Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is reportedly killed in a plane crash which came down between Moscow and St Petersburg.
The head of the Wagner Group rose to prominence in the Ukraine-Russia war as a leading strike weapon for Russian President Vladimir Putin but has more recently been highly critical of the tactics being used in the conflict.
Another video from the site of the plane crash in Tver region of Russia. Russian aviation agency reports Prigozhin was on board of the plane. pic.twitter.com/h3mPYZoM0V
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 23, 2023
Prigozhin was convicted of robbery and assault in 1981, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Following his release, he opened a restaurant business in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. It was in this capacity that he got to know Putin, then the city’s deputy mayor.
Prigozhin used that connection to develop a catering business and won lucrative Russian government contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef”. He later expanded into other areas, including media and an infamous internet “troll factory” that led to his indictment in the US for meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In January, Prigozhin acknowledged founding, leading and financing the shadowy Wagner company.
Wagner was first seen in action in eastern Ukraine soon after a separatist conflict erupted there in April 2014, in the weeks following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
While backing the separatist insurgency in the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, Russia denied sending its own weapons and troops there despite ample evidence to the contrary. Engaging private contractors in the fighting allowed Moscow to maintain a degree of deniability.
Prigozhin’s company was called Wagner after the nickname of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian military’s special forces. It soon established a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness.
Wagner personnel also deployed to Syria, where Russia supported President Bashar Assad’s government in a civil war. In Libya, they fought alongside forces of commander Khalifa Hifter. The group has also operated in the Central African Republic and Mali.
Prigozhin has reportedly used Wagner’s deployment to Syria and African countries to secure lucrative mining contracts. US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said in January the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund operations in Ukraine.
Some Russian media alleged that Wagner was involved in the 2018 killings of three Russian journalists in the Central African Republic who were investigating the group’s activities. The slayings remain unsolved.
Western countries and UN experts have accused Wagner mercenaries of human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.
In 2021, the European Union accused the group of “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings”, and of carrying out “destabilising activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Video has surfaced purporting to show some of the activities that have contributed to Wagner’s fearsome reputation.
A 2017 online video showed a group of armed people, reportedly Wagner contractors, torturing a Syrian and beating him to death with a sledgehammer before mutilating and burning his body. Russian authorities ignored requests by the media and rights activists to investigate.
In 2022, another video showed a former Wagner contractor beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was repatriated. Despite public outrage and demands for an investigation, the Kremlin turned a blind eye.
Wagner has taken an increasingly visible role in the war as regular Russian troops have suffered heavy attrition and lost territory in humiliating setbacks.
Prigozhin toured Russian prisons to recruit fighters, promising pardons if they survived a half-year tour of front-line duty with Wagner.
In the interview this week, he said he had recruited 50,000 convicts, about 10,000 of whom were killed in Bakhmut; a similar number of his own fighters have died there.
He said he had 50,000 men at his disposal “in the best times”, with about 35,000 on the front lines at all times. He didn’t say whether these numbers included convicts.
The US has estimated Wagner had about 50,000 personnel fighting in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts. A US official says nearly half of the 20,000 Russian forces killed in Ukraine since December have been Wagner’s troops in Bakhmut.
The US assesses that Wagner is spending about $100 million a month in the fight. In December, Washington accused North Korea of supplying weapons, including rockets and missiles, to the Russian company in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Both Wagner and North Korea denied the reports.
If the US accusation is true, Wagner’s reach for North Korean weapons may reflect its long-running dispute with the Russian military leadership, which dates to the company’s creation.
Prigozhin claimed full credit in January for capturing the Donetsk region salt-mining town of Soledar and accused the Russian Defense Ministry of trying to steal Wagner’s glory. He has repeatedly complained the Russian military failed to supply Wagner with sufficient ammunition to capture Bakhmut and threatened to pull out his men.
Troops purported to be Wagner contractors in Ukraine recorded a video in which they showered the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, with curses and accusations of failing to provide ammunition.
Prigozhin also has singled out Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for withering criticism, accusing military leaders of incompetence. His frequent complaints are unprecedented for Russia’s tightly controlled political system, in which only Putin could air such criticism.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby described Prigozhin’s critical remarks about the war “could be a sort of morbid way of him ... claiming credit for whatever they’ve been able to achieve in Bakhmut, but also trying to publicly embarrass the Ministry of Defense further that the cost was borne in blood and treasure by Wagner, and not by the Russian military”.
Once a shadowy figure, Prigozhin has increasingly raised his public profile, boasting almost daily about Wagner’s purported victories, sardonically mocking his enemies and complaining about the military brass.
Asked recently about a media comparison of him with Grigory Rasputin, a mystic who gained fatal influence over Russia’s last tsar by claiming to have the power to cure his son’s haemophilia, Prigozhin snapped: “I don’t stop blood, but I spill blood of the enemies of our Motherland.”
Prigozhin had recently published his first recruitment video for the Wagner Group since organising the short-lived mutiny, according to information on Russian social media channels.
In the video, which was posted on Telegram messaging app channels believed to be affiliated with Prigozhin, a person who appears to be the 62-year-old mercenary leader says the Wagner Group is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free”.
“We are hiring real strongmen and continuing to fulfil the tasks which were set and which we promised to handle,” the speaker in the video says, toting an assault rifle and wearing military fatigues. Pickup trucks and other people dressed in fatigues were in the background.
This time, it appeared someone was not willing to see “Putin’s Chef” increase his forces again.
Residential areas in both countries have suffered from deadly strikes in the conflict.