by Bidisha Saha: After the head of the Wagner militia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, took to social media to publicly slam Russian military commanders, documents leaked before the Pentagon revealed his questionable moves as he traded territory around the besieged city to Ukraine offered to disclose intelligence to Ukraine. Bakhmut.
Because of his blatant cynicism and impunity in the face of Russian law, he elicits malice in Russian circles and emerges as a major player that only a few can match. But his life took a sinister turn as his political ambitions grew from a life as a hotelier to someone who unabashedly hurled abuses at the Russian high command.
So, who is this man who speaks fearlessly about the Russian Defense Minister and the Russian Armed Forces, but was once considered ‘Putin’s chef’ because he was so close to the Kremlin?
India Today’s OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigative team has profiled this notorious boss-man and flag-bearer of organized corruption in Russia.
Yevgeny Prigozhin: Wagner’s boss
The defiant boss of the Wagner Group is an oligarch who is also a past thug who spent nine years in prison and shares his birthplace with President Putin in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. He later went to sell hotdogs at a roadside stall with his father.
In the 1990s as the Soviet Union opened to the world under then President Gorbachev and Russia’s private sector boomed, Prigozhin invested in St. Petersburg’s first grocery chain and eventually opened the luxury restaurant New Island, where it was reported that He personally served Putin for the first time and some other notable Russian military orders.
Prigozhin has leveraged his high-profile connections to win billion-dollar military catering and construction contracts since the mid-2000s, earning himself the nickname “Putin’s chef”.
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Some Russian academics chastised him for using Russian prison language in his latest videos. How a businessman leading a private army was allowed to act as a prerogative of the state can be seen in a viral video where he not only sneaks into the dark confines of Russian prisons to recruit soldiers, Rather, if they survived, he even forgave them. The course of the battle – is mysterious.
Although his rapport with Putin lies in hazy areas of his past, the fact that the paranoid Russian president has handed his food to anyone shows an enormous amount of trust. Wagner’s deep ties to Russia’s top political leaders set the company apart from its contemporaries.
The shrewd entrepreneur has gone to the extent of trolling Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is a close confidante of Putin. In a letter shared on Telegram, the Wagner chief continued to blame the army for losing ground around Bakhmut and dared Shoigu to go to the battlefield himself.
Wagner Group
When the war began, Putin’s favorite mercenary organization that has been at the forefront of the Russian fight—the Wagner Group—was touted as its secret weapon. Mercenaries are professional fighting forces at the behest of the highest bidder.
The Wagner Group is most popularly known for providing mercenaries to Russian efforts or the efforts of Russian allies, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Africa.
As Russia expands its involvement in Africa, Wagner’s operations expand across the continent on behalf of the Russian government and Prigozhin’s own business interests.
Moscow has a wide affinity for using mercenary groups like Wagner because of its quasi-accountability to the Russian state, that is, it provides Putin with a degree of admirable deterrence in the war zone. Such private military groups also allow the Kremlin to cover up the true cost of the war as deaths and other expenditures by these groups do not appear on official statistics, even though indirectly funded by the Kremlin.
Despite a slow start to the war, Russia’s ruthless strategy of a so-called human wave assault has allowed it to remain at the helm of some of the most publicized battles in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has seen some of the worst fighting. ,
However, these successive victories and the boasting of Yevgeny Prigozhin strained relations between the militia and the wider Kremlin’s military.
What the leaked documents reveal
The position of the Russian army was informed by the boss himself, on the condition that the Ukrainian commanders withdraw their troops from the area around Bakhmut. The proposal was conveyed to him by his contacts in the Military Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine, with whom he had maintained secret communications during the war.
However, it is not clear from the leaked document which Russian military positions Prigozhin offered to disclose, and Ukraine declined the offer.
Prigozhin has maintained a secret relationship with the Ukrainian intelligence unit that has included phone calls as well as in-person meetings with HUR (Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate) officials in an unspecified area in Africa, a leaked document states.
The leaked documents also showed Prigozhin lamenting the heavy losses his own forces had been fighting and urged Ukraine to take tough action against Russian forces.
In another document, he advised the Ukrainian military to proceed with an assault on the Crimean border while Russian troops struggled with ammunition supplies in late January.
The Washington Post report also cited other intelligence exchanges, stating that Prigozhin was aware of the declining morale of Wagner’s forces and that some of his fighters hesitated from orders to be deployed to the Bakhmut area. which was subjected to heavy shelling for fear of more casualties.
fall background
One of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s videos, released in a state-sponsored Telegram channel filmed in Bakhmut, showed his anger at the lack of ammunition.
In the past few weeks, the Wagner Group has repeatedly accused the Russian high command of withholding ammunition. Tension escalated further when he threatened to withdraw his forces from the region if he did not receive more support from the Russian army.
In January 2023, the Wagner Group took Soledar, a small suburb north of Bakhmut, in one of the most significant gains in recent months. This was followed by a series of triumphal announcements on pro-Vagner Telegram channels, including the Russian Ministry of Defense.
In another video posted by Yevgeny, he can be seen saying that the group is more effective than the Russian army, even mocking and humiliating the blow of their failed offensive in Vuhledar near Donetsk .
In retaliation, the Russian military stopped supplying ammunition to Wagner and banned the group from recruiting convicts from penal colonies.
Unsurprisingly, this did not go down well with Prigozhin, who began with his indictments against the Russian Defense Minister, which led to a personal feud. Tensions reached a peak in early May when the Wagner chief publicly threatened in a scathing video that unless he received more ammunition, he would have to completely withdraw his forces from Bakhmut after Putin’s victory parade on 9 May. have to be removed from
Prigozhin spewed obscenities and an ultimatum after walking through the rows of corpses, claiming that Wagner fighters killed in the Battle of Bakhmut had been killed, citing insufficient ammunition.
However, this did not happen as the Russian Defense promised much needed ammunition and essential supplies to the Wagner Group.
Yevgeny denies report he offered to share Russian intelligence with Kiev – days after Wagner chief issued a series of criticisms revealing deep rifts within the Kremlin over the war in Ukraine Denial came.
He also added in a video recording published on 11 March that Wagner “will turn into an army with an ideology, and that ideology will be the struggle for justice.”
Such statements coincide with the perception of analysts who are suggesting that Prigozhin wants to move beyond his position as a private military leader and present himself as a ‘competent, ruthless patriot’ – playing a huge role in the Russian Federation, in contrast to its inept army. forces.
Last weekend, four Russian aircraft were reportedly shot down by Ukrainian missiles within its territory in the Bryansk region.