Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has died aged 62 in a plane crash, was a multimillionaire militia commander who sparked the biggest crisis in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power. Once a close friend and confidant of Putin, in June 2023 Prigozhin led an armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership after severely criticising the invasion of Ukraine as being unnecessary and based on false premises.
At the head of thousands of battle-hardened mercenary soldiers, known as the Wagner group, he took control of Russia’s southern military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, the official command centre of the invasion, and demanded the resignation of the defence minister and the chief of staff. He then sent a column of troops and tanks up the main highway towards Moscow. The column was attacked by helicopters loyal to Putin and several were shot down.
Within hours a deal was struck, in which Prigozhin called off his mutiny in the name of avoiding more bloodshed that could have led to civil war. His men were allowed to return to their camps in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, while he was promised immunity from prosecution and safe passage to exile in Belarus. Putin said the Wagner forces were being spared punishment because of their heroic role in the fighting in Ukraine.
The crisis marked the climax of growing tension between Russia’s top military brass and the Wagner troops who took part in many of the key battles in Ukraine. In video footage, Prigozhin was often pictured with them on the frontline. They suffered multiple casualties while capturing the small town of Bakhmut in May 2023 after months of fighting Ukrainian troops. Having seized the destroyed town, Prigozhin withdrew his men and handed Bakhmut’s ruins to official Russian forces, made up largely of unwilling conscripts, unlike the well paid Wagner militias, who included hardened criminals promised release from prison if they joined up.
Prigozhin had previously avoided criticising Putin, whom he first got to know when they were young men in St Petersburg. There was speculation that Putin even supported and encouraged Prigozhin’s criticisms of Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, for their incompetent planning and poor implementation of the invasion.
But on 23 June Prigozhin broke his silence on Putin. In a video message he rejected Putin’s argument that Russia’s invasion in February 2022 was necessary to forestall a Ukrainian attack on the eastern region of Donbas, which had been under Russian control for eight years. “There was nothing out of the ordinary on 24 February [the day Putin gave the green light to the invasion] … The defence ministry is trying to deceive the president and society by saying Ukraine was going mad with aggression and was planning to attack us together with the whole Nato block,” Prigozhin raged. Shoigu was part of a “bunch of bastards” who wanted to get medals and show off what a strong army they had.
Prigozhin’s attack on the basis of Kremlin strategy was extraordinary, since civilians could, and some did, get prison sentences of 15 years for questioning the reasons for invading Ukraine. That such a senior figure would do so was a sensation.
Putin’s style was to play “divide and rule” with his senior staff, and until Prigozhin’s outburst the Russian president took no action to end the feud between Prigozhin and Shoigu. In fact Shoigu had seemed to be winning. On 14 June Putin had announced that Wagner forces were to be put under the control of the defence ministry.
With his mutiny, Prigozhin apparently hoped to forestall Wagner’s merger with the regular army and trigger Putin into replacing Shoigu. He also hoped to persuade other generals to come out against Shoigu so as to improve Russia’s performance on the battlefields of Ukraine. In particular he wanted to win over General Sergei Surovikin, the former commander of Russian forces in Syria, who had fought successfully in Ukraine. But Surovikin condemned Prigozhin’s mutiny and called on Russian troops to resist it. This may have been a key factor in Prigozhin’s decision to make a deal with Putin and call off the insurrection.
Surovikin’s public condemnation of Prigozhin’s mutiny may have come too late for him. He disappeared from view and was rumoured to be under house arrest for not having distanced himself from Prigozhin quickly enough. On the day Prigozhin died, it was reported that Surovikin had been sacked.
Like Putin, Prigozhin was born in St Petersburg, which had been the capital city of the Russian empire under the Tsars. His mother, Violetta, worked in a local hospital. Prigozhin told reporters his father, Viktor, an engineer, had died when he was young. His stepfather, Samuil Zharkoi, was a ski instructor at a sports-oriented boarding school, which Yevgeny attended. When he graduated in 1977 at the age of 16, young Yevgeny, known as Zhenya, hoped to be a professional cross-country skier.
In 1979 he was caught stealing and given a suspended sentence. Two years later he was caught burgling flats in affluent areas and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1990 after nine years in detention.
Russia was then taking its first steps on the road to unregulated capitalism. Prigozhin sold hotdogs with his mother and stepfather in a local street market. From this humble start he became involved in the grocery business and was appointed by a schoolmate to be managing director of St Petersburg’s first chain of supermarkets. He also entered the lucrative gambling business and became acquainted with Putin, who was then head of the supervisory board for casinos in the city.
By 2002 Prigozhin was a multimillionaire entrepreneur, with investments in restaurants, supermarkets and construction. During the US president George W Bush’s visit to Russia that year, Putin invited his American guest to dine in a luxury floating restaurant on the River Neva that Prigozhin owned. Prigozhin was filmed personally serving both presidents and their wives. The media gave him the nickname “Putin’s chef”.
But Prigozhin was more than that. He was a member of the Kremlin’s circle of useful oligarchs. He received hundreds of millions of roubles in government contracts for providing school meals and in 2012 was given a contract to supply meals to the Russian military.
In 2014 he founded the Wagner group, a private army of mercenaries. The origin of the name was obscure. Some reports said it was chosen by Dmitry Utkin – the co-founder of the militia group, and also reported to have died in the plane crash – simply because he admired the music of the German composer. The Wagner forces fought in the Russian campaign to seize Ukrainian territory in the eastern Donbas region. This was followed by combat in Syria and involvement in civil wars in Mali, the Central African Republic, Libya and several other African countries. Putin valued Wagner’s activities since they could pursue Russia’s international interests while ostensibly being independent of Kremlin control.
In 2013 Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency, in effect a “troll farm” that used hundreds of young Russians to plant pro-Kremlin messages on social media outlets around the world. During the 2016 US presidential election they supported Donald Trump and denigrated Hillary Clinton. In 2018 a US grand jury indicted the Internet Research Agency for election meddling and the US Treasury Department subsequently put sanctions on Prigozhin.
Prigozhin is survived by his wife, Lyubov, a businesswoman, and their two daughters, Polina and Veronika, and son, Pavel.
• Yevgeny Prigozhin, militia leader and businessman, born 1 June 1961; died 23 August 2023
