The rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘The rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator, the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Russia, or more specifically, about a single Russian, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Mr Prigozhin’s attracted international attention because of the role that he and his private armed militia, known as the Wagner Group, have played in the war in Ukraine. To discuss Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, I’m joined by two of the FT’s experts. Max Seddon is our Moscow bureau chief, and Miles Johnson, an investigative writer who’s done a series of articles on Prigozhin’s business empire. So, what role will Yevgeny Prigozhin play in the future of Russia? The Wagner Group has played a prominent part in the brutal battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where thousands of soldiers on both sides seem to have died.

Reporter 1
Russia’s Bakhmut offensive in eastern Ukraine has largely stalled, according to Kyiv, due to the sheer number of troops it has lost in seven months of fighting.

Gideon Rachman
Many of the Russian fighters were former convicts recruited by the Wagner Group. Yevgeny Prigozhin himself appealed to these men directly, promising them freedom if they survive six months of fighting and a bullet in the back if they attempted to desert. His recruitment pitch was made directly to convicts in a Russian prison yard and later surfaced on the internet.

Video clip
[Yevgeny Prigozhin speaking in Russian]

Gideon Rachman
The key role played by Prigozhin in the war has raised questions about his political ambitions. Is he trying to displace the regular army? Might he even have ambitions to be Russia’s leader, displacing Vladimir Putin himself? In some of his blasts on the internet, Prigozhin’s complained bitterly about the conduct of the war and about lack of supplies for his Wagner troops.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, via interpreter
All the questions I raised about ammunition, unfortunately, stay completely unresolved. And this is the most serious problem. I’m unable to solve this problem despite all my connections, contacts and everything is sinking and sticking.

Gideon Rachman
So does all that mean that Prigozhin’s on his way up or on his way out? I started our discussion by asking Max Seddon to tell me about the man. Who exactly is Yevgeny Prigozhin and where did he emerge from?

Max Seddon
His nickname is Putin’s chef because he made his money as a caterer for the Kremlin and for the Russian armed forces. But his career started after he got out of prison. He spent most of the 1980s in Leningrad in prison for various petty robbery and assault charges. And in the early capitalist days of Soviet Union, Russia, in 1990s, he had a hot dog stand. He would boil the hot dogs in his apartment and sell them on the street. And gradually this grew. And so he opened a restaurant in St Petersburg called the Old Customs House. That quickly became a favourite of the then deputy mayor of St Petersburg. A little-known official called Vladimir Putin.

And we still don’t know too much about exactly what the relationship was between the men. But it seems clear that Putin very much liked Prigozhin’s restaurant and his catering work. By the time that Putin became president, he would take visiting dignitaries from abroad to St Petersburg and Prigozhin would be the one serving them dinner. And you look at the picture now, there’s George W Bush and his wife Laura at a state dinner with Putin, and there’s unmistakably Prigozhin, you know, then completely unknown, in the background, pouring a glass of wine.

And his career took a dramatic turn a little over 10 years ago when he lost a lot of these very lucrative government catering contracts and seemingly as a way to try to win back the favour of the Kremlin, he cornered this very bizarre industry. Basically, he’s a specialist in dirty tricks, so he set up the troll farm, the infamous meddling in the 2016 American election.

Gideon Rachman
That this was the internet Research . . . 

Max Seddon
The Internet Research Agency, yes. It started out as a way to attack the Russian opposition. And then when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, when the proxy war was going on in the Donbas, that was the birth of what later became Wagner, the mercenary outfit. And for years the benefit of this to the Kremlin was it was a very small fig leaf of plausible deniability that they weren’t officially involved in this war, even though they very clearly were part of the Russian army. And eventually they were using it in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and that was Russia essentially renting out these heavies to foreign governments to spread its own influence and solve problems for various governments with gripes with the west. Right before the war in Ukraine, there was a great example in Mali where Russia was able to use Wagner to deal with their own internal security situation.

