businessman close to Putin admits “interference”

“We have interfered, we are doing it and we will continue to do so”, assured this man, close to power.

A Russian businessman close to the Kremlin, Yevgeny Prigojine, admitted “interference” in the US elections on Monday, on the eve of a major mid-term poll in the United States where Moscow has been accused of meddling for years.

“We interfered … surgically”

“We interfered, we do it and we will continue to do it. Carefully, precisely, surgically, in our own unique way,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a social media post from her company Concord.

These remarks were the answer to a question about the allegations of Russian meddling in the mid-term elections to be held this Tuesday in the United States, an election closely followed by Moscow in the context of the crisis that pits it against Washington since the beginning of its offensive in the United States. Ukraine.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is facing US sanctions for her alleged role in interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.

“Troll fever”

He is accused in particular of having created a “farm of trolls”, fake profiles that operate on social networks in an attempt to influence voters, for example by denigrating candidates or transmitting false information.

The once discreet entrepreneur is establishing himself more and more as a public figure in Russia, multiplying the presences in support of the Moscow offensive in Ukraine. At the end of September, Evguéni Prigojine specifically acknowledged that he founded the paramilitary group Wagner in 2014 to fight in Ukraine, admitting his presence in particular in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

This paramilitary group has been suspected for years of carrying out basic Kremlin work in the shadows in various theaters of operations, which Moscow and Evgeny Prigojine have always denied.

Reputed to be close to Vladimir Putin, the businessman was for a time one of the Kremlin’s kitchen suppliers, which earned him the nickname “Putin’s cook”.