Yevgeny Prigozhin

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (1 June 1961 – 23 August 2023) was a Russian mercenary leader, rebel commander, and oligarch. He led the Wagner Group, a private military company, and was a close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin until launching a rebellion in June 2023. Prigozhin was sometimes referred to as "Putin's chef" because he owned restaurants and catering businesses that provided services to the Kremlin. Once a convict in the Soviet Union, Prigozhin controlled a network of influential companies whose operations, according to a 2020 investigation, were "tightly integrated with Russia's Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU".

In 2014, Prigozhin reportedly founded the Wagner Group, which was used to support Russian separatist forces in Ukraine. Funded by the Russian state, it played a significant role in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and supported Russian interests in Syria and in Africa. In November 2022, Prigozhin acknowledged his companies' interference in United States elections. In February 2023, he confirmed that he was the founder and long-time manager of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company running online propaganda and disinformation campaigns.

Prigozhin's companies and associates, and formerly Prigozhin himself, are subject to economic sanctions and criminal charges in the United States and the United Kingdom. In October 2020, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions against Prigozhin for his financing of the Wagner Group's activities in Libya. In April 2022, the EU imposed further sanctions on him for his role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The FBI offered a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to Prigozhin's arrest.

Prigozhin openly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for corruption and mishandling the war against Ukraine. Eventually, he said the reasons they gave for invading were lies. On 23 June 2023, he launched a rebellion against the Russian military leadership. Wagner forces captured Rostov-on-Don and advanced toward Moscow. The rebellion was called off the following day, and the criminal charges against Prigozhin were dropped after he agreed to relocate his forces to Belarus. On 23 August 2023, exactly two months after the rebellion, Prigozhin was killed along with nine other people when a business jet crashed in Tver Oblast, north of Moscow. The Wall Street Journal cited sources within the US government as saying that the crash was likely caused by a bomb on board or "some other form of sabotage". Since then, researchers and other analysts have reached the conclusion that an on-board bomb or explosive likely downed the plane.

Early life and education

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was born an only child on 1 June 1961 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). His mother, Violetta Kirovna Prigozhina, was a hospital nurse. His father, Viktor Yevgenyevich Prigozhin, was a mining engineer who died when Yevgeny was nine. His grandfather, Yevgeny Ilyich Prigozhin, was a captain in the Red Army during World War II, who fought in the Battles of Rzhev and received a medal "For Courage". Prigozhin sponsored the 2020 war film Rzhev, based on a 1991 novel by Vyacheslav Kondratyev that mentions his grandfather.

His father and stepfather are believed to be of Jewish descent. Prigozhin's great-uncle was Soviet scientist Yefim Ilyich Prigozhin. He settled with Yefim for several years during his childhood in the Ukrainian city of Zhovti Vody, where he worked in an open-pit uranium mine. His stepfather, Samuil Fridmanovich Zharkoi, was a ski instructor and introduced Prigozhin to cross-country skiing. Aspiring to be a professional skier, he graduated from Leningrad Sports Boarding School No. 62 in 1977. However, he abandoned his sports career after an injury. He later worked as a fitness trainer at a children's sports school.

Criminal history and imprisonment

In 1979, 18-year-old Prigozhin was caught stealing and was given a suspended sentence of two years and six months in prison. He served his sentence working at a chemical plant in Veliky Novgorod. In 1980, he returned to Leningrad and joined a gang. He participated in a burglary spree in Leningrad, before being caught after choking a woman on the street during a robbery, with him and accomplices then stealing the woman's earrings and boots. In 1981, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment in a high-security penal colony for robbery, theft, fraud, and involving minors in criminal activity.