Gideon Rachman
Basically, they got rid of the French who hadn’t suppressed the security problem, and Wagner came in with rather more brutal methods and, inverted commas, sold it for the Malians.

Max Seddon
Yeah. So they were referred to as mercenaries. It’s a word that these days I try to avoid because they don’t seem to have very many clients other than the Russian government. There was very clearly closely involved with the Russian military, even if they were then and even more so now, clashing with the military and various arms of Russian security services. You can’t build an army without there being some sort of official sign-off.

Gideon Rachman
OK. Well, we’ll come to their role in the war now in Ukraine in a second. But Miles, let’s look at the kind of business side of it, because as Max has said, this guy starts out as literally as a hot dog seller, then through building up Wagner, as you have illustrated in the FT, he became a very, very rich man. I mean, it’s $100mn-plus business.

Miles Johnson
Well, he’s fascinating in that context as a kind of modern, very modern criminal entrepreneur where he is, as Max has said, backed and closely connected to the state, but is also labelled as the boss of a transnational criminal organisation by the US government, where it allowed us and others, because of that one foot in the sort of criminal world and one foot in the legitimate world of business, to the extent where he would be doing things that legitimate businessmen do, like, you know, obviously establishing companies, having professional advisers, lawyers. And it meant that this was a figure where, unlike other famous international criminal bosses, you know, someone like Chapo, you couldn’t watch step by step what Chapo was doing in selling cocaine into the United States or something. But with Prigozhin, you could actually chart his rise in fairly granular detail when he went to operate in places like Sudan or Central African Republic . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Because he would open a company or . . . 

Miles Johnson
He would open a company. He would start importing tons of industrial equipment from Russia. So almost in a blow-by-blow account you could see how he was building this thing up and also the types of structures he was using.

Max Seddon
I think that’s important. At the same time, even though Prigozhin was pretending that Wagner didn’t exist and the Kremlin was pretending not to know anything about it, it was not exactly a big secret. Prigozhin was filming movies about the heroic Wagner fighters in the Central African Republic. He had this enormous propaganda machine working on the domestic market, attacking the opposition. Physical trolls, I actually saw one once in 2019. I interviewed Alexei Navalny, the now jailed opposition leader, and we were sitting in a food court and being harassed the whole time by an actual, a physical troll.

Gideon Rachman
A human being, not a . . . 

Max Seddon
A human being, (laughter) yes, but a professional troll whose job was to ask Navalny ridiculous questions that would irritate him and film him the whole time to try to get some video that they could then spin completely out of context and it’s an extremely strange experience.

Gideon Rachman
And he was clearly working for Prigozhin.

Max Seddon
Yes. He was working for one of a number of sites as part of this, you know, fake news empire called Patriot Media, which is chaired by Prigozhin.

Gideon Rachman
And Miles, I mean, obviously the Africa stuff, it has this military side. But also he’s doing business. I mean, he’s mining, he’s making money that way. And he’s also presence in the west, isn’t he, because he’s taking out court cases here in London. He has phalanxes of business advisers and so on.

Miles Johnson
But that was sort of the really fascinating thing for me about it in terms of his narrative. It’s easy to forget now because he’s become such a prominent figure there up until really quite recently. Officially, he would say Wagner didn’t exist. I have nothing to do with Wagner. I have nothing to do with any type of this activity. And he would, as you said, hire really expensive and top, you know, sort of white-shoe law firms to very aggressively go after people who had any suggestion that he was doing that. And it was sort of fascinating thing because, you know, he has been accused with a lot of evidence, a supporter of his organisation, having been involved in the murder of Russian journalists who had gone to investigate his activities in Africa. And then on the other hand, he’s hiring some of the most expensive lawyers money can buy to sue journalists in the west. So it’s a sort of interesting duality.

Gideon Rachman
What’s the pay-off for him in Africa? Is it simply that he’s doing the Russian state a favour, or that he’s making money in business by, you know, exporting gold, exporting diamonds, whatever it is?

Miles Johnson
He recently responded to an article published by FT colleagues about his activities in Africa where he said the entire article is true apart from how much money I’m making, that’s exaggerated. So he was trying to play down the profits he’s making, but obviously he’s playing some sort of geopolitical purpose in terms of advancing the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals in countries like Sudan and Central African Republic, you know, post-2014 and the sort of sanctions post-Crimea. Russia became increasingly diplomatically isolated, had to look for friends in new places and sometimes quite unsavoury regimes that were sort of a natural partner. But then, yes, he is also being awarded concessions. And there’s obviously also collaboration with local elites and a sort of a mutually beneficial arrangement.

But quantifying exactly how much money he’s making is rather more difficult in terms of his actual published accounts. You can see in Syria, he was making quite a lot of money from energy assets, you know, oil and gasfields that Wagner quote unquote, “liberated” from Isis and then in return for a cut of those. But in other operations from the evidence we’ve seen, yeah, it’s not very profitable in places like Sudan, but it’s obviously difficult to quantify because they’ll be off balance sheets, so to speak, elements of that. How much support is the Russian state providing him, which isn’t in those books? But yeah, definitely it’s an important part of the structure.

Gideon Rachman
But I guess, Max, the idea that this guy is just this international businessman, well, now, you know, all over the internet, you have pictures of him right up in the front line in military uniform urging on the troops. He’s become a big player in the Ukraine war. How did that happen and how important is he in this war?

Max Seddon
So Wagner weren’t involved at all in the early phases of the invasion. The exact nature of Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin is quite hard to quantify, but what he appears to have done is sold Putin on this idea that look at these useless generals and the FSB guys, they completely screwed everything up. I have my crack fighting force of ex-special forces guys and volunteers, and we’ll be better than the actual army.

And it got to the point by the summer, especially around Bakhmut, this battle that’s been raging really intensely for about nine months. Prigozhin, who is someone who very much has an eye for good PR, had set aside on this as Wagner’s testing ground, as it were. This was gonna be where they showed how good they were.

So that’s when these videos started appearing of him recruiting these convicts who were basically being sent to the slaughter, in some cases with no weapons, in some cases the weapons from World War Two. And this is something that you cannot do without Putin’s approval, because only Putin has the power to pardon prisoners in Russia.

And by the fall, there are some shake-ups in the military. Prigozhin began this really astonishing PR campaign around just roll in Wagner. This is the man who’s said for years, you know, I don’t know what Wagner is. It doesn’t exist, I have nothing to do with it. He suddenly puts a statement out saying it was me. I set up Wagner. I’ve been doing it the whole time. You know, Wagner is the best.

And by this point you’re already seeing on state TV, they’re putting out Wagner recruitment videos, movies produced by Prigozhin’s companies praising Wagner at a time where the vast majority of the Russian elite have been almost completely silent or doing their utmost to avoid commenting on the war at all. Because firstly, it’s a disaster. Secondly, so many of them are actually against it.

And Prigozhin took advantage of this vacuum by just suddenly being absolutely everywhere, talking about Wagner, admitting his role in the US election, going around, releasing all these videos of him recruiting the prisoners. You know, his pitch to the prisoners was, I understand that, guys, I was in prison myself. We are Putin’s last hope. The army have completely messed everything up. We are the ones who are gonna win the war. And he basically emerged as the leader of these various irregular forces fighting in Ukraine when it was him, Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, who basically has his own private army that swears loyalty to him, and these various groups going back to 2014 around the Donbas volunteer circuit, which has a lot of overlap with Wagner.

And I spoke to someone close to Prigozhin last time I was in Moscow who said, we’re the only ones who really want to win the war. The rest of the elite, including much of the security services, they just want this to be over as soon as possible. We’re the only ones who really want to go to Kyiv. And they have this absolutely amazing PR campaign openly lambasting the army leadership. And Prigozhin and Kadyrov were allowed to do this to an extent that had never been seen, especially in a country that now has wartime censorship. And it was clear that Putin had approved this and his star was very much on the rise.

