“It’s the detainees or your children”, stings Evgueni Prigojine, when a journalist asks him in mid-September why the Wagner mercenary group is recruiting new fighters in the Russian penal colonies. The response is typical of the individual: aggressive, almost threatening, assuming without qualms an initiative that is nevertheless perfectly illegal. More surprisingly, he no longer even bothers to deny, as in the past, his links with the private military company. A few days later, he goes even further by openly acknowledging having founded Wagner in May 2014, at the time of the Russian intervention in the Donbass. In a few weeks, Yevgueni Prigojine emerged from the shadows to fully endorse his status as the centerpiece and rising star of the Putin system.
This man with a shaved head and worrying eyes seems to be able to do anything. “There are only two people who can get you out of here, it’s Allah and God, in a box,” he told a group of inmates in a prison yard, without thinking. worry about the presence of a camera. “I get you out alive. But I don’t always bring you back alive.” The revenge must be tasty for the man who, in Soviet times, had spent nine years behind bars for theft, banditry and “incitement of minors to prostitution”, before going into business in the 1990s, until to become the owner of several luxury restaurants.
The Two Sides of the Prigozhin Empire
In 2001, Vladimir Putin had lunch in one of them during a trip by Jacques Chirac to Russia. Prigojine serves them in person and is noticed by the Russian president by his eagerness. This is the beginning of his ascent. Soon, his collective catering company, Concord Catering, was receiving hundreds of millions of rubles from public orders to supply meals for schools and ministries, then for the entire Russian army. Nicknamed “Putin’s cook”, Prigojine becomes a billionaire. But also the target of investigations by opponent Alexeï Navalny, who accuses him of corruption in videos posted on YouTube. He will respond with libel suits, threatening all Russian journalists and media who are a little too curious.
Businessman Yevgeny Prigojine (right) and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg (Russia), September 20, 2010
afp.com/Alexey DRUZHININ
Prigojine, at the time, wants to stay in the background. But the new activities entrusted to him by the Kremlin will gradually draw him towards the light. The world first heard of him in 2017, after Donald Trump was elected to the White House. In the wake of accusations of interference against Moscow, we discover his company, the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm”, which has cut its teeth for years discrediting opponents of Vladimir Putin. Evgueni Prigojine will always deny being linked to interference in the American ballot… until last November 7, when he declared shamelessly about the US elections: “We interfered, we continue to interfere and we will continue to do so. TO DO.” Disinformation actions and mercenary interventions are the two faces of the Prigojine empire, which has become the armed wing of the State, where Russia does not want to be officially present: from the Central African Republic to Syria via Libya and the Ukrainian Donbass.
The invasion of Ukraine last February brought about a change of scale. Engaged from the beginning of the conflict, “the Wagner orchestra”, as its troops nicknamed it, launched an assault on Bakhmout, one of the best defended sectors of the Ukrainian eastern front. Russian mercenaries have been trying for months to advance in this area (one of the few where Moscow’s forces have not retreated since the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensives in mid-September).
Wagner’s men would today be between 5 and 10,000 on the Ukrainian front, estimates historian Nikolai Mitrokhine. They are equipped with their own tanks, artillery, helicopters and even some planes… in short, a real private army. At its head, Evgueni Prigojine, who no longer goes out without his three medals – Hero of the Russian Federation, Hero of the People’s Republic of Donetsk and Lugansk -, seems to be taking a liking to his new public status. He found his style: a brutal word that does not hesitate to criticize the shortcomings of the Russian high command. “They have no idea what is happening on the ground”; “we should send all these shabby bare feet to the front with an assault rifle”, he asserts in October. He even allows himself to pay tribute to the Ukrainian opponent: “Slavs, Soviet guys like us, brave opponents.”
The 61-year-old businessman has no account in his name on social networks. But his word is omnipresent there, relayed by a nebula of media belonging to him, and above all by hundreds of accounts on Russian social networks, more or less directly linked to him, which portray him as the only competent military commander, distribute good and bad points to Russian generals and ministers and demand the heads of those they deem “incapable”.
“A politician with a private army”
This media machine brought him immense popularity in ultranationalist circles. “He does it because Putin lets him,” considers a well-informed source behind the scenes of power in Moscow. “And he can afford it thanks to the services he renders on the Ukrainian front. In doing so, he changes his register: he becomes a real politician… a politician with a private army.”
“As soon as he gets a hit, he goes to the next step, he raises the bet again, completes Russian political scientist Andrey Pertsev in the independent media Meduza. It is not clear what he wants to achieve at the end of the season. account, but what is certain is that he loves glory. What is his ambition? Simply to obtain more money for Wagner and himself… or to finally be admitted to the club of the greats? Mystery.
“The elites will never rally around him”
The former cook is currently not invited into the first circle of Vladimir Putin, of which he remains the executor more than the friend. Several well-informed sources confirm this: in these spheres dominated by siloviki, men from the army, the police or the secret services, the practices of Prigojine irritate. “Many are annoyed to see him parading around the penal colonies and behaving there like the king of the area,” said one of them. His vocabulary mixed with prison slang, his intonations, his way of being… everything in him evokes the codes of organized crime.” Having a more institutional position in the Putinian galaxy would be a way for Prigojine to secure a situation that he knows precarious.
Beyond that, there is the question of his aims for the post-Putin era. “He cannot claim power: the elites will never gather around him, considers a source. On the other hand, he could be a weighty ally for one of the candidates for the succession, in whose service he would put his army , its popularity and its media, such as former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev or the leader of the presidential party Andrei Tourchak.” He could thus tip the balance in his favor and be rewarded for it… or, in case of disgrace, end up in a dungeon. Like the world of organized crime, that of siloviki in power is ruthless.