Patriot Media, the media group chaired by Evgueni Prigozhin, is on its way to closure, as stated this weekend by the director of one of them, the RIA FAN news website. The closure of this corporation is a symptom of the collapse of the business empire of the head of the Wagner Group after his failed mutiny against the Kremlin that has led to his exodus in Belarus.
Although Prigozhin has a vast network of companies, ranging from mining to hospitality and produced 230 million euros in the years before the war, the truth is that three of its main pillars have already gone out of its control: the security, since his private army has been taken over by Moscow; the cyber warfare agency or ‘troll factory’ dedicated to spreading false news, which has also shut down, and the media group he had built to praise his own figure and that of the Russian government. Many of the videos released in recent months by the mercenary boss have emerged from the latter in which he boasted of the power of his army and the conquests in Ukraine in messages that were usually exaggerated or filled with falsehoods.
“I announce our decision to close and leave the information space of the country,” declared the director of RIA FAN, Yevgeny Zubarev, on Saturday night in a recording where he was glad to have “opposed those who wanted to destroy Russia.” In particular, he takes aim at Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned dissident repeatedly denigrated by RIAFAN. This website has been characterized above all by offering ultra-nationalist information and always positive coverage of the Wagner Group and the Kremlin.
But the idyll ended when his boss mutinied. The Executive led by Vladimir Putin has blocked the signal and diffusion of the rest of Prigozhin’s media, whom Russian public television accused this Sunday in one of its reference programs of having “lost his mind because of large sums of money” and of a feeling of impunity originated when his mercenaries operated in Syria and Africa, which was “reinforced” after the capture of Soledar and Bakhmut in Ukraine.
mercenary recruitment
Meanwhile, his private company of paramilitaries is disbanding at a forced march. Moscow has ensured that the Wagner Group will maintain its protection contracts for politicians and large companies in Africa and the East, but many of its mercenaries have already begun to join the Russian regular army, as explained yesterday by the president of the Duma, Viacheslav Volodin. According to him, a growing number of them have signed the contract offered by the Kremlin to “take up arms for Russia” on the Ukrainian front. Other sources indicate that a group of ex-members of Wagner would have gone to Belarus with the purpose of forming a new battalion under the command of Prigozhin, although there has been no news from the former oligarch since his plane landed in Minsk.
The assumption of the empire of ‘Putin’s chef’, as he was known in his moments of greatest glory, is not an easy task for the Russian government. For example, the food of a large part of the troops stationed not only in Russia, but also on the Ukrainian front depends on its enormous hotel and catering businesses, and it is unthinkable to stop this flow. It is paradoxical that while Prigozhin lashed out at the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, they paid him million-dollar bills for feeding the soldiers, according to the contracts signed before and during the invasion.
In fact, food, where the origin of the former mercenary boss’s fortune is located, is the base of the entire business pyramid. The companies that supply it, grouped in the Concord emporium, also supply the daily food for schools and children’s orphanages; a network in which the Kremlin must now take command in the absence of its executive president.
Prigozhin’s food business with the government began in 2006 and last year received an injection of some 900 million euros in the form of supply contracts for the front kitchens. In reality, this financing has served the oligarch for decades to boost the rest of his businesses and, especially, the hiring of mercenaries. Then it sold these “security services” to third countries and to the Kremlin itself, adding to an endless spiral of profit. It is assumed that many of the food prices were inflated and that some of the money went back to Russia in mercenary projects in Syria and other covert operations.
The accounting of the Wagner Group and the rest of the financial empire constitutes another challenge for the Administration. Cleaning doesn’t seem like your best tool. Experts believe that the rebellion has cost the exiled oligarch dearly. Many of his economic resources would remain in Russia due to Western sanctions, possibly in the hands of the Kremlin either directly or through the assumption of control of his companies. No one knows for sure how much Prigozhin’s fortune amounts to.
A piece of information is quite illuminating about the way of acting of the former paramilitary leader. After their failed revolt, security forces seized millions of rubles in cash hidden in several military trucks parked outside the Wagner Group headquarters in Saint Petersburg. The find proved that Prigozhin is allegedly a skilled manager of black cash. Perhaps those millions were destined to facilitate his escape or to pay collaborators in Moscow. But if an individual is capable of leaving a fortune in the back of a truck, various Western analysts believe that he will have been smart enough to have hidden part of his assets in opaque places. Just his personal safety must now be costing him dearly.
A little over a week after Prigozhin’s fall from grace, what may be extraordinarily worrying Moscow is what the governments of Mali and the Central African Republic will do with Wagner’s contracts. The company is deeply rooted in these countries. For example, his soldiers of fortune have been in charge of protecting the Central African president, Faustin Archange Touadéra, for five years. Regarding Mali, the rumor is that the Government pays them large amounts (it has been speculated with almost 10 million euros per month) for their services as a private army.
But the cornerstone of these links does not reside solely in the provision of security services to high political officials. It is also the open door for the mercenary company to operate at will in a strip of Africa whose mines and oil exploitations generate authentic rivers of wealth. Former Central African parliamentarian Jean-Pierre Mara has declared on the DW channel that Russia must ensure that nothing changes, since “it needs the gold of Central Africa and Mali to finance the war. But it is not clear if they will be the same actors. Or, perhaps, it would be better to talk about directors because some media believe that the Wagner Group keeps recruitment open in Russia, where it used to get volunteers in clubs and gyms, perhaps to keep the war machine oiled.
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