The relationship between the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, began under suspicious circumstances; its end is equally murky.
It was a symbiotic relationship born in the gray zone where the state security services mix with the criminal world. It was a relationship that was going to end badly.
In just a few decades, Wagner became one of the most influential structures in Russia, and some believed that the very survival of the Putin regime became dependent on Prigozhin’s successes in the Ukrainian war.
Now it appears that the Kremlin wants to eliminate all competition for political influence.
Criminals, the KGB and the sordid scene of Saint Petersburg
It was in the early 1990s that Yevgeny Prigozhin met Vladimir Putin.
We do not know the exact circumstances of their first meeting, but it is believed that they met when one was a newly released prisoner and the other had recently returned from a Soviet security service, KGB, mission in East Germany and was looking for a way to safety. policy.
The backdrop was the harsh political realities of Russia in the 1990s.
When the Soviet Union collapsed chaotically in 1991, for a time the criminal world took the upper hand and wielded significant power.
Historically, the Soviet Union’s security services tended to cut deals and recruit criminals to report and assist in various tasks. And the criminals were happy to get rich through that collaboration.
Yevgeny Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin hail from Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and, for many, its cultural capital, home to the Hermitage art museum and the Imperial Winter Palace.
The city is also known as the “criminal capital of Russia”, home to several powerful criminal gangs and petty thieves.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was no exception. He received a suspended sentence for larceny in the late 1970s.
In 1981 he was convicted again, this time for robbery, and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The circumstances of the brutal crime were described as follows: he and two of his accomplices attacked a woman on a street, grabbing her by the neck and trying to strangle her.
Then they took off her winter boots and her earrings and fled.
Wagner’s future boss was released from prison in 1990, at a very different time than when his sentence began.
In place of former Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev, reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, Perestroika was underway, and the Berlin Wall had fallen.
In the mid-1990s, Prigozhin opened a restaurant in St. Petersburg called “The Old Customs”, frequented by local crime bosses, as well as St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
Vladimir Putin, then 40 years old, worked as Sobchak’s assistant.
From there, the path Prigozhin followed went up. He opened a chain of restaurants in Saint Petersburg, visited by local and foreign clients, including politicians.
There is a photograph from 2002 showing Prigozhin serving dinner to Vladimir Putin and then US President George Bush. The nickname “Putin’s chef” is believed to have originated around this time.
It was crucial for a man like Putin, with his KGB past and a suspicious mind, to have a personal chef to ensure that his food was safe to eat.
From chef to troll to mercenary
In the early 2000s, Putin came to the Kremlin, and Russia’s security services slowly began to regain control.
From the middle of that decade, Prigozhin began to carry out various tasks of the Kremlin, in particular those that were outside the scope of the security services.
He created a media empire focused on spreading disinformation both within Russia and abroad.
The stories that this media machine invented were often so fantastic that no state propaganda apparatus would dare spread them.
As social networks developed and gained influence, Prigozhin set up his “troll factory.”
Many commentators believed that the main strength of this fabric was to spread the idea among Russians that there was no such thing as truth and that there was no point in seeking it.
After the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution in 2013-2014 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the first reports about the private military company Wagner emerged.
The Wagner Group supported pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
At that time, the Kremlin did not dare to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and instead launched a military operation in Syria.
Many analysts believe that Russia’s involvement in Syria was aimed at diverting attention from the war in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine.
It was then that we first heard of Dimitri Utkin, a close associate of Prigozhin, who became the commander of the Wagner Group and was known for his far-right views, but also for his cruelty and lack of mercy.
Despite Prigozhin himself and his Wagner mercenaries becoming increasingly important to Putin’s authority, the Russian government continued to claim until spring 2022 that the state had no connection to the leader of the paramilitary group.
Mercenary organizations are prohibited by Russian law.
Official Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov repeatedly denied any knowledge of Wagner’s operations. He said the Kremlin knew of “a certain private businessman” who might be involved.
At the same time, it was clear to everyone that military operations in Ukraine and Syria, where Wagner was also covertly involved, as well as in a number of African countries, simply could not be carried out without the consent and approval of the highest levels of the authorities. russian.
In the summer of 2022, news began to appear in the Russian media that an armed group of the St. Petersburg businessman was fighting in Ukraine.
Within weeks, Prigozhin was touring Russian prisons, recruiting prisoners for the war effort.
That fall, the official Kremlin spokesman would describe Prigozhin as a man “whose heart aches from what is happening” and who is “making a great contribution”.
In November 2022, Prigozhin opened a “Wagner Center” in St. Petersburg, as his criticism of the Russian military and the Defense Ministry grew louder.
As Russian forces withdrew from much of southern and part of eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin’s criticism of the Defense Ministry reached its peak.
the rebellion
Wagner’s boss complained that the army command refused to acknowledge the contribution of mercenaries to the war effort.
He later openly accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov of “depriving” Wagner of ammunition when the group was fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
The Kremlin did not comment publicly on the escalation of the conflict.
At the beginning of June, the Ministry of Defense demanded that all private military groups, that is, mercenaries, join the State and sign contracts with the army. Prigozhin flatly refused this.
The situation reached a boiling point in the early hours of June 23 when Prigozhin accused the Russian army of attacking Wagner’s positions (there is no evidence that such attacks actually took place) and announced his “march of justice” with the goal of reaching Moscow.
Sources the BBC and other media spoke to described this as a sign of Prigozhin’s desperation and his attempt to draw President Putin’s attention to his conflict with the Russian military.
“He was worried about losing his autonomy,” a source familiar with Prigozhin told the BBC.
Wagner’s mercenaries shot down two military helicopters and a plane, as well as killing up to 15 Russian soldiers.
When Prigozhin resorted to these extreme measures, the Russian security service, the FSB, opened a criminal case against him, while President Putin described him as a traitor (although he did not mention him by name) who “stuck a knife in the back of the country” and promised to go after all the mutineers.
The situation was suddenly resolved on the evening of June 24, when Prigozhin stopped the march of his mercenaries.
On June 29, President Putin met with Prigozhin and other Wagner commanders. Later, the president said that he convinced the mercenaries to serve under one of the commanders of the Russian army.
Prigozhin denied that he had ever agreed to serve under the Defense Ministry.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, Vladimir Putin unexpectedly revealed that Wagner had always been sponsored by the Russian state, despite the Kremlin denying any connection to the mercenaries for years.
In late July there were reports that Prigozhin was seen at the Russia-Africa summit in Saint Petersburg.
Many observers surmised that given Wagner’s previous history of involvement in various African countries, Prigozhin would likely focus his activities on that continent.
Two days before the fatal event in the Tver region, a video allegedly taken in the West African nation of Mali surfaced online.
It showed Prigozhin wearing a hat, standing in a field and saying: “Here we are, putting the fear of God on ISIS, al Qaeda and other bandits.”
This remains his last known public statement.
Prigozhin’s story seems to follow a trajectory familiar from other examples in Russian history: when the executors of the Kremlin’s cruelest policies are subsequently punished and destroyed.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cd1g2x9xw97o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-26 03:30:05
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