Gideon Rachman
OK. Well, we’ll get to the question of whether his star is still on the rise in a bit. But, Miles, as Max was saying, Wagner’s taken staggering losses. What’s your sense? You know, Wagner is this multi-faceted group. It’s an army, but it’s also a business. Do you think that we’re seeing the making of Wagner at the moment or the breaking of Wagner?

Miles Johnson
That’s an interesting question. I mean, one of the fascinating things is really can’t be underplayed here is that less than a year ago, Prigozhin still had a case out in the high court which said he had suffered severe emotional distress from being accused of having anything to do with mercenary activity.

Gideon Rachman
This is in London.

Miles Johnson
This is in London, the English High Court. So we flash forward, you know, just a year, and he’s now filming videos of himself on a rooftop in Bakhmut, (laughs) you know, with an automatic weapon.

Gideon Rachman
Maybe it’s the manifestation of his emotional distress. (Laughter)

Miles Johnson
So, you know, the sort of Scooby Doo moment where he finally dramatically pulled off his mask and said, ahaha! It was me all along. I’ve been lying for five years or whatever. It was so, sort of dramatic. The interesting question is, you know, to what extent was it a choice of fully embracing and going from this position of denying this thing ever actually existed at all and having nothing to do with it to setting up a corporate headquarters and posting daily videos of yourself running around Bakhmut? To what extent was it a choice and to what extent was it forced upon him? Is this the best way he can play his hand right now? Because I think there is an interesting question. To what extent does he have an edge? Max will have views on this. You know, there’s clearly, he has no unique capability.

Gideon Rachman
Other than the convicts, really.

Miles Johnson
Yeah, but I mean, presumably someone else could come out and replace him. It’s an interesting question to what extent he is just a replaceable person now. In this new environment, once you lose your subterfuge, once you lose your ability to sort of be in this strange sort of grey areas of asymmetric warfare, how useful are you really going to be?

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And Max, there’s a lot of speculation as to how come in what is in other ways an increasingly totalitarian state clamping down on dissent, that this guy is given all this leverage to slag off the army in public. So what’s going on? Is he trying to displace the army? Does Putin find him useful, or might Putin even begin to regard him as a threat? How do you read it?

Max Seddon
One misconception is it’s not like these guys are out there on their own fighting. You know, you can’t have something like what they’re doing in Bakhmut without the army being involved. And, you know, the Army were financing it. The army were the ones supplying them with weapons and ammunition. You don’t have something going on like this unless Putin has personally approved it.

Prigozhin was very much trying to portray himself as a sledgehammer to the elite by striking fear into the hearts of oligarchs and security people and officials who are privately not in favour of the war. And he became the symbol of the astonishing moral degradation of the Russian elite. You know, the way that this was legitimised in just a matter of months because, you know, where did the sledgehammer come from? So they have this prisoner, a man called Yevgeny Nuzhin, a convicted murderer who defected pretty much immediately after they sent him to the front lines, was taken prisoner by Ukraine. And he gave several interviews in Ukraine saying he didn’t want to fight against Ukraine and he wanted to stay. And it appears Prigozhin somehow managed to offer the Ukrainians enough Ukrainian POWs through his own channels that he was able to get this guy back because the next time we saw Yevgeny Nuzhin, he had his head taped to a post in a basement somewhere and a Wagner-affiliated channel posted a video of this poor man’s head being bashed in with a sledgehammer. And Prigozhin’s said he sent to the European parliament a bloody replica sledgehammer. Some members of the Russian parliament were posing with these sledgehammers and clearly there was some approval of this from the very top.

But also at the same time, you can see this was very limited, and this year it’s all gone downhill for him very fast. I remember this person close to him I saw in December said, you know, there’s a risk he could end up like Icarus. You know, he’s flying a bit too close to the sun. And at the beginning of January, Putin reappointed Valery Gerasimov, who is the chief of the general staff and the architect of the initial disastrous invasion plan. He was placed in charge of the entire war effort.

