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October 27, 2022 - 4:05pm
Robber and restauranteur Yevgeny Prigozhin’s unlikely rise to billionaire businessman and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s confidante began at a hot-dog stand. Sentenced to imprisonment by a Leningrad court in 1979 for offences including fraud, theft, assault and involving a minor in criminal activity, upon his release in 1990 Prigozhin embraced the new freedoms of the post-Communist era and became a hot-dog vendor.
Graduating to a chain of convenience stores, he then entered the high-end restaurant trade, most notably establishing the fashionable ‘New Island’ floating restaurant on the Neva River. The luxury eatery soon counted St Petersburg’s then-deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin, among its elite clientele. Upon his accession to the Russian Presidency in 2000, Putin continued to treat it as his preferred spot for entertaining visiting dignitaries, hosting Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush there. He even chose it as the site for his 2003 birthday celebrations.
Thanks to his burgeoning friendship with Putin, Prigozhin attracted the moniker of “Putin’s chef” and his company Concord Catering soon came into receipt of hefty government contracts to feed Russia’s schools, hospitals and army.
That was not the end of Prigozhin’s service to the Kremlin. In 2013, he founded the ‘Internet Research Agency’, the St Petersburg ‘troll farm’ accused by the US Justice Department of having waged “information warfare” to influence the 2016 US Presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour.
Just last month, a video posted online revealed Prigozhin visiting a Russian prison to compensate for dire personnel shortages in Ukraine by recruiting inmates to fight. Addressing assembled convicts, the entrepreneur announced that he represented the Wagner private military company and offered prisoners a pardon in return for six months on the front line, adding that deserters would face the firing squad.
His firm subsequently released a statement conceding that the speaker did indeed look “terribly similar” to Prigozhin and shared a “well-delivered manner of speech”. In a post online, Prigozhin admitted he had not only founded the paramilitary Wagner Group but had even personally “cleaned the old weapons” and “sorted out the bulletproof vests”.
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SubscribeComing from a country and regime of ‘their truth’, the world has become puzzling for me. Having read about Harry, the Prince and the Spare, and Putin delivering the main points of his understanding of the world order (the West has been trying to do… ‘whatever’ to Russia in all its glory) I can’t help agreeing with Whoopi Goldberg’s comment on Meghan the Duchess’ bitterness of having been the suitcase girl – it’s maybe how you FEEL you were treated. How you FEEL things are/were. How come the world has accepted the ‘their truth, how they feel’ as the truth (they=someone thinking differently from what seem to be the real facts)? How come the British phrase ‘take offence’ (= you take it, regardless of if it actually has been given) has established itself, in its most extreme, as a reason for starting wars? “Prigozhin this month accused Russia’s military command of being out of touch with the realities of the Ukraine conflict” – what is HIS truth, I wonder? Sending the sick and infected from the prisons (red handbands for the HIV and white for the hepatitis, or was it vv) to protect the Russian Motherland on the Ukrainian soil?
P.S. and I resent Putin saying NATO should ‘pull back’ – as a citizen of a former soviet republic, who is happy to have NATO as an alternative to Putin’s truth. Whatever wrong the US of A has committed in the past. At least they’re decent enough to admit now and then they had been ‘somewhat wrong’.
The USA’s best sales pitch at this point is “still better than the alternatives.”
Like Churchill’s defense of democracy!
Exactly! Worst form of government except for all the others.
btw, quite an interesting one (at least for me): What causes armies to lose the will to fight? Here’s what history tells us – and what Putin may soon find out
Criticising the war effort, not the actual war; so, no peace for Ukraine even if Prigozhin becomes more influential or powerful.
While destroying what’s left of the regular Russian Army.
An SS in the making.
The psychotics are finally taking over. Putin is no longer in full control.
Note that Vagner’s three-month attack on Bakhmut has no military value. Its sole purpose is to claim that Russian forces are “still on the offensive.” The reality is that they are losing on every front.
So this is the Third Reich in early 1945, with the gauleiters jockeying to take over a doomed regime.
But just as no one could replace Germany’s ruler in 1945, no one will be able to replace this “Vozhd.”
The very worst outcome for every Russian.
The Germany WW2 comparisons have gone from 1938 Sudetenland to early 1945 in only 7 months – I guess we should be happy 🙂
History, like everything else seems to move faster these days….
Several people (e.g. Streiff) have been puzzling over the continuing Bakhmut assault, which makes no sense, militarily. Seeing it as Prigozhin’s private war within the more general Ukraine war makes sense of it.
From the author’s description, Prigozhin sounds just as bad if not worse than Putin. Will we be any better off in the long run if some other militarist autocrat takes over Russia? Will the Russians? I doubt it. Then again, most of Russia’s history is a long chain of autocrats, militarism, and expanding at the expense of weaker neighbors. There’s probably already a line of wannabe Tsars forming behind Putin already just waiting for an opportunity to do the same things Russia has always done and act like they’re the greatest leader in the history of the motherland.
Don’t worry.
Putin has ingeniously made it impossible for anyone else to rule Russia.
As one toady put it: “there is no Russia without Putin.”
And soon there will be neither.
Any proof for such a bold predication?
I’m pretty sure that predictