Yevgeny Prigozhin, from “Putin’s cook” to leader of the rebellion against the Kremlin

taketonews

Last June he became the man of the hour in Russia. The one who took up arms against the Russian Government, Yevgeny Prigozhin, cannot be understood without the Wagner mercenary group. The mere existence of “musicians” – one of the nicknames of the group – cannot be imagined without Prigozhin himself, either. Nicknamed “Putin’s cook” for years, his military rebellion confirmed that he prefers to go his own way and defy the entire Russian establishment. He did not consummate the mutiny, but became an outlaw whose whereabouts have been unknown ever since.

For months before the coup, Prigozhin had drawn his sharp tongue to mercilessly criticize the Russian Ministry of Defense, especially Minister Sergei Shoigu himself, whom he repeatedly accused of insufficiently arming them and not knowing how to manage the front. On June 23, he crossed all the red lines by asking his arrestand in their official channels they called him “the tuvan idiot“. He himself led Wagner’s conquest of the city of Rostov-on-Don, in addition to making public that his men control military installations in the region, including an airfield.

Start in the kitchen

But his rise to fame was two decades ago, in the 2000s, when his restaurants were in charge of the usual catering of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. It was at this time that he earned the nickname “Putin’s cook”. So he had already been in the restaurant sector for some time, to which he ended up after having passed years in jail for crimes such as robberies or home assaults during the last years of the Soviet Union.

Concord Catering, one of his companies, became a regular for Russian government contracts in the new millennium. This would have guaranteed trust of russian leaders, in addition to a huge amount of money. He Anti-Corruption Fund of the Russian opponent Aleksé Navalni – an entity branded as a foreign agent by the Russian Government – ​​estimated that Prigozhin has a patrimony of more than 1,000 million euros.

Another of his past achievements was the creation of “troll farms“, the most prominent of which is the Internet Research Agency (IRA). These are organized groups of people who seek spread propaganda and attack critics, usually to influence public opinion. Far from denying their link, last February proudly wore who was one of the creators of this organization. “I was never just the capitalist partner of the IRA. I invented it, created it and directed it for a long time“, he assured on his Telegram channel, his favorite way of communicating with the world. He pointed out that, according to him, “it was created for protect the Russian information space of the West’s aggressive anti-Russian propaganda.” Some reports also link him to another page dedicated to spreading ‘fake news’ known as Peace Data -pronounced the same as a foul word in Russian – although so far he has not made any statement on the matter.

The ‘Wagnerites’ and their interests

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However, his greatest contribution to the Russian cause is the creation of the Wagner group, which takes its name from one of the favorite composers of the German dictator Adolf Hitler. This was created in 2014, according to Prigozhin himself. “I cleaned the old weapons myself, found the bulletproof vests and started to bring together specialists could you help me with this. From that moment, the May 1, 2014a group of patriots had been born, which would later be called the Wagner group”, he himself expressed in September of last year, when he finally publicly accepted what was already vox populi in Russia.

When it became public that Wagner was recruiting in the prisons in Russia, one of the videos that circulated through social networks and Telegram channels is one in which he supposedly went to offer freedom to prisoners in exchange for fighting for a few months in the Ukraine. he promised them be free at the end of the corresponding months and a salary above the average in Russia, although he warned them that anyone who deserted would take a bullet in the back. This Saturday independent media were talking about riots in Russian prisons, just as Wagner began his fight for state power.



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