Yevgueni Prigozhin and his company of mercenaries Wagner, due to their secrecy and their support for the Kremlin, were a kind of legendary characters respected in Russia among the sectors closest to power. But it won’t be like that anymore. Within hours of starting their military rebellion, they began to erase his name. The municipality of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, announced that it was removing ads about the Wagner Group from the city’s subway. In Vladimir, 180 kilometers from Moscow, a video broadcast by the local Pro Gorod channel showed officials on a crane taking off a poster asking for volunteers to join this private army and fight in Ukraine.
No one in Russia now remembers the man dressed in a white coat over an elegant suit who in 2010 served the Russian president an exquisite dish in one of his posh restaurants. He was nicknamed “Putin’s cook” because of the contracts his Concord catering company had won with the Kremlin and other government entities.
Before getting that nickname, this intriguing character had come a long way from jail and a hot dog stand to the top of business.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in 1961 in what was then Leningrad. He studied at a sports-oriented college and after 1977 he tried to become a professional cross-country skier, the electronic newspaper Meduza explained. But his dreams failed in 1981, when he was sentenced for robbery and fraud to twelve years in prison. He turned nine and achieved freedom shortly before the breakup of the USSR.
After trying again with skiing and an unsuccessful stint at university, he started again by focusing on business. He opened a fast food cafeteria, later some kiosks and finally quality restaurants in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. One of them, Staraya Tamózhnaya (the old customs), opened in 1996. According to Prigozhin’s own account, which he told Elite Society magazine in 2008, he soon had among his clients high-ranking city officials, including Vladimir Putin. , who at that time worked in the town hall.
In 1998 he opened a luxury restaurant on a ship, called New Island. It was there that Putin took French President Jacques Chirac to dinner in 2001 and US President George W. Bush in 2002. The Meduza media published that he even once celebrated his birthday there.
Its catering business began in 1996, with the creation of Concord Catering, dedicated to providing meals to schools. In 2012 the company took a qualitative leap and began to distribute food to the Russian army.
The Foundation for the Fight against Corruption, the NGO banned in Russia from the opposition Alexéi Navalni today imprisoned, assured in 2017 that it had obtained state contracts worth at least 2,500 million euros.
The Russian press classified him within the group of businessmen known and loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the head of the Kremlin had a certain admiration for him, and on several occasions he had invited high-ranking leaders visiting the city on the Neva River to his restaurants. Putin “saw how I built my business starting with a kiosk,” Prigozhin once told the local magazine Gorod 812, a business for which he mixed mustard in a relative’s kitchen and from which he said he earned $1,000 a month.
According to US allegations, Prigozhin used his small business empire years later to create the troll factory that used social media to cajole unwary Americans into trying to misrepresent the results of the 2016 US presidential election. After some time in denial, in November of 2022 recognized the operation. “We have done it, we continue to do it and we will do it in the future,” he said. In February 2023, he acknowledged that he had financed the entire structure. The US sanctioned Prigozhin and three of his companies for his actions.
Similarly, he used his money to create the Wagner Group in 2014. For a year he denied having anything to do with the mercenary army that was operating in the Ukrainian Donbass, in African countries or in Syria in defense of the interests of the Kremlin. At that time, he did not even hesitate to go to court to denounce the journalists who had discovered him.
But with Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine, and the dispatch of Russian armed forces to the neighboring country, Prigozhin had to come out of the shadows. In September 2022, a video appeared on social networks in which he was seen in a Russian prison trying to recruit inmates to join his ranks to fight in Ukraine. Days later he openly declared that he was behind Wagner, that he created it and that he directed it.
On the battlefront in Ukraine, especially in the offensive to seize Bakhmut, which was finally taken last May, Prigozhin became a kind of hero for the most nationalist Russian sectors, those who demand a stronger hand with Ukraine.
But it was there that his decline also began. Knowing that his men, supported by some 50,000 ex-convicts recruited from Russian prisons, had become Moscow’s battering ram to take that city in Donbass, he demanded without much consideration that the army send him weapons and military equipment to take the city as soon as possible. soon as possible.
He did not realize that his military company, in an illegal situation in Russia, was not part of the Russian Armed Forces and in recent months he began to harshly criticize the chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu. , one of the men closest to Putin for decades.
He challenged them constantly, with written messages, in audio and video recordings. In one of the last, in May, he raised his tone, used totally foul language and showed dozens of corpses of his men whose deaths he blamed on the Russian military. He accused them of incompetence, disorganization, and choosing the wrong strategy on the battlefield. After taking up arms last Friday night, he added the accusations of corruption and deceiving Putin.
“Putin’s cook” no longer wears a white coat. He now wears a combat uniform and has become the enemy within who is shaking up the plans of the Kremlin in Ukraine.
