“[Video] Prigogin: How the Mercenary Leader Laundered His Identity and Rose to Political Power from a Swindling Past?”

delivery time2023-03-15 18:12

(Seoul=Yonhap News) ‘From a petty criminal ex-convict to Putin’s chef, then from a notorious mercenary chief to the political world?’

The US Daily New York Times (NYT) paid attention to the recent actions of Yevgeny Prigozhin (62), founder of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary company, on the 14th (local time).

Prigozhin, who was a petty criminal such as fraud and prostitution, was released from prison in the 1980s, opened a restaurant, and entered the catering business.

Dubbed ‘Putin’s chef’, he began to form a force in earnest when he founded the Wagner Group in 2014.

The Wagner group became the shadow of the Russian military and stained the forcible annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and the pro-Russian conflict in the Donbas region bloody.

The NYT analyzed that Prigozhin was aiming for ‘identity washing’ in the wake of the war of invasion of Ukraine that broke out in February last year.

As the Russian military unexpectedly struggled, some raised theories of incompetence targeting the military leaders, and Prigozhin took advantage of the gap to aim to advance into Russian politics.

He went to the front lines, directed mercenaries, and even targeted Russian generals and reprimanded them for lack of munitions.

Until recently, he operated mercenaries hidden in a veil, but this month, he publicly announced that he was recruiting mercenaries, and occasionally appeared on social media (SNS) to give speeches.

While Wagner’s group continues the bloody war of attrition in Bahmut, the frontline battleground, Prigogine seems to be turning his eyes to the mainland and trying to advance into politics.

In particular, in a video posted on Telegram on the 11th of this month, the Wagner group declared that it would “be transformed into an army with an ideology.” Let’s see it in the video.

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2023/03/15 18:12 Sent