Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin: From military might to botched revolt

By Paul Kirby, BBC

From the moment Yevgeny Prigozhin's mutiny in Russia collapsed in June there was always a sense that a man who had lived so close to the edge for so long had overplayed his hand.

If he was on board his own private jet when it went down en route from Moscow to St Petersburg then it would mark a shocking and violent end to a very turbulent life.

For so many years Vladimir Putin was able to call on Prigozhin's services.

But the botched revolt involving thousands of Wagner mercenaries went beyond the pale. President Putin condemned the rebellion as "treason" and it was soon very clear that Prigozhin's prolific role in Russia was over.

This was a man whose first years of adulthood were spent in a St Petersburg jail, but he thrived in the 1990s with catering businesses that brought him wealth and patronage from Putin himself.

It was Prigozhin's mercenary ventures in Africa, Syria and Ukraine that made him a military figure but the dynamic changed when Russia unleashed war in Ukraine and the president's one-time chef found power as well as wealth.

Unconfirmed reports suggest his Embraer Legacy 135 plane was hit by two bursts of fire from military air defences.

If it was brought down deliberately, few will be surprised because Prigozhin had no shortage of enemies. Dmitry Utkin, who was Prigozhin's first Wagner commander, was also on the passenger list.

Prigozhin, 62, appeared to have escaped punishment for his short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin.

Under a deal to end the revolt, many of his rebel mercenaries were allowed to go to a camp in Belarus while the Wagner boss himself was able to travel within Russia, showing up in St Petersburg in casual clothes during a Russian summit of African leaders in late July.

His witty but venomous video rants against the failings of the Russian defence establishment came to an end and state-run TV broadcast footage of raids on his luxurious home outside St Petersburg.

But Prigozhin was never going to slink off quietly to a bolthole in Belarus and it was only this week that his first video address since the botched mutiny surfaced.

The desert background indicated it had been shot in Africa and, clad in combat gear, Prigozhin declared that the temperature was 50C and his Wagner group was recruiting to make Russia "even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free".

Prigozhin appeared to be reverting to the mercenary roots he put down several years ago when he set up the Wagner private military company, which helped prop up Russian allies in the Central African Republic and Syria, and challenged French influence in Mali.

Although he denied it for years, Prigozhin also founded a so-called troll-factory of pro-Kremlin bloggers in a non-descript office in St Petersburg. His Internet Research Agency was blamed by the US for using information warfare to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Prigozhin admitted this year to coming up with the whole idea: "It was created to protect the Russian information space from the West's boorish and aggressive anti-Russian propaganda."

He had spent almost a decade in the final years of the Soviet era in jail for robbery and fraud. But as the new Russia shrugged off its Soviet past, Prigozhin went into catering, first as a hotdog-seller and then moving on to more sophisticated dining, opening some of St Petersburg's more chic restaurants.

Putin, then the city's deputy mayor, took notice. "Vladimir Putin saw how I built a business out of a kiosk," he said years later.

After he became president, Putin entertained global leaders such as France's Jacques Chirac in Prigozhin's restaurants. The up-and-coming caterer earned the sobriquet "Putin's chef".

If Prigozhin's mercenary business was later to give him military clout and money, his catering business would supply him with a constant stream of wealth right up to this year.

President Putin revealed shortly after the botched Wagner revolt that Prigozhin's private army had been fully funded with $1bn from the state over 12 months, while a further $1bn went to Prigozhin's Concord catering firm for feeding the military.

But that was just over one year, and reports suggest he had received more than $18bn in government contracts since 2014.

Kremlin propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov said big money had made Prigozhin go "off the rails" but it was his men's battlefield exploits that had gained him a sense of impunity.

"He thought he could challenge the defence ministry, the state itself and the president personally."

That all came to a head as Russia's military campaign in Ukraine faltered last year and Prigozhin's Wagner fighters spearheaded a bloody campaign to seize the eastern city of Bakhmut.

Last September Prigozhin toured prisons around Russia offering inmates the chance to commute their sentences in exchange for service with Wagner.

Thousands died in the fight for Bakhmut, many of them inexperienced, badly armed former prisoners.

As the battle reached a climax, Prigozhin appeared in social media videos demanding ammunition, standing among bodies of dead mercenaries.

He reserved his loathing for President Putin's loyal defence minister Sergei Shoigu and the armed forces chief Valery Gerasimov.

"Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the... ammunition?... They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten yourselves in your mahogany offices."

Prigozhin steered clear of directly criticising the president, always blaming his commanders instead.

But when the military chiefs announced plans to bring the Wagner forces and other "voluntary detachments" under the main command structure, Prigozhin appeared to snap.

As he prepared to launch his "march for justice", he called into question the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and accused the defence minister of responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers.

The Kremlin denounced as "hysteria" suggestions that Prigozhin's revolt had dented Vladimir Putin's hold on power.

At the very least it was the beginning of the end of Prigozhin's extraordinary and long-lived Russian influence over the Putin leadership.

- This story was first published by the BBC