According to Prigozhin, he violated the terms of his solitary confinement "on a regular basis" until he was sent to general population in 1985, where he started to "read intensively" and worked as a lathe operator, tractor driver, and cabinet maker after receiving training at a vocational school. In 1988, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reduced his sentence to ten years on good behavior, noting that he had begun "corrective behavior". He was sent to a medium-security penal colony and was released in 1990. In total, Prigozhin spent nine years in detention. Immediately after his release, he started attending the Leningrad Chemical and Pharmaceutical Institute to get a pharmaceutical degree, but failed to complete his studies. Prigozhin would later flaunt his prison past to convince prisoners to join the Wagner Group.

Early career and rise to prominence

After his release from prison in 1990, Prigozhin began selling hot dogs alongside his mother and stepfather at the Apraksin Dvor open-air market in Leningrad. Soon, according to a New York Times interview with him, "the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them". From 1991 to 1997, Prigozhin was heavily involved in the grocery store business. He became 15% stakeholder and manager of Contrast, which was the first grocery store chain in Saint Petersburg and founded by his former classmate Boris Spektor.

Around the same time, Prigozhin became involved in the gambling business. Spektor and Igor Gorbenko brought Prigozhin on as CEO of Spectrum CJSC (Russian: ЗАО «Спектр»), which founded the first casinos in Saint Petersburg. This trio went on to create many other businesses together throughout the 1990s across various industries, including construction, marketing research, and foreign trade. Novaya Gazeta notes that this may be when Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin for the first time, as Putin had been chairman of the supervisory board for casinos and gambling since 1991.

In 1995, Prigozhin entered the restaurant business. When revenues of his other businesses began to fall, Prigozhin persuaded a director at Contrast, Kirill Ziminov, to open a restaurant with him. They opened Prigozhin's first restaurant: Old Customs House (Russian: Старая Таможня) in Saint Petersburg. In 1997, they founded a second restaurant, New Island, a floating restaurant that became one of the most fashionable dining spots in the city. Inspired by waterfront restaurants on the Seine in Paris, Prigozhin and Ziminov created the restaurant by spending US$400,000 to remodel a rusting boat on the Vyatka River. He said his patrons "wanted to see something new in their lives and were tired of just eating cutlets with vodka". Before Prigozhin decided to focus on upscale dining, one of his dining establishments initially featured a striptease show. Prigozhin was reportedly known to punish poor performance or misconduct of employees of his catering businesses with physical violence.

In 2001, Prigozhin personally served food to Vladimir Putin and French president Jacques Chirac when they dined at New Island. He hosted US president George W. Bush in 2002. In 2003, Putin celebrated his birthday at New Island. Over the course of the 2000s, Prigozhin grew closer to Vladimir Putin. By 2003, he left his business partners and established his own independent restaurants. Notably, one of Prigozhin's companies, Concord Catering, began winning numerous government contracts. He received hundreds of millions in government contracts for feeding school children and government workers. In 2012, he received a contract to supply meals to the Russian military worth US$1.2 billion over one year. Some of the profits from this contract are alleged to have been used to start and fund the Internet Research Agency.

In 2012, Prigozhin moved his family into a Saint Petersburg compound with a basketball court and a helicopter pad. By this point he owned a private jet and a 115-foot (35 m) yacht. Prigozhin was later linked to several aircraft, including two Cessna 182s as well as Embraer Legacy 600, British Aerospace 125, and Hawker 800XP jets. The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Prigozhin of corrupt business practices. In 2017, they estimated his illegal wealth to be worth more than one billion rubles. Alexei Navalny alleged that Prigozhin was linked to a company called Moskovsky Shkolnik (Moscow Schoolboy) that had supplied poor-quality food to Moscow schools, which had caused a 2019 dysentery outbreak. On 11 December 2018, a company claimed to be unaffiliated with Concord Catering called Msk LLC (Russian: ООО "Мск") was paid 2.5 million rubles for an annual "Heroes of the Fatherland Day" banquet held at the Kremlin. However, Msk LLC shares the same contact phone number with Concord. On 11 December 2019, the company received another 4.1 million rubles for another banquet. Prigozhin was declared the 2022 Corrupt Person of the Year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.