The announcement of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death was also made by Rossija 24 TV but the disappearance of Wagner’s leader, at least for his mercenaries, is still a mystery. Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin died in today’s plane crash in the Tver region of Russia. Indeed, no. The Wagner-affiliated Telegram Gray channel Zone does not confirm the deaths of the two leaders. Nor that Prigozhin and Utkin actually got on the plane that crashed. Indeed, as reported by the Fontanka site, there is a second Embraer 600 aircraft, also connected to Group leader Wagner Prigozhin, which successfully landed today at Ostafievo airport, near Moscow, in Russia. But he would have been shot down by Russian flak instead.
He was considered one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, until the attempted mutiny on 24 June. Accused of treason by the tsar and then at least apparently pardoned, Yevgeny Prigozhin with his Wagner company had been ‘exiled’ to Belarus, only to reappear on video only a few days ago from an unspecified African country, exalting his group of mercenaries that “makes Russia even greater on all continents.” Prigozhin was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1961. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbery and assault in 1981. After his release, he set up a restaurant business in St. Petersburg in the 1990s: this is how he met Putin, then deputy mayor of the city. He began modestly, selling hot dogs with mustard that he prepared in the kitchen of his family apartment, then opened the Old Customs House, a famous floating restaurant in St. Petersburg, and eventually landed lucrative contracts with the Russian government, which earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef”. He later branched out into other areas, including the media and an infamous internet ‘troll factory’ that led to his indictment in the US for meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But Prigozhin is best known for being the founder of the infamous company paramilitary Wagner, first seen in action in eastern Ukraine soon after the breakout of the separatist conflict in April 2014, in the weeks following the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
Prigozhin’s company is named Wagner after its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian Army’s special forces. She soon gained a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness. Wagner’s personnel have also been deployed to Syria, where Russia supported the government of President Bashar Assad in the civil war. In Libya they fought alongside the forces of Commander Khalifa Hifter. The group also operated in the Central African Republic and Mali. Prigozhin reportedly used Wagner’s deployment in Syria and African countries to secure sizable mining contracts. Some Russian media have alleged 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. Western countries and UN experts have accused the Wagner mercenaries of human rights abuses across Africa. In 2021, the European Union accused the group of “serious human rights violations, including torture and executions and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings” and of carrying out “destabilizing activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Wagner has assumed an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine as Russian regular troops have suffered heavy losses in men, weapons and territory. Prigozhin visited Russian prisons to recruit fighters, promising pardons if they survived six months of front-line service with Wagner. He said he has 50,000 men at his disposal “at the best of times”, with around 35,000 on the front lines at any one time. The US estimated that Wagner had about 50,000 members in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 inmates; nearly half of the 20,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine since December would be Wagner troops in Bakhmut. Prigozhin claimed in January that he had captured the mining town of Soledar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and accused Russia’s defense ministry of trying to steal credit from Wagner. He repeatedly attacked the Russian army for failing to supply Wagner with enough ammunition to capture Bakhmut and threatened to withdraw his men from him. He fiercely criticized the Chief of Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, and Defense Minister Sergej Shoigu, an unprecedented fact for the Russian political system, in which only Putin has such power. Prigozhin has increasingly raised the bar and his public profile, bragging almost daily about Wagner’s supposed victories, mocking his enemies and military leaders. Up to the point of criticizing Putin, and attempting a ‘march on Moscow’ on June 24th. The tsar’s reaction was harsh, who accused him of treason, and then allowed Wagner to take refuge in Belarus. Christo Grozev of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, known for his scoops on plots linked to the Kremlin, echoes the prediction of Christo Grozev on the fate of ‘Putin’s cook’, according to which Prigozhin would be dead or there would be a second coup in Russia within six months.
