Who was Yevgeni Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries who defied Putin by marching on Moscow

The leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhinhas been left for dead after the private plane in which he was allegedly traveling crashed in the Russian region of Tver, north of Moscow. A plane crash that has sparked speculation and that occurs two months after the head of the mercenaries challenge the Russian command and march on Moscow in an ordeal against the Kremlin.

Prigozhin, 62, was born in Saint Petersburg in 1961 and spent nine years in soviet prisons for crimes including fraud and theft. He was released in 1990, in the death throes of the USSR, and began a career as a restaurateur. He would have met the now Russian president at precisely this time and would come to be known as the“Putin’s cook”since he was in charge of catering at Kremlin events.

In 2014, Prigozhin founded the Wagner paramilitary company. Sanctioned by the United States, which accuses the group of committing atrocities, its mercenaries have fought in Syria, Libya or the Central African Republic. Prigozhin has further admitted that he created and financed a ‘troll farm’ that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. In November 2022, Prigozhin acknowledged that interference and said he would do it again.

However, it was with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine that it began to gain more and more notoriety. His mercenaries, including thousands of inmates he recruited in prisonsled the assault on the city of bakhmut, the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. Through his social networks, Prigozhin was celebrating his war achievements and also through his channel he began his direct confrontation with the Russian military leadershipespecially the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff, Valeri Gerasimov.

Proof of this is the video he published in May in which he exploded against the Kremlin due to the lack of ammunition that, he denounced, the Russian command was supplying to its fighters: surrounded by corpses, in it he lashed out at Shoigu and Gerasimov, at whom he dedicated all sorts of expletives, and threatened to leave Bakhmut.

The tension was definitively blown up last June, when Prigozhin led a mutiny in which Wagner’s mercenaries seized the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and launched a march to moscow. An attempt at rebellion that his own Putin called Russia a “stab in the back” and betrayal and that, however, ended without charges against Prigozhinwho went into exile in Belarus after an agreement reached with the mediation of the Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko.

This decision, after directly challenging Putin, caused surprise and unleashed unknowns about the future of Prigozhin, who met with the Russian president days later in the Kremlin. Subsequently, however, the Wagner leader was photographed in St. Petersburg and, this week, he appeared in a video supposedly in Africa. Two months after the rebellion, now Prigozhin is dead.