Yevgeny Prigozhin: The man who taught the Russian elite to fear “There is hardly any justice for women who have experienced sexual violence”

Yevgeny Prigozhin will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most outstanding figures in the Russian offensive war against Ukraine. This can be said without a trace of sympathy for his person.

The countless crimes with which he has paved his path in the Ukraine and his rise to fame make this lansquenet figure appear in the worst possible human light. Nevertheless, the 62-year-old is so far the only one who has managed to bring Russia’s Putin system to the brink of collapse. Even Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky relied on “the devil” Prigozhin to overthrow Putin in Saturday’s coup attempt.

An extraordinary combination of nefarious, criminal energy and business acumen are the characteristics that have distinguished the extremely wealthy boss of the Wagner mercenary army to date. They are also the ones who catapulted him from a convicted murderer and ‘hot dog seller’, as the Anglo-Saxon media now disparagingly call him, into the orbit of dictator Putin.

Of course, with this master of self-presentation, all biographical data should be treated with caution. Much of what is rumored to be fact could also be the building block of a self-made legend.

However, based on court documents, it is certain that in 1980, as a 19-year-old, Prigozhin was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the robbery murder of a housewife in Leningrad and in 1990, when he was released from prison. , he found himself in the middle of the last convulsions of the Soviet Union – some possibilities more unimaginable to him like despair and fear of the future.

From Putin’s cook and court jester to mercenary leader

He used the 1990s to set up his own restaurant chain in St. Petersburg, which surrendered to newfound capitalism. In 2001, the fateful meeting with the newly elected president Vladimir Putin took place in his restaurant. Prigozhin personally took care of the prominent guest and he took a liking to the radically talkative restaurateur.

Here too, Prigozhin seems to sense immediately what opportunities this unexpected encounter would bring him. Putin expressed his gratitude with official catering orders for the military and schools. Prigozhin returned the favor with lavish birthday catering and other favours.

The term “Putin’s cook” dates back to those years, and the Russian caste of oligarchs did not seem to attach any particular importance to Prigozhin, who was considered a kind of court jester.

So innocent and ordinary by Russian standards so far. The 2010s brought a dramatic turn, with his criminal tendencies becoming more prevalent. It is not entirely certain whether and how Prigozhin founded Wagner’s mercenary army around 2012, the existence and connections of which he denied until 2019, and what role the right-wing extremist Dmitri Utkin played in it.

The fact is that after the occupation of Crimea in 2014, “Putin’s cook” provided the Kremlin ruler with the fighters Russia needed for its illegal intervention in Ukraine, Syria and Africa. The establishment of the infamous Petersburg troll factory, which influenced the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, also dates from this time.

The military layman knew how to get the best deals for him from Wagner. For example, he had mercenary contracts in the Central African Republic, offset by mining permits and prospecting rights for gold and diamonds – the true source of his wealth.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the third and most internationally sensational period in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s career began. The brutal execution of deserters with sledgehammers; the recruitment of criminals in Russian penal camps; its careless sacrifice in senseless waves of attacks; the increasingly scandalous provocations directed against the Russian military leadership; finally the strangest one-day uprising in history.

The leader of the mercenaries, long ridiculed as an upstart and presumably not even taken seriously by Putin, has achieved at least one thing: the former prison nerd and fast-food restaurant has taught the Russian elite and the corrupt Kremlin system to fear. (aargauerzeitung.ch)