Yevgueni Prigozhin, known worldwide as the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, died this Wednesday at the age of 62 after the private plane in which he was traveling with ten other people crashed in the Russian region of Tver.
The leader of the mercenaries participated in the war in Ukraine together with the Russian Army and just two months ago he led a failed military rebellion against the Kremlin, but who was Yevgueni Prigozhin really?
Born on June 1, 1961 in what is now St. Petersburg, his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin began when Prigozhin, then a hot dog vendor at street stalls, distributed various food caterers to the Russian Army.
Prigozhin was nicknamed “Putin’s chef” due to his proximity to the president and his restaurant business, which he set up after he was pardoned from prison in 1990, where he spent almost ten years for various crimes.
The beginning of the relationship between Putin and Prigozhin took place in April 2000, shortly after the beginning of the term of the Russian president.
The first phase of the relationship between the two was purely commercial, but three years later, Putin would be celebrating his birthday on Prigozhin’s ship.
From the kitchen to leading a group of mercenaries
The future of ‘Putin’s chef’ changed its course with the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Prigozhin recruited 35,000 prisoners who were released to fight alongside the Russian troops.
However, over time and also, within the framework of the war, he had harsh confrontations with the Russian Defense Ministry, which he accused of depriving his men of ammunition during campaigns as intense as the one waged in the city of Bakhmut.
For a long time Prighozin denied having created Wagner, but in September 2022 he acknowledged having founded this private military company in 2014, which is prohibited by law in Russia, but he assured that it had been born as a group of patriots.
This decision gave the organization a face and made it a star on social media, constantly announcing the group’s operations against Ukrainian forces.
The Wagners became a military ace for the Kremlin in its invasion of Ukraine, as they managed to advance into areas where the Russian army. Yevgeni Prigozhin’s men managed to take the city of Bakhmut after long fighting.
The ‘Putin chef’ recruited mercenaries from both Africa, Belarus and the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk, making the group number between 2,000 and 4,000 soldiers in January 2023, according to The Times.
The main confrontation between the Wagner leader and the Russian government took place on June 24, 2023, after he rose up against the Putin regime by taking the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and marching on Moscow in response to alleged attacks.
Russians against their positions. Prigozhin assured that his troops would blockade the city until they had in their power the chief of the Russian General Staff, Valeri Gerasimov, and the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, with whom he had been fighting harshly for months.
Vladimir Putin described this performance as a “betrayal” by the leader of the Wagner Group, although he agreed to meet with him after the failed rebellion.
Thanks to the mediation of the Belarusian president, Alexandr Lukashenko, Prighozin gave up that same day and ordered his men to stop the operation.
On June 27, Lukashenko confirmed that Prigozhin was in exile in Belarus. After almost two months without hearing from the Wagner boss, he reappeared in a video shared via Telegram in which he suggested meeting in Africa to make Russia
“even bigger on all continents”, but he finally died on the 23rd. August after the plane he was traveling in crashed.
Beyond the Russian borders
In parallel, the Wagner boss has operated with his mercenaries in different war scenarios such as the Syrian war and various armed conflicts on the African continent, such as Mali, where he instructed local forces to protect the Government, an action that was subject of strong controversy.
The actions of the Wagner Group led to serious international sanctions. The first came to him in December 2021 from the European Union (EU) for serious human rights violations in several African countries, including Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya, where he has also been deployed.
In the case of Libya, the Military Prosecutor General’s Office linked Wagner to the murder of 26 students at the Tripoli Military College, the bombing of the illegal immigration headquarters in Tajoura, which caused the death of 63 emigrants, and the bombing of the city of Al Zawiya, committed during the war in that country between 2019 and 2020.
The Wagner Group would have recently begun to get involved with the new Government of Niger, which requested collaboration from the mercenaries after the coup d’état that occurred in the country on July 26.
Niger’s new military junta pleaded for help as the deadline for the release of ousted president Mohamed Bazoum loomed. The latest images shared by Yevgueni Prigozhin suggested that he could be on the African continent with the aim of recruiting new soldiers.