Inside story from Russia: How Prigozhin built up his empire and got close to Putin

Just a few days after Russia experienced a brief turmoil that saw fighters of the Wagner group marching towards Moscow, the mercenary group’s name was removed from the glossy facade of its headquarters in Saint Petersburg. Some organisations associated with its now exiled chief Yevgeny Prigozhin are being shut down and contracts with some others are getting cancelled. The recruitment to Wagner has been put on hold in some of the 40-odd centres the company has opened up across Russia.

The immediate trigger behind Prigozhin’s downfall started early in the morning on June 24, when he released a video from Russia’s southern city of Rostov, stating that his fighters have taken control of the city. Rostov residents who wanted to leave found the train station really crowded and no tickets available. Many, however, ventured out on to the streets and even did photo sessions with Wagner fighters and their weaponry. By the time the bulk of the mercenaries started leaving Rostov some 12 hours later, following Prigozhin’s announcement that he ordered his troops back to the camps as he did not want “Russian blood to be shed”, many people could be seen cheering the fighters and sending them flying kisses.

Images of a Wagner tank stuck at the gates of the city circus, adjacent to the defence headquarters building, was probably one of the most shared pictures of the ‘coup’. It was symbolic, too, as hours after the attempted coup was called off, many Russians would start referring to it just as a “circus”. As an online commentator noted, “When was the last time Rostov saw tanks rolling in? During the Nazi occupation? There won’t be such a chance in the future,” he said, explaining why most people were excited at seeing Wagner’s troops.

Military experts have been guessing about Wagner’s size since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in February 2022. In March, Prigozhin said that he wanted to recruit 30,000 people by the end of May. As he announced his march on June 24, Prigozhin claimed that he had 25,000 fighters heading to Moscow. Independent estimates put that number at not more than 8,000.

LENINGRAD DAYS

Prigozhin was born in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, in 1961, nine years after Vladimir Putin. He was raised by his mother, who worked as a nurse in the hospital, and a stepfather (his biological father died when he was young). Prigozhin studied at the School of Olympic Reserve No. 62, where he trained for cross-country skiing. His stepfather, Samuil Zharko, was a skiing coach.

When he was 18, Prigozhin was arrested for theft and received a suspended sentence. He spent two years in a correctional labour colony in Novgorod―he was out after a year and returned to Leningrad, where he met his future accomplices. Two years later, Prigozhin was sentenced to 13 years in prison for multiple cases of robbery. Court documents show that Prigozhin and his associates stole anything valuable in the darkest times the Soviet Union has seen, from tape recorders to crystal sets. He was released after nine years in prison. Prigozhin has never commented on this criminal past and has sued several media outlets for publishing stories on the topic.

Prigozhin is married and has two children. Back in 2003, he published a book of children’s stories. The book cover carries the names of his children, Polina and Pavel, as authors. As he told a newspaper, the book was born out of improvised bedtime stories he used to tell his children, and then, when he got busy, recorded for them to listen. He even gifted the book to Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage Museum, and Vladimir Yakovlev, former governor of Saint Petersburg.

FROM HOT DOGS TO ROYAL CATERING

In 1990, Prigozhin set up a fast food stall at Apraksin market, one of the oldest and the shadiest in Saint Petersburg. “I was the first person in Leningrad to sell hot dogs. We would mix mustard at my apartment. I was making about a thousand dollars a month, and that was a lot of roubles back then. It was difficult for my mother to count it all,” Prigozhin said in an interview. He was then invited to work as a manager at a supermarket chain and soon grew into one of its co-owners.

Since 1992, together with Boris Spektor, Kirill Ziminov and Igor Gorbenko, an associate of influential entrepreneur and billionaire Mikhail Mirilashvili (all were unofficially linked to the Saint Petersburg administration under mayor Anatoly Sobchak and Putin), Prigozhin founded several companies and restaurants. Most of those establishments were placed under the umbrella of his holding
company, Concord Catering.

