Facts: The Wagner Group and Yevgeny Prigozhin
The Wagner group is a private mercenary company that has long operated with unofficial connections to the Russian state leadership.
Its top leader and main financier is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former restaurateur from St. Petersburg and now oligarch, who with his close ties to Vladimir Putin and his own business empire has acted in the interests of the Kremlin in various ways.
Under Prigozhin’s corporate umbrella, in addition to the private army, there are also catering operations and a media group that runs everything from local newspapers to news and propaganda sites.
Even well-known so-called troll factories are linked to Prigozhin’s business empire.
A conflict has been going on during the Ukraine war between Prigozhin and Russia’s military leadership – Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
On June 23, Prigozhin announced that he would begin an armed march through Russia toward Moscow with 25,000 troops. The next day, Wagner forces entered and took over the city of Rostov-on-Don, whereupon they continued to roll north in a column that is said to have come as close as 20 miles from Moscow before the uprising was suddenly called off.
A settlement was reached with Belarus Russia-allied leader Aleksandr Lukashenko at the negotiating table. They agreed that Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner soldiers involved would receive impunity and security guarantees, as well as free passage to Belarus, which Russian President Vladimir Putin was said to have promised. What the settlement entails exactly – or what the leaders have quietly worked out – is not known.
As Wagner’s private army leader Yevgeny Prigozhin staged his coup attempt and his mercenaries marched on Moscow on June 24, masked men raided his headquarters in St. Petersburg. The men came from the Russian security service FSB.
— They stormed in, smashed the entrance door. It felt like they were going to blow up a brothel and not a workplace for patriotic journalists, one of the journalists on Prigozhin’s propaganda site Ria Fan tells the newspaper The Guardian.
AP/TT”Violence and lies”
The headquarters was the heart of Prigozhin’s Patriot media empire, a media conglomerate that includes local newspapers as well as Internet-based debate and news and propaganda sites with a Putin-loyal nationalist agenda.
Since then, several of Progozjin’s newspapers and news sites have been shut down, including the influential Ria Fan. According to the news agency AFP, it is not possible to enter Ria Fan’s site in Russia. To The Guardian, one of Ria Fan’s producers, Andrej Karpov, says that all employees were dismissed on June 30.
— The editor-in-chief wrote to everyone that Ria Fan has closed, says Karpov.
According to Per Enerud, Russia expert and author of a book on Russian disinformation, Pregozhin through his media group has had great influence in Russian society.
— Pregozhin is an oligarch whose activities have been based on violence and lies. Wagner was the violence part and the media empire was the lie part, says Enerud.
AP/TTS smear campaign
Prigozhin and his propaganda channels have been able to criticize Putin from a nationalist right. The criticism has, among other things, been that Putin should be more forceful, not pander and not listen to sneaky liberal advisers and economists. He is one of the few in Russia who has been allowed to call the war of aggression against Ukraine a war and not “a military special operation” which is the official Russian designation. His aggressive tone has been allowed to pass as long as he has not attacked Putin’s position of power.
But now it’s different tones. The Kremlin appears to have taken over Prigozhin’s media group and, according to Enerud, an intensive smear campaign against Prigozhin by the Russian state is now underway.
— They try to make him appear ridiculous, a tit. They should not only deprive him of his assets but also of his reputation, says Enerud.
The troll turns
There are also signs that the authorities have taken control of the Internet Research Agency, IRA, a notorious troll factory that spreads propaganda and disinformation, both inside and outside of Russia. Among other things, according to the US Department of Justice, the IRA was involved in attempts to influence the US election in 2016 when Trump was elected president.
— The IRA has long been an instrument of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns, while it has been said that it does not belong to the Kremlin.
Now it seems that the trolls who previously praised and supported Prigozhin on social media have turned their backs on him and are instead slandering him.