Yevgeny Prigozhin obituary: From ‘Putin’s chef’ to thorn in his side

Born June 1st, 1961

Died August 23rd, 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has died aged 62 in a plane crash, was a multimillionaire militia commander who sparked the biggest crisis in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power. Once a close friend and confidant of Putin, he led an armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June after severely criticising the invasion of Ukraine as being unnecessary and based on false premises.

At the head of thousands of battle-hardened mercenary soldiers, known as the Wagner group, he took control of Russia’s southern military headquarters, demanded the resignation of the defence minister and the chief of staff and sent a column of troops and tanks up the main highway towards Moscow. The column was attacked by helicopters loyal to Putin and several were shot down.

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Within hours a deal was struck, and Prigozhin called off his mutiny in the name of avoiding more bloodshed that could have led to civil war. His men were allowed to return to their camps in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, while he was promised immunity from prosecution and safe passage to exile in Belarus. Putin said the Wagner forces were being spared punishment because of their heroic role in the fighting in Ukraine.

Prigozhin had previously avoided criticising Putin, whom he first got to know when they were young men in St Petersburg. There was speculation that Putin even supported and encouraged Prigozhin’s criticisms of Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff.

But on June 23rd, Prigozhin broke his silence on Putin. In a video message he rejected Putin’s argument that Russia’s invasion in February 2022 was necessary to forestall a Ukrainian attack on the eastern region of Donbas.

Prigozhin’s attack on the basis of Kremlin strategy was extraordinary; civilians get prison sentences of 15 years for questioning the reasons for invading Ukraine.

[ ‘Closed’ funeral for Wagner mercenary boss Prigozhin after unexplained plane crash ]

Putin’s style was to play “divide and rule” with his senior staff, and the Russian president initially took no action to end the feud between Prigozhin and Shoigu. In fact, Shoigu had seemed to be winning. On June 14th, Putin had announced that Wagner forces were to be put under the control of the defence ministry. With his mutiny, Prigozhin apparently hoped to forestall Wagner’s merger with the regular army and trigger Putin into replacing Shoigu. He also hoped to persuade other generals to come out against Shoigu, to no avail.

Like Putin, Prigozhin was born in St Petersburg. His mother, Violetta, worked in a local hospital. Prigozhin told reporters his father, Viktor, an engineer, had died when he was young. His stepfather, Samuil Zharkoi, was a ski instructor at a sports-oriented boarding school, which Yevgeny attended. When he graduated in 1977, at the age of 16, young Yevgeny, known as Zhenya, hoped to be a professional cross-country skier.

In 1979 he was caught stealing and given a suspended sentence; two years later he was caught burgling flats in affluent areas and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1990.

As Russia was taking its first steps on the road to unregulated capitalism, Prigozhin sold hotdogs in a local street market. From this humble start he became involved in the grocery business and was appointed by a schoolmate to be managing director of St Petersburg’s first chain of supermarkets. He also entered the lucrative gambling business and became acquainted with Putin, then head of the supervisory board for casinos in the city.

By 2002 Prigozhin was a multimillionaire entrepreneur, with investments in restaurants, supermarkets and construction. During US president George W Bush’s visit to Russia that year, Putin invited his American guest to dine in a luxury floating restaurant that Prigozhin owned on the river Neva. Prigozhin was filmed personally serving both presidents and their wives, earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef”.

But Prigozhin was more than that. He was a member of the Kremlin’s circle of useful oligarchs; the recipient of hundreds of millions of roubles in government contracts for providing school meals and in 2012 was given a contract to supply meals to the Russian military.

In 2014 he founded the Wagner group, a private army of mercenaries. The Wagner forces fought in the Russian campaign to seize Ukrainian territory in the eastern Donbas region. This was followed by combat in Syria and involvement in civil wars in Mali, the Central African Republic, Libya and several other African countries. Putin valued Wagner’s activities since they could pursue Russia’s international interests while ostensibly being independent of Kremlin control.

In 2013 Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” that used hundreds of young Russians to plant pro-Kremlin messages on social media outlets around the world. During the 2016 US presidential election they supported Donald Trump and denigrated Hillary Clinton. In 2018 a US grand jury indicted the Internet Research Agency for election meddling, and the US Treasury Department subsequently put sanctions on Prigozhin.

Prigozhin is survived by his wife, Lyubov, a businesswoman, and their two daughters, Polina and Veronika, and son, Pavel.