Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the outspoken tycoon who built a private paramilitary force that fought on behalf of Russia in Ukraine and Africa but whose harsh judgment of its army leadership led him to incite rebellion, is widely who was believed dead on Thursday, a day after. a plane he was on crashed in Russia. He is 62 years old.
Although his death has not been officially declared by Russian authorities or confirmed by family members or business associates, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin spoke of Mr. Prigozhin last Thursday and offered condolences to the families of the 10 crash victims. . And Pentagon officials for the first time publicly said they believed Mr. Prigozhin did not survive the crash, where everyone on board was killed. His name was on the passenger list.
Mr. Prigozhin has long used a close relationship with the Kremlin to secure lucrative government construction and catering contracts, and he developed the paramilitary force, known as Wagner, in close cooperation with Russian military intelligence service.
For years he kept a low public profile. Although Wagner has conducted operations on behalf of Moscow in Syria and several African countries, he has denied any involvement.
Mr. Prigozhin began to embrace a public profile only after Mr. Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, acknowledging later that year that he founded and ran Wagner. Signing military contracts and recruiting prison inmates, he built Wagner into a force estimated at 50,000.
In remarks a day after the plane crash, Mr. Putin said he knew Mr. Prigozhin since the early 1990s – a revelation, since the timing of their relationship has long been a mystery. Mr. Prigozhin once said in an interview that he first met Mr. Putin in 2000.
Speaking at a televised meeting, Mr. Putin continued: “This is a man with a complicated destiny. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved the necessary results.”
He said Russian investigators would pursue the crash investigation “to the end,” and offered his condolences to the families of those killed in the crash.
Mr. Prigozhin has emerged as a public power player in the past few months, using social media, especially the messaging platform Telegram, to create a personal brand out of tough talk, obscene videos and a willingness to endorse extrajudicial killing.
Mr. Prigozhin has been a harsh critic of the way the Russian military has conducted the war in Ukraine, issuing criticisms that Mr. Putin has let go unabated even as the government has cracked down on other critics. . Close enough to the president that he is known as “Putin’s chef,” Mr. Prigozhin who did not directly address Mr. Putin. And for his part, Mr. Putin seems interested in creating a kind of competition among his military leaders.
But raised by Mr. Prigozhin had his rift with the military leadership on June 23, saying in a 30-minute video that the invasion of Ukraine was a “racket” perpetrated by a corrupt elite seeking money and glory with no regard for Russian life. Within hours, he accused the Russian Army of attacking his forces, vowed to retaliate, and deployed his forces on Russian soil, soon claiming control of the southern city of Rostov- on-Don, the home of Russia’s southern command about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border.
Then, as his troops advanced toward Moscow, Mr. Prigozhin suddenly quashed a brief uprising, which challenged Russia’s political stability. He agreed to leave Rostov-on-Don under a deal that would drop the charges against him and allow him and any fighters loyal to him to leave for Belarus. Since then, he has published videos that appear to place him in locations in Belarus, Russia and Africa, but none could be independently verified.
Mr. Prigozhin (pronounced pree-GOH-zhin) was born in 1961 in the same town as Mr. Putin: St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. He spent nine years in prison in the 1980s for theft and other charges. Shortly after his release in 1990, just as private enterprise exploded across Russia, Mr. Prigozhin and his mother, Violetta, built a network of hot-dog stands. His business interests included a supermarket chain, casinos, construction and, later, military-related work.
His company Concord Catering began winning lucrative contracts to supply food to schools, government workers and then the army. According to Russian news media reports, companies affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin persuaded the Russian Parliament to change bidding laws, a rare move, to qualify them for military construction contracts worth millions.
Wagner’s roots go back to 2014, when Russia launched its first invasion of eastern Ukraine, a covert operation. Mr. Prigozhin asked for land from the Defense Ministry to train a private army that could fight on behalf of Russia without official links to the government. He was given the land, in the western Krasnodar region.
It was a convenient combination, said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, because it allowed Moscow to deploy professional, Russian-led military operations abroad while maintaining a credible denial.
Wagner-trained soldiers would go on to fight wars in the Middle East and across Africa, in addition to Ukraine. Human rights groups have accused Wagner soldiers of committing atrocities in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique.
Mr. Prigozhin also oversaw an entity known as the Internet Research Agency, based in his home city, which sought to influence the 2016 US presidential election by spreading false news and disseminating messages supporting Donald J. Trump .
In 2016, the United States imposed financial sanctions on Mr. Prigozhin and several of his businesses in connection with those activities. Two years later, he was one of 13 Russian citizens charged of the US federal grand jury on charges of election interference. He denied his involvement with the agency for years, just as he denied his association with Wagner, but after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he went public about his activities.
“I have never been a financier of the Internet Research Agency,” he wrote in a statement to a consortium of Western journalists in February. “I invented it, I made it, I managed it for a long time. It was created to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian theses from the West.
Similarly, he acknowledged the establishment and operation of Wagner in September 2022. Mr. Prigozhin’s paramilitary force took on an increasingly public role after the Russian Army’s plan to capture Kyiv immediately in the early days of the war failed. . He was seen in videos personally recruiting inmates from the prison to serve Wagner.
“If you serve six months, you will be free,” Mr. Prigozhin told a group of uniformed prisoners in a video published in September. But he is also blunt about their fate if they prove unfaithful. “If you come to Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we will kill you,” he said.
He recruited thousands of prisoners before announcing in February that he would stop the practice.
As his soldiers were thrown into brutal battles for control of cities in eastern Ukraine, including Bakhmut, Mr. Prigozhin regularly records videos near the front lines, seeking credit for battlefield successes, praising his troops as “probably the most experienced army in the world today.” and denounces the Russian military leadership.In local polls, he has become one of the most prominent political figures in Russia.
On his social media channels, and on a media outlet he controlled, RIA FAN, he regularly published videos that hit on populist themes and drew implicit contrasts with the Russian defense minister, Sergei K .Shoigu, who had never served as a soldier. Mr. Prigozhin often traveled to the Wagner camps, and his criticism of the military leadership and the Moscow “elite” became blistering as the war continued.
He also adopted merciless violence against perceived enemies. When a video surfaced of a man who turned himself in after agreeing to fight Wagner to death with a sledgehammer, Mr. Prigozhin to endorse the action.
“The death of a dog for a dog,” he wrote.-
Recently, he called for the imposition of martial law and a halt to normal government activities in Russia, saying these measures were necessary to win the war.
“We should stop building new roads and infrastructure facilities and work only for war, to live for a few years in the image of North Korea,” he said in an interview published on the Telegram messaging platform in May. “If we win, we can build anything.”
Mr. Prigozhin is often seen as a creation of Mr. Putin, who analysts say watched and even enabled his public feud with Mr. Shoigu to encourage competition for results. But many wondered how long it could go on before escalating into something violent.
In the Telegram interview, Mr. Prigozhin predicted political violence caused by relatives of dead and wounded soldiers growing increasingly frustrated with what he described as a coddled elite.
“Society always demands justice,” he said, “and if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Berlin, and Anton Troyanovski from London.