The tycoon Yevgeny Prigozhin, close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and known as “the Kremlin cook”, has decided to completely come out of the shadows. This Tuesday he admitted that he was the one who created and financed the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg company known as the “troll factory” that the United States accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump won.
The oligarch has spent years secretly scheming on behalf of Russian power, but in recent months he has become an influential figure in Moscow by becoming involved in Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.
After years of denying it, in September of last year he acknowledged that it was also he who founded the Wagner Group in 2014. This military company of mercenaries, which since the summer has also recruited Russian prisoners to fight on the front lines, has taken charge of important military actions in the neighboring country, such as the offensive on the city of Bakhmut.
Previously, these paramilitaries have fought alongside the Russian military in Syria and in other conflicts in various African countries, always in favor of Russia’s geopolitical interests.
“I have never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I ran it for a long time,” Prigozhin said in a social media message posted by the press service of Concord, his catering company.
The controversial businessman had previously admitted that he had interfered in the 2016 presidential elections in the United States by launching a campaign on social networks to manipulate American public opinion, but this time he has gone further by putting himself directly as the creator and executor. from the “troll factory”. It “was created to protect the Russian information space from the rude and aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian theses in the West,” he added.
His name had already been linked to this company in the past. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign team named three Russian companies in 2019, including the Internet Research Agency, accused of launching “a war news” on social media to divide American society.
Prigozhin referred to these accusations for the first time last November, stating that Russia would continue the practice. “We have done it, we continue to do it and we will do it in the future,” he warned.