In 1996, Prigozhin opened a posh restaurant called “Staraya Tamozhnya” (Old Customs House) with Ziminov. The place soon became popular among city officials and would often host city government delegations and dignitaries. In the following years, Prigozhin opened several new flagship restaurants and even spent $4,50,000 to launch a floating restaurant called “Novyi Ostrov” (New Island) on an old steamboat. It was at this restaurant that Putin hosted, among other world leaders, president George W. Bush and his wife.

There are photos showing Prigozhin serving Putin, earning him the nickname ‘Putin’s chef’. “Putin saw how I turned a small kiosk into a business. He witnessed how I didn’t hesitate to personally serve crowned individuals when they came to visit me. We met when he came with Japanese Prime Minister Mori, and later with Bush,” Prigozhin said in one of his interviews.

From 2002 onwards, Prigozhin’s business expanded to Moscow and other regions and he had separated from his partners. Concord got the rights to provide catering services in schools and colleges in Moscow, worth billions of roubles. He continued winning such contracts despite a case of food poisoning among kindergarten students in 2019, and the company was ordered to pay compensation.

But school catering was a much smaller business compared with supplying food for the Russian military. Since 2013, more than 90 per cent of the defence ministry’s catering contracts have been allocated to companies associated with Prigozhin. Concord also received a contract to provide catering services to the Russian emergencies ministry. The company also won the contract for cleaning services in military barracks and educational institutions of the defence ministry and for building a military base in the Belgorod region and a military town in Omsk. After his failed rebellion, many of these contracts are being cancelled by the government.

Prigozhin also diversified into real estate and media. The media business served him well, especially the infamous “troll factory”―known outside as the Internet Research Agency―he launched in 2013. It started as an organisation that would hire people to post comments on social media. The FBI accused the agency of interfering with the 2016 American presidential elections, claiming that it undertook a massive “disinformation campaign” to influence the outcome of the election. Prigozhin is on the FBI’s wanted list and there is a reward of $2,50,000 for information leading to his arrest.

Prigozhin confirmed his links with the “troll factory” only this February. “I was never just a financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, and I ran it for a long time,” he told Der Spiegel, adding that he had set up the organisation “to protect the Russian information space from boorish, aggressive anti-Russian propaganda by the west”.

Over time, Prigozhin’s media assets grew, but he denied any connection with them, until he created the Patriot media holding in 2019, and took over officially as its head. The company has dozens of media outlets such as the RIA FAN (Federal News Agency) website as well as small opinion websites like Economics Today and Politics Today and several Telegram channels. On the day Prigozhin launched his mutiny, access to RIA FAN and several other outlets was blocked in Russia, while several platforms announced that they were “shutting down” or were “transforming” themselves. Which of these businesses helped Prigozhin fund Wagner was never clear. A few days after the mutiny, Putin said Wagner’s fighters were supplied and paid for by the defence ministry and the state budget.

PMCS ON THE RISE

The civil war that erupted in Donbass in 2014, then a rich mining and industrial region of Ukraine, after the regime change in Kyiv through the “Maidan revolution”, acted as a catalyst to the emergence of private military companies (PMCs) in Russia. Globally, PMCs provide services such as security, military training, consulting support and special operations. Such companies have been and remain illegal in Russia, even though some attempts were made in the past to reform relevant laws. After the Wagner fiasco, this might be out of the question.

Back in 2014, several Russian PMCs joined the hostilities in Donbass, and these included the RSB group, MAR, the ATK group, the Slavonic Corps Limited and the Wagner group. According to various media reports, Wagner emerged from the Slavonic Corps, which operated in Syria. The Slavonic Corps traces its origins to the Moran Security Group―registered in the British Virgin Islands―set up in 2008 to provide protection for commercial maritime vessels from pirates. In 2013, some of the Moran founders set up the Slavonic Corps to guard and secure energy infrastructure facilities in Syria on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad government.

The Slavonic Corps did not perform well in Syria and its members were soon repatriated to Moscow. At the Vnukovo airport, two chartered planes from Syria were received by investigators from the federal security services. Many of them later resurfaced in Ukraine as part of the pro-Russian militia that helped local rebel units in what they saw as fight for their independence.

