Yevgeni Prigozhin, from prisoner to direct threat to Putin through a dog stand

2023-06-24 13:25:13

Yevgeni Prigozhin has gone from being one of Vladimir Putin’s most loyal men to challenging the Russian army. Prigozhin is a man of radical changes. Born in 1961 in former Leningradnow St. Petersburg, and at just 20 years old, in 1981, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for robbery, 9 of which he spent behind bars.

In 1990, he got out of jail and started selling hot dogs. In just five years, he managed to buy part of a supermarket chain and open his own restaurant. That first place would have allowed him to do two things: network contacts and develop new businesses, expanding his assets.

At the end of the 1990s, he made a key acquisition: the ship Isla Nueva, who sailed on the Neva River. It became a regular establishment of the Russian elite and the president, Vladimir Putin, began to bring his guests. In an interview collected by the BBC, Prigozhin stated his first meeting with Putin around April 2000, early in the president’s term, during a visit by then-Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.

At first, the relationship between the two was merely business: Prigozhin founded a catering company, Concord, which was hired by Putin to supply food to the Army and public schools in the country.

2014 would be the year in which the leader of the Wagner group would make a key turn in his career, entering the arms business with the founding of the mercenary group. A leaked document from the Russian law firm Capital Legal Services, which counted Prigozhin among its clients, details that the Wagner leader spent the 2000s in the hospitality business through Concord. Absent from this biography, collected by the portal ‘The Intercept’.

Sources from the newspaper ‘The Guardian’ point out that Wagner’s creation had a lot to do with the concept of “plausible deniability”, since, at that time, Russia had declared private military companies illegal. “I think it was Prigozhin who raised the issue directly with Putin. Perhaps Russian military intelligence was involved, but I suspect that this project was entirely in Prigozhin’s hands,” according to a former Russian Defense Ministry official, who was anonymous.

In any case, the ministry provided Prigozhin with land in Molkino, in southern Russia, the group’s first training base, which from there began to gain relevance. He began by intervening with the separatists in the Ukrainian region of Lugansk, and spread to Syria, Africa or the United States. This last country, he accused him of organizing groups of “trolls” on the internet to interfere in the 2016 US elections in favor of Donald Trump.

In recent years, group leader Wagner has gained considerable popularity on social media, where he has constantly announced the group’s operations against Ukrainian forces.

However, the turning point of Prigozhin and the beginning of the current crisis, arises from his rejection of the strategy proposed by the Russian Ministry of Defensewhom he accused of depriving his men of ammunition during campaigns as intense as the one waged in the city of Bakhmut.