Short answers, pulled from the story.
Both Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin have been named as founders. Prigozhin claimed in September 2022 that he personally founded it on the 1st of May 2014. Utkin, a former Spetsnaz GRU lieutenant colonel who fought in both Chechen wars, is named as its founder and leader in European Union sanctions. The group's name reportedly derived from Utkin's alias.
Yes. On the 27th of June 2023, President Putin confirmed that the Russian state fully funded Wagner from its defense and state budgets. From May 2022 to May 2023 alone, the Russian state paid 86.262 billion rubles to the group, approximately one billion US dollars. Russian state media later reported total payments to Prigozhin's Wagner Group and his Concord catering business together exceeded 19 billion dollars.
Wagner was reportedly Russia's main assault force in the Battle of Bakhmut. It deployed recruited prison inmates in human wave attacks at intervals of fifteen to twenty minutes to draw out Ukrainian positions, while professional mercenaries were held back until defenses were weakened. A US estimate on the 1st of May 2023 put Wagner's losses since the 1st of December 2022 alone at 10,000 killed and 40,000 wounded, primarily in Bakhmut fighting.
Prigozhin died on the 23rd of August 2023 in a plane crash in Tver Oblast, two months after leading the armed mutiny against Russia's military leadership. He died alongside Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin and commander Valery Chekalov. Western intelligence agencies assessed the crash was likely caused by an explosion on board and widely suspected Russian state involvement.
The Wagner Group is known to have operated in at least eleven countries across four continents: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, Mali, Libya, Venezuela, and Madagascar. By the end of 2019, following deployments between 2017 and 2019, Wagner had offices in twenty African countries.
Since at least July 2022, Wagner recruited Russian prison inmates by offering them sentence reductions and monetary payment, specifically 100,000 or 200,000 rubles and amnesty for six months of service, or 5 million rubles paid to their families if they died. BBC Russian Service reported that legal experts considered it unlawful to send inmates to war. The first group of twenty-four prisoners who completed their six-month contracts were released on the 5th of January 2023.