the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, managed to broker a settlement with Prigozhin and the attempted coup abruptly ended. The Wagner Group withdrew from traveling north towards Moscow and they ultimately resettled in Belarus. Putin had the Russian government seize control of Prigozhin's propaganda operation while the Wagner Group started to train Belarus soldiers.
Even though Lukashenko said that Prigozhin could stay in Belarus for some time, by early July Prigozhin decided to go back to Russia. He even met with Vladimir Putin where he expressed Wagner's unconditional support for Putin.
Despite that expression of unconditional support from Prigozhin, it was obvious that Putin still held a grudge against Prigozhin for that aborted coup attempt. On August 23, 2023, the two-month anniversary of that aborted coup attempt, Prigozhin along with the Wagner Group co-founder Dmitriy Utkin and nine other people boarded a plane that was headed from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The plane suddenly crashed, killing everyone on board. A Wagner-associated Telegram channel claimed the jet was shot down by Russian air defenses over Tver Oblast. The US and other Western officials believed that an explosion on board probably brought down that plane.
There are times when I wonder if Prigozhin's last words were “SHOIUGU!!! GERASIMOV!!!” LOL! 😆
Since that plane crash the remnants Wagner Group has been brought under the direct control of the Russian state. What happened to Prigozhin provides a further example of the deadly consequences of those who openly defy Vladimir Putin too much. But it's pretty hard to feel sorry for Yevgeny Prigozhin since he was basically a thug. Had he succeeded in overthrowing Vladimir Putin last June and installed himself as a new Russian leader, the war in Ukraine would have still continued and the Russian people would still be living under repressive rule with very few civil rights. In other words, Prigozhin wasn't really that different from Putin so it was no big tragedy that he died at 62.
RIP (Rot Into Pieces) Yevgeny Prigozhin.
My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription. Click on the button below for more details.