Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenary company, Wagner, for their secrecy and support of the Kremlin, were a kind of legendary figures respected in Russia among the sectors closest to power. But it won’t be like that anymore. A few hours after the military rebellion began they began to erase his name. The City Council of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, announced that it would remove the Wagner Group’s advertisements from the city’s subway.
No one in Russia remembers the man in a white coat over an elegant suit who in 2010 served an exquisite dish to the Russian president in one of his classy restaurants. He was called “Putin’s cook” because of the contracts that Concord, his catering company, had secured with the Kremlin and other government entities.
Until he got that nickname, this intriguing character had traveled a long way that has passed through prison and a frankfurt kiosk. Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in 1961 in what was then Leningrad. He studied at a sports-oriented school and after 1977 tried to become a professional cross-country skier, explains the electronic newspaper Meduza. But his dreams failed in 1981, when he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for theft and fraud. He was there for nine and got his freedom shortly before the disintegration of the USSR.
After trying again with skiing and a failed university, he started again, now in business. He opened a fast food cafe, later some kiosks and finally quality restaurants in St. Petersburg and Moscow. One such restaurant, Stàraia Tamójnaia (the Old Customs House), opened in 1996. According to Prigozhin’s own account, he soon had among his customers high-ranking city officials, including Vladimir Putin, who worked at Town hall.
In 1998 he opened a luxury restaurant on a boat, 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. Meduza has posted that she even celebrated her birthday there.
The catering business began in 1996, with the creation of Concord Catering, dedicated to supplying food to schools. In 2012, the company made a qualitative leap and began distributing food for the Russian army.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation, the organization banned in Russia by the opposition Aleksei Navalni, now imprisoned, assured in 2017 that the company had obtained state contracts worth at least 2.5 billion euros. The Russian press classified him within the group of businessmen loyal to the president. Apparently, the head of the Kremlin had a certain admiration for him, and several times he had invited high-ranking officials to visit the city on the Neva River to his restaurants: “Putin saw how I built my business starting with a kiosk,” he Prigojin once said.
According to U.S. indictments, Prigozhin years later used his small business empire to create the troll factory that used social media to fool unsuspecting Americans and try to misrepresent the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After After denying it for a while, in November 2022 he acknowledged 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 United States sanctioned Prigozhin and three of his companies.
He used his money to create, in 2014, the Wagner Group. For years he denied that he had anything to do with the mercenaries who acted in the 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, 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 prisoners to fight in Ukraine. Days later he openly declared that he was behind Wagner.
On the Ukrainian battlefront, especially in the offensive to take Bakhmut, a city finally conquered in May, Prigozhin became something of a hero for the most nationalist Russian sectors, those who demand a more iron fist with Ukraine.
But it was there that his decline began. Knowing that his men, with the support of some 50,000 ex-convicts recruited from Russian prisons, had become Moscow’s battering ram to take that city in the Donbass, he bluntly demanded that the army send him weapons and military equipment to take the city as soon as possible.
He did not realize that his military company, in a legal 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 Guerassimov, and the Minister of Defense , Serguei Xoigu, 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 latest, in May, he raised his voice, used downright foul language and displayed dozens of dead bodies of his men to blame senior Russian military officials for the deaths. He accused them of incompetence, disorganization and of choosing the wrong strategy on the battlefield. After standing up in arms on Friday night, he added to the accusations of corruption and cheating Putin.
Putin’s cook no longer wears a white coat. He now wears a combat uniform and has become the enemy within that is destabilizing the Kremlin’s plans in Ukraine.
