Hackers succeed in cracking Wagner’s personal agenda: agreements show how deeply he has infiltrated Putin’s circle of trust | War Ukraine and Russia

The anonymous hackers – who call themselves “Bogatyri” (the Russian equivalent of medieval knights) – got their hands on a series of internal files belonging to the Wagner group earlier this year. They shared it with news sites ‘Die Welt’, ‘Insider’ and ‘Politico’, as well as with the research agency ‘The Dossier Center’ of the fled Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

One of the cracked files turned out to contain the personal agenda of Yevgeny Prigozhin. With the exception of a few periods – the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the US presidential election in 2020 – it provides a detailed picture of the daily life of the Wagner boss, from his appointments with his personal doctor to the times when he takes his nutritional supplements. In addition, it also contains a whole series of meetings and telephone calls with Russian generals and Putin’s top employees.

Prigozhin got to know Putin in Saint Petersburg. The president occasionally came to eat in one of the restaurants he owned there at the time. Although they were photographed together several times, it’s not clear how close they were. Putin’s name appears only twice in Prigozhin’s agenda, and it is not about face-to-face meetings. The first time for an event at a Russian army base in September 2015 and the second time for a press conference held by Putin in a shopping center in Moscow in June 2018.

There are some appointments that mention the word “president”. These include a New Year’s party and two that have the name of countries: Germany and Korea. That may be code for a specific place.

That Prigozhin did have direct access to Putin’s inner circle is evidenced by 75 appointments he planned with Ruslan Tsalikov (deputy defense minister since 2012) and 73 appointments he had with Anton Vaino (head of Russia’s presidential administration since 2016).

There are also 36 appointments with someone described as “the Chief of the General Staff”. That is almost certainly about General Valeri Gerasimov, the commander of the Russian troops in Ukraine. Together with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, he became one of Prigozhin’s archenemies.

In addition, the name of Aleksey Dyumin, a former Putin bodyguard who is now governor of the Tula region in western Russia, also appears 33 times. Dyumin is one of Putin’s stalwarts who came in a bad light after Prigozhin’s rebellion at the end of last month. Russian media speculated during the ‘March for Justice’ that Dyumin might succeed Shoigu.

The same story with General Sergei Surovikin, an ally of Prigozhin who disappeared from the scene after the uprising of the Wagner group. The Wagner boss met him eleven times.

Dmitry Medvedev – president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 – is on the agenda fourteen times, but some of the meetings are said to have been with his associates.

Putin’s personal agenda ends in November 2021. After that, there is only one appointment, which was probably used earlier: for a “helicopter license” in April 2022.

The document therefore provides no insight into what Prigozhin did in the period around the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022. In the months that followed, however, he increasingly came out of the shadows, culminating in the siege and capture of the city of Bachmut. . There he lost tens of thousands of men.