Prior to that, in 2010, one of Africa’s top private military contractors, Eeben Barlow, who had served in the apartheid-era South African military, visited the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum to deliver a presentation on “new paths and opportunities for cooperation in the military sphere”. Apart from speaking at the forum, he also delivered a closed presentation before a delegation of the general staff of the Russian armed forces on PMCs.

Wagner made it to media headlines only in 2015, when the Saint Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka published a report detailing the recruitment process for volunteers who were ready to risk their lives for Assad. The emerging PMC neither disclosed its official name, nor was it listed in directories. But the name Wagner was already known among the insiders.

By then, the PMCs would attract many new recruits, including those who served in the military; some would come for attractive sums offered, others for “growth opportunities”, but many were also driven by ideology.

Wagner became prominent not just in Syria, but also in Africa, deploying its troops in Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Mozambique and Libya to provide military and security support to the leaders who share a difficult relationship with the west. Apart from being a profitable business for Wagner, it also helped expand Moscow’s influence across the continent.

For several years, Prigozhin denied any connection to the Wagner group and even sued media outlets like the Echo of Moscow and The Insider (both labelled as ‘foreign agents’ in Russia) for reporting that he headed the group. After being sanctioned by the European Union in 2022, Prigozhin even denied Wagner’s existence. In September 2022, a video surfaced on social media showing a man resembling Prigozhin recruiting inmates from one of the Russian penitentiaries to participate in a military operation in Ukraine on behalf of Wagner. Following this, Prigozhin admitted for the first time that Wagner belonged to Concord and was formed in 2014. Prigozhin also claimed that his son, Pavel, was serving in the conflict zone as a Wagner fighter.

Commenting on Wagner’s operations after the failed mutiny, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that contrary to western media reports about the concern in Africa about the possible withdrawal of the Wagner troops, there was “no panic” and that the countries which hired Russian private military contractors also enjoyed direct security cooperation with Moscow. For example, he said, the Central African Republic was hosting at the moment a hundred military instructors under an arrangement with the Russian defence ministry.

After Putin sent his troops to Ukraine last year, Wagner started recruiting convicts from across Russian prisons. Prigozhin claimed that he got 50,000 convicts, which was confirmed by Olga Romanova, director of a prisoner rights group called Russia Behind Bars. In February this year, Prigozhin said the recruitments had stopped, as reports emerged that the defence ministry had taken over the process. Last month, Putin confirmed that he had been signing “pardon decrees” for convicts returning from the frontline.

“The status of private military companies and volunteer detachments should be brought in line with established practice”, said Putin during a rare meeting with military correspondents at the Kremlin. He said all those who were fighting in the “zone of military operation” were defenders of the motherland. He revealed that he had asked the lawmakers and the defence ministry to bring mercenaries and their units under the military’s umbrella.

It is this particular reason that triggered Prigozhin’s revolt, according to experts and Prigozhin himself. On July 3, the exiled Wagner chief released his first public statement after leaving Russia, nearly a week after his private jet landed at a military airfield near Belarus capital Minsk. Prigozhin thanked Russians for their “support” and insisted that his march was aimed at “fighting the traitors” and for “mobilising” the Russian society. “I think we achieved a lot of that,” he said, promising that “our next victories on the frontline” will be seen in the coming days.

He did not give any information about his future plans or his whereabouts, or anything related to Wagner. According to Fontanka, on July 4, Prigozhin’s driver was handed over 10 billion roubles ($111 million) worth of cash and gold, which was seized from Prigozhin’s office in Saint Petersburg on the day of the mutiny. The police returned the cash and gold―estimated to weigh a couple of tonnes―to the driver while Prigozhin himself was reportedly in Moscow, attending “some meetings”, adding yet another twist to the Wagner saga.

―Ksenia Kondratieva is a journalist based in Saint Petersburg who has reported from the war zone in Ukraine.