Yevgeny Prigozhin

• 1. Introduction

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  Yevgeny Prigozhin died on the 23rd of August 2023, when a business jet crashed in Tver Oblast, north of Moscow. All ten people aboard were killed. The date fell exactly two months after Prigozhin had turned on Russia's military leadership in an armed revolt.

  He had been many things by then. He had been a convict, a street vendor, a restaurant owner, a mercenary chief and a rebel. Few people in modern Russia packed so many lives into one career.

  Three questions run through his story. How did a man with a prison record come to serve dinner to presidents? How did a caterer end up commanding a private army that the state relied on in Ukraine? And why did he gamble everything by attacking the very people who had made him powerful?

  The answers begin far from any palace, in a Soviet childhood that gave little hint of what was coming.

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• 2. Skis And Prison

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  Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was born an only child on the 1st of June 1961 in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg. His mother, Violetta Kirovna Prigozhina, worked as a hospital nurse. His father, Viktor Yevgenyevich Prigozhin, was a mining engineer who died when the boy was nine. His grandfather, Yevgeny Ilyich Prigozhin, had been a Red Army captain in World War II, fought in the Battles of Rzhev and earned a medal "For Courage". In 2020 Prigozhin sponsored a war film based on a 1991 novel that mentions this grandfather.

  His stepfather, Samuil Fridmanovich Zharkoi, was a ski instructor who introduced the boy to cross-country skiing. Prigozhin dreamed of skiing professionally and finished his sporting training in 1977. An injury ended that plan. He later worked as a fitness trainer at a children's sports school.

  In 1979, at the age of eighteen, Prigozhin was caught stealing. A court gave him a suspended sentence of two years and six months, which he served working at a chemical plant in Veliky Novgorod. When he returned to Leningrad in 1980, he joined a gang and took part in a burglary spree. Police caught him after a street robbery in which he choked a woman while he and his accomplices took her earrings and boots. In 1981 he was sentenced to twelve years in a high-security penal colony for robbery, theft, fraud and involving minors in criminal activity.

  By his own account, Prigozhin broke the rules of solitary confinement "on a regular basis" until he was moved to the general population in 1985. There he began to "read intensively". After training at a vocational school, he worked as a lathe operator, a tractor driver and a cabinet maker. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union cut his sentence to ten years, noting that he had begun "corrective behavior". He moved to a medium-security colony and was released in 1990, after nine years in detention in total. He then enrolled at the Leningrad Chemical and Pharmaceutical Institute to study pharmacy, but never finished the degree.

  That prison past later became a recruiting tool. When Wagner needed fighters, Prigozhin flaunted his time behind bars to persuade inmates to sign up.

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• 3. Putin's Chef

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  At the Apraksin Dvor open-air market in Leningrad, Prigozhin sold hot dogs alongside his mother and stepfather after his release. In an interview with the New York Times, he said that "the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them".

  From 1991 to 1997 he threw himself into the grocery trade. He held a 15 percent stake in Contrast, the first grocery chain in Saint Petersburg, and managed it. His former classmate Boris Spektor had founded the chain. Spektor and Igor Gorbenko then made Prigozhin chief executive of Spectrum CJSC, which opened the first casinos in the city. The three men launched more ventures through the 1990s, in construction, marketing research and foreign trade. Novaya Gazeta notes that this may be where Prigozhin first met Vladimir Putin, who had chaired the supervisory board for casinos and gambling since 1991.

  In 1995, with revenues falling elsewhere, Prigozhin persuaded Contrast director Kirill Ziminov to open a restaurant with him. The result was Old Customs House in Saint Petersburg. In 1997 they followed it with New Island, a floating restaurant made from a rusting boat on the Vyatka River. They spent 400,000 dollars on the remodel, inspired by waterfront restaurants on the Seine in Paris. It became one of the most fashionable dining spots in the city. Prigozhin said his patrons "wanted to see something new in their lives and were tired of just eating cutlets with vodka". One earlier venture of his had featured a striptease show before he settled on upscale dining. He was also reportedly known to punish poor performance or misconduct among his catering staff with physical violence.

  In 2001 Prigozhin personally served food to Putin and French president Jacques Chirac at New Island. He hosted US president George W. Bush there in 2002, and in 2003 Putin celebrated his birthday at the restaurant. Those dinners helped earn him the nickname "Putin's chef". In 2003 he left his business partners and set up independent restaurants. His company Concord Catering began winning government contracts, worth hundreds of millions in total, for feeding schoolchildren and government workers. In 2012 it landed a contract to supply meals to the Russian military worth 1.2 billion dollars over one year. Some of the profit is alleged to have funded the Internet Research Agency.

  By 2012 Prigozhin had moved his family into a Saint Petersburg compound with a basketball court and a helicopter pad. He owned a private jet and a 115-foot yacht. The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused him of corrupt business practices and in 2017 estimated his illegal wealth at more than one billion rubles. Alexei Navalny alleged a link between Prigozhin and Moskovsky Shkolnik, a company that supplied poor-quality food to Moscow schools and was blamed for a 2019 dysentery outbreak. On the 11th of December 2018 a company called Msk LLC, said to be unaffiliated with Concord, was paid 2.5 million rubles for a Kremlin banquet. It shared Concord's contact phone number, and a second payment of 4.1 million rubles followed on the 11th of December 2019. In 2022 the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project named Prigozhin its Corrupt Person of the Year.

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• 4. Troll Factory And Sanctions

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  In Olgino, outside Saint Petersburg, sat the offices of the Internet Research Agency, a company accused of running online trolling and disinformation. Prigozhin financed and directed it, along with Concord Management and Consulting and one other related firm. The Russian journalist Andrey Soshnikov linked a man named Alexey Soskovets to those offices. Soskovets's company, North-Western Service Agency, won 17 or 18 contracts, depending on the source, to organize celebrations, forums and sporting events for Saint Petersburg authorities. It was the only bidder in half of those tenders.

  The network's reach extended to domestic politics too. In 2013 campaigns against opposition figures involved Dmitry Bykov and Svetlana Mironyuk, then head of RIA Novosti. A homepage called Gazeta O Gazetah, which claimed to fight fake news, was used to spread it instead.

  On the 16th of February 2018 a US grand jury indicted Prigozhin, the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management and other connected Russians. He was charged with funding and organizing operations to interfere in American political and electoral processes, including the 2016 presidential election, and with crimes such as identity theft. Charges against Concord Management were dismissed with prejudice on the 16th of March 2020.

  For years Prigozhin denied everything. Then, on the 7th of November 2022, he said he had interfered in US elections and would keep doing so. In February 2023 he went further and described his own role: "I've never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time."

  His money reached into Washington's courtrooms as well. In May 2019 Maria Butina, who had pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia in the United States, appealed for help with her legal bills. Her father told Izvestia she owed her American attorneys 40 million rubles. Prigozhin's Fund for the Protection of National Values, managed by Petr Bychkov, donated 5 million rubles toward the defence costs.

  Sanctions piled up over the years. In December 2016 the US Treasury designated Prigozhin for supporting senior Russian officials. In June 2017 it sanctioned Concord Management and Consulting over the war in Eastern Ukraine. In January 2018 it targeted Evro Polis Ltd, which had a contract with the Syrian government to protect oil fields in exchange for a 25 percent share of their output. In September 2019 three more companies fell under sanctions: Autolex Transport, Beratex Group and Linburg Industries. The European Union acted in October 2020 over his financing of Wagner in Libya, and again in April 2022 over the invasion of Ukraine. Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom imposed their own measures. The FBI added him to its wanted list in February 2021 and offered a reward of up to 250,000 dollars. In July 2022 the US State Department offered up to 10 million dollars for information about him and the other entities involved in election interference.

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• 5. Wagner Abroad

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  In September 2022, after years of denial, Prigozhin said publicly that he had founded the Wagner Group in 2014. He explained that he created it to "protect the Russians" when "the genocide of the Russian population of Donbas began". He claimed he "found specialists who could help". The state-funded private military company first backed Russian separatist forces in the Donbas War. Prigozhin also confirmed what the Russian government had previously denied: that Wagner mercenaries had operated in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

  The idea came from higher up. Valery Gerasimov, who took over as Chief of the General Staff in 2012, pushed the plan, which gave the Russian government plausible deniability for military operations abroad. Prigozhin was picked to run the company because of his service relationship with the Defense Ministry and his close ties to Putin. Three different sources claim he first objected to such a high-risk role, though he could not refuse it. He had no military background, so he reportedly relied on Dmitry Utkin, a Russian military veteran named as Wagner's founder and commander. Utkin had once headed Prigozhin's security and was listed as director general of Concord Management.

  Throughout 2018, Prigozhin built interests in Africa through Wagner and roughly 100 to 200 political consultants. The countries named include Madagascar, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Libya, Nigeria and South Africa, among many others. Pyotr Bychkov was allegedly responsible for coordinating the expansion. According to a Kommersant article of the 20th of April 2018, a political strategist named Yaroslav Ignatovsky, who heads a firm called Politgen, coordinated Prigozhin's troll efforts there.

  Since early 2018, a company called Lobaye Invest has mined diamonds, gold and other minerals in the Lobaye prefecture of the Central African Republic. It is a subsidiary of M-Finance, which Prigozhin founded. In March 2020 it emerged that he had financially assisted Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the overthrown Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, in a bid for the Libyan presidency.

  When the 2023 coup in Niger came, Prigozhin cheered it on in a Telegram post. He described it as the people of Niger struggling against their "colonizers" and called it "effectively winning independence".

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• 6. Shell Hunger And Fame

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  When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, its Ground Forces took heavy casualties while Putin delayed announcing a mobilization of reservists. Authorities went looking for mercenaries, and Prigozhin's influence grew. He received substantial resources, including aviation assets of his own. From the summer of 2022 he gained the authority to recruit inmates from Russian prisons in exchange for their freedom. Western intelligence estimated that Wagner swelled from "several thousand" fighters around 2017-18 to about 50,000 by December 2022, mostly convicts recruited from prisons.

  On the 13th of November 2022 Wagner released a video of its mercenaries using a sledgehammer to execute Yevgeny Nuzhin, a deserter reportedly handed back to the Russians in a prisoner exchange. Prigozhin suggested the film should be called "a dog dies a dog's death". On the 4th of May 2023, after a drone attack on the Kremlin, he warned against threatening nuclear retaliation, saying Russia looked "like clowns threatening to use nuclear weapons in response to a child's drone".

  Wagner had no legal authority, however. Prigozhin held no official position, having been neither appointed nor elected. He gave up his secluded life and began reporting from the front in military fatigues. Wagner came to look like his private army, operating outside Russian law and the military hierarchy. Anger built inside the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. On the 1st of October, during Ukraine's 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, he said Russian commanders ought to be sent to the front barefoot with just a submachine gun. The Washington Post reported that he was one of the few people who dared to tell Putin about the commanders' mistakes. Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov insisted the dispute existed only in the information field.

  The feud sharpened in February 2023 during the battle for Bakhmut. On the 20th of February, Prigozhin mocked the family of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, accusing the ministry of eating from "gold dishes" while soldiers died. Two days later he said Wagner was "walking around like a beggar" asking unit commanders for help. He published a photo of dead Wagner fighters and blamed the lack of ammunition. His media companies ran a campaign called #DayShellsToWagners. In May 2023 he said Wagner had been getting no more than 30 percent of its needs, then no more than 10 percent. On the 5th of May he announced that his fighters would leave Bakhmut on the 10th unless more ammunition arrived. A day later he said publicly, for the first time, that he was banned from recruiting inmates.

  On the 9th of May he accused regular Russian troops of running away from their positions. Ukraine's 3rd Separate Assault Brigade later said the 72nd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade had escaped from the city. Before the Victory Parade in Moscow, Prigozhin released a video that said "the happy grandpa thinks he's happy". Meduza reported that the Kremlin took this badly. "Grandpa in his bunker" had become an insulting nickname for Putin since the war began.

  Prigozhin now cast himself as a "truth teller". He also clashed with Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic. The sociological service Russian Field said he was converting recognition from the front into political rating. In a May survey by the Levada Center, he appeared among the ten most trusted politicians for the first time. The Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde described his program as radical populism, and he was counted among the "war party" of hardliners who wanted a tougher war.

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• 7. Road To Moscow

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  In mid-June 2023 the Ministry of Defence ordered Wagner to sign contracts with the military before the 1st of July. That would have folded the group into the regular command structure and shrunk Prigozhin's influence. He refused, alleging that Shoigu was incompetent. Meduza reported that the order also threatened Wagner's profitable operations in Africa. Prigozhin tried and failed to get around it while sharpening his attacks on the ministry.

  On the 23rd of June 2023 he claimed that regular Russian forces had launched missile strikes on Wagner, killing a "huge" number of his men. He declared that "the evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped". The announcement of armed conflict against the ministry went out on his press service's Telegram channel. In a video the same day he claimed that the official reasons for invading Ukraine were lies. He denied that Ukraine had escalated anything before the 24th of February 2022, and said Shoigu and an "oligarchic clan" had personal motives for the war. He also said the command was hiding its dead, with casualties reaching 1,000 on some days.

  Early on the 24th of June, Wagner forces crossed from Luhansk into Russia's Rostov Oblast without apparent opposition. The Federal Security Service filed criminal charges against Prigozhin for inciting an armed rebellion. Wagner captured the city of Rostov-on-Don and began advancing on Moscow. Along the way it shot down an Ilyushin Il-22M airborne command post and several military helicopters. Putin addressed the nation, calling Wagner's actions "treason" and promising "harsh steps". He said the situation threatened the existence of Russia itself, and appealed to fighters who had been "dragged" into the revolt "by deceit or threats".

  Prigozhin replied that the president was "mistaken" and that his fighters were "patriots, not traitors". He said his main goal was to remove Shoigu and Gerasimov. He kept supporting the war itself, only calling for it to be fought more effectively. On the afternoon of the 24th, he allegedly tried to reach the presidential administration and Putin himself, who refused to speak with him. Final negotiations were reportedly handled by chief of staff Anton Vaino, Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Boris Gryzlov, the Russian ambassador to Belarus. Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko spoke with Prigozhin at Putin's request and mediated a settlement. The charges were dropped and Wagner halted its march. Prigozhin was to move to Belarus, but plans for Wagner troops to return to Ukraine were cancelled after the group refused to sign military contracts. He remained under investigation for treason.

  The BBC tracked Prigozhin's private jet flying from Belarus to Russia in late June. It made several flights between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, though nobody knew whether he was aboard. On the 6th of July Lukashenko said: "As for Prigozhin, he's in St Petersburg. He is not on the territory of Belarus." In July Prigozhin told his fighters to prepare for "a new journey to Africa". On the 28th of July he was confirmed to be meeting Freddy Mapouka, a presidential advisor from the Central African Republic, at the Trezzini Palace hotel in Saint Petersburg during the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit. He also told the Cameroonian outlet Afrique Média that Wagner was ready to increase its presence in Africa.

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• 8. Burial And Aftermath

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  The Embraer Legacy 600 was flying from Moscow to Saint Petersburg when it went down. Russia's emergency ministry reported the crash, and the state agency TASS said Prigozhin was on the passenger list. The Investigative Committee of Russia confirmed the deaths on the 27th of August, after genetic analysis of remains recovered from the wreckage.

  Explanations competed immediately. A Wagner-associated Telegram channel claimed Russian air defenses had shot the jet down, but that claim was contested because released footage showed no visible missile trails. US and other Western officials said preliminary intelligence suggested an explosion on board. On the 22nd of December 2023 the Wall Street Journal cited Western and Russian intelligence sources who said Nikolai Patrushev had orchestrated the crash. According to that account, Patrushev presented Putin with an assassination plan in August 2023, and a bomb was placed under the wing during pre-departure safety checks.

  Across several cities, mourners built makeshift memorials to Prigozhin and Utkin from candles, flowers and Wagner flags. A video of a Wagner soldier crying in front of one went viral. On the 29th of August, Prigozhin was buried in a private ceremony at Porokhovskoe Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, beside his father. On the 6th of September Ukrainian military intelligence said it could not confirm his death with certainty. On the 10th of September, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed it and cited Putin's breaking of the deal with Prigozhin as a reason to refuse negotiations with Russia under Putin.

  Prigozhin left behind a wife, Lyubov Valentinovna Prigozhina, a pharmacist and businesswoman who owns the Chocolate Museum boutique chain in Saint Petersburg. She opened the Crystal Spa and Lounge on Zhukovsky Street in 2012. The couple had two daughters, Polina, born in 1992, and Veronika, born in 2005, and a son, Pavel, born on the 18th of June 1998. In 2004 Prigozhin produced a children's picture book listing his children as co-authors. It never went on sale, and he gave copies to friends and associates. Until the invasion of Ukraine, the children could travel freely across the European Union, and on the 20th of February 2022 Veronika took part in equestrian competitions in Spain. His mother, Violetta, is the legal owner of Concord Management and Consulting and two other companies. The European Union, the United States, Ukraine and many other countries sanctioned the whole family.

  Honors had come his way in life. Prigozhin received the title Hero of the Russian Federation in 2022, Sudan's Order of the Republic in 2018 and the Order of the Two Niles in 2020. After his death came monuments. In April 2024 a monument showing Prigozhin and Utkin was unveiled outside Wagner's chapel in Goryachy Klyuch, Krasnodar Krai, beside the largest cemetery for Wagner mercenaries. The municipal government said it stood on private property and needed no authorization. In December 2024 a statue of the pair appeared in the Central African Republic. It shows Prigozhin in a bulletproof vest holding a walkie-talkie, next to Utkin with an AK-47 rifle.

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