Shocking Revelation: Meet the Elusive Powerhouse Behind Wagner – Yevgeny Prigozhin!

He has before criticized the country’s military leadership for failures in the war in Ukraine and is known for his longstanding feud with the Ministry of Defense.

A look at the role of 62-year-old Prigozhin and Wagner in the war:

WHAT DID PRIGOZHIN SAID?

Prigozhin released a series of angry video and audio recordings in which he accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering a rocket attack on Friday at Wagner’s base in Ukraine, where his troops are fighting on behalf of Russia.

Prigozhin said his troops would now punish Shoigu with an armed uprising and urged the army not to resist.

“This is not a military coup, but a march of justice,” Prigozhin said.

The Ministry of Defense denied carrying out the missile attack.

The National Counter-Terrorism Committee, which is part of the Federal Security Service (FSB), said it was under investigation on charges of inciting an armed uprising.

The FSB called on Wagner’s contract soldiers to arrest Prigozhin and refuse to follow his “criminal and treacherous orders”. She called his remarks “a stab in the back of Russian troops” and said they amounted to inciting armed conflict in Russia.

Tass reported that riot police and the National Guard were working to tighten security of key facilities in Moscow, including government agencies and transport infrastructure.

WHAT IS PRIGOZHIN’S BACKGROUND?

Prigozhin was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1981 for robbery and assault. After his release, he opened a restaurant business in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. It was in this capacity that he met today’s President Vladimir Putin, who was the city’s deputy mayor at the time.

Prigozhin used this connection to set up a catering business and won lucrative Russian government contracts, earning him the nickname “Putin’s Chef”. He later expanded into other fields, including the media and a notorious internet “troll factory,” leading to his indictment in the US for interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In January, Prigozhin paid tribute to the founding, management and funding of the shady Wagner company.

Where was Wagner active?

Wagner was first seen in action shortly after a separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted there in April 2014in the weeks following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

Russia, while supporting the separatist insurgency in Donbass, Ukraine’s eastern industrial center, has denied sending its own weapons and troops there, despite ample evidence to the contrary. The involvement of private contractors in the fighting allowed Moscow to maintain a degree of denial.

Prigozhin’s company was named Wagner after the nickname of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian military’s special forces. It soon gained a good reputation brutality and ruthlessness.

Wagner staff too sent to Syriawhere Russia supported President Bashar Assad’s government in a civil war. In LibyaThey fought alongside Commander Khalifa Hifter. The group was also active in the Central African Republic and Mali.

Prigozhin has reportedly used Wagner’s operations in Syria and African countries to secure lucrative mining contracts. US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said in January the company was leveraging its access to gold and other resources in Africa to finance operations in Ukraine.

Some Russian media claimed that Wagner was involved in the 2018 killing of three Russian journalists in the Central African Republic who were investigating the group’s activities. The murders remain unsolved.

What is Wagner’s reputation?

Western countries and UN experts have accused Wagner mercenaries of human rights abuses across Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

In 2021, the European Union accused the group of “gross human rights violations, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings” and conducting “destabilizing activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

A video has surfaced purporting to show some of the activities that contributed to Wagner’s terrifying reputation.

A 2017 online video showed a group of armed individuals, believed to be Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian man and beating him to death with a sledgehammer before mutilating and burning his body. The Russian authorities ignored calls from the media and human rights activists to open an investigation.

In 2022, another video showed a former Wagner contractor being beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was repatriated. Despite public outrage and calls for an investigation, the Kremlin turned a blind eye.

What role does Wagner play in Ukraine?

Wagner took one increasingly visible role During the war, regular Russian troops suffered severe attrition and lost territories to humiliating setbacks.

Prigozhin traveled to Russian prisons to recruit fighters and promised them pardons if they survived six months of combat with Wagner.

In the May interview, he said he had recruited 50,000 convicts, about 10,000 of whom were killed at Bakhmut; a similar number of his own fighters have died there.

He said that “at the best of times” he had 50,000 men at his disposal, with about 35,000 at the front at any one time. He did not say whether those figures included convicts.

According to US estimates, Wagner fought in Ukraine with about 50,000 troops, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts. A US official says almost half of the 20,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine since December were Wagner’s troops in Bakhmut.

The US estimates that Wagner spends about $100 million a month on the fight. In December, Washington accused North Korea of ​​supplying weapons, including rockets and missiles, to the Russian company in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Both Wagner and North Korea denied the reports.

How did Prigozhin criticize the Russian military?

If the US accusation is true, Wagner’s quest for North Korean weapons could stem from the longstanding dispute with Russian military leaders that dates back to the company’s founding.

Prigozhin claimed full responsibility for the capture of the salt-mining town of Soledar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region in January, accusing the Russian Defense Ministry of trying to steal Wagner’s fame. He has repeatedly complained that the Russian military did not provide Wagner with sufficient ammunition to capture Bakhmut and threatened to withdraw his men.

Troops believed to be Wagner contractors in Ukraine recorded video of them hurling curses and accusations at the Russian military chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, that he had failed to provide ammunition.

Prigozhin also commended Shoigu for his scathing criticism and accused Russian military leaders of incompetence. His frequent complaints are unprecedented in Russia’s tightly controlled political system, where only Putin could voice such criticism.

John kirbyA spokesman for the White House National Security Council said last month that Prigozhin’s critical remarks about the war “could be some sort of morbid way that he claims credit for what they accomplished at Bakhmut, but is also publicly trying to bring that about.” Ministry of Defense even more embarrassed that Wagner paid for this with blood and money and not with the Russian military.”

Once a shadowy figure, Prigozhin has increasingly raised his public profile, bragging about Wagner’s supposed victories almost daily, sneering at his enemies and complaining about the military leadership.

When Prigozhin was recently asked about a media comparison to Grigory Rasputin, a mystic who gained fatal influence over Russia’s last tsar by claiming he had the power to cure his son’s hemophilia, Prigozhin retorted sharply: “I don’t hold blood up, but I shed blood.” the enemies of our fatherland.”