And very quickly, Prigozhin’s fortunes started to dwindle. First, he announced that he wasn’t recruiting prisoners anymore, and at exactly the same time, Russian prisoners’ rights groups started reporting that the army had started recruiting prisoners instead. And this is someone who doesn’t really have his own independent resource base, and he turned out to be very vulnerable to this. Then he started complaining that the Wagner forces were being left to their deaths because the army wasn’t giving them enough ammunition. And the fact that he had to do an open PR campaign begging Putin to help him get this ammunition shows you that someone who’s able to call Putin at the drop of a hat isn’t going to do that. And something that we’ve seen over the years with Putin in everywhere from the energy industry to people in his administration, the way that he balances his coterie is he loves having them fight against each other. And so the fall for Prigozhin has been as precipitous as his rise was meteoric. And as someone who, as Miles said, is really quite disposable, so much of what Prigozhin did was through opportunism over the years, whether it was what they’ve been doing in Ukraine, what they did in Syria, what they did in Africa, he was able to pitch himself as someone who could solve these problems. But now, you know, according to western intelligence, there are something like eight to 12 other paramilitary groups fighting in Ukraine funded by, you know, various oligarchs or state companies or security services or other corners of the elite. It’s not a unique service that he provides.

Gideon Rachman
OK. So, Max, you’re suggesting — although we can never be sure — that we might have seen peak Prigozhin in Russia itself. But Miles, to end, I mean, if you look at the picture in Africa, Wagner still seem to be on the rise. How durable is the phenomenon there?

Miles Johnson
I think inevitably it just becomes extremely logistically complicated to be engaged in such a conflict as the conflict in Ukraine and also manage multiple other things around the world. There are clearly embedded and enmeshed interests in these countries between, you know, the Russian Ministry of Defence and the informal operations like Prigozhin’s. But it would appear it’s just going to become increasingly difficult, I would predict. That doesn’t mean that they will disappear, but I cannot really see how you can expand internationally when you’re sort of potentially fighting for your own survival back at home.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, it does seem to be there’s a manpower issue. I mean, if they’re so desperate for troops that they’re recruiting from prisons, can they really afford to fight all these little wars all over Africa?

Miles Johnson
And the scale of what is happening in Ukraine in terms of their engagement is so dramatically different to any of their engagements in Syria or in countries like Central African Republic. So, it just doesn’t bode well if your main asset is fighters and all your fighters get used up and killed. What really do you have left? You can’t scramble around. There’s only so many places you can go. And also, you know, there’s an interesting issue of a PR point where the sledgehammer incident that Max referred to, there was this other bizarre incident where a Wagner fighter was apparently killed with a sledgehammer and then miraculously came back to life, right? So presumably he’s sort of realising, actually, it’s quite hard to recruit people if you know the PR, which was showing how extreme and awful and dedicated Wagner was — so gruesome, so barbaric — is to a certain extent going to be backfiring because no one’s gonna want to join you.

Max Seddon
There are some reports in Russian independent media beginning of this year that they did the second wave of recruitment and a lot of prisoners who were in touch with their buddies who had been out there. And, you know, everyone has a phone in Russian prison that they smuggled in and, you know, they read the news and they see this guy having his head bashed in with a sledgehammer. And most of these people are not coming back alive and I think, maybe I should sit this one out.

Gideon Rachman
Maybe prison would be better.

Miles Johnson
Yeah. You’re doing a 20-year stretch. You’re like, I’ll last one month, at best in the Ukraine. I might get my head smashed in with a sledgehammer. I would rather stay in prison.

Gideon Rachman
OK. Well, on that rather grim note, that’s a rather grim topic, but thank you both very much.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Miles Johnson ending this edition of the Rachman Review. And you also heard from Max Seddon, our Moscow bureau chief. Thanks for listening and please join us again next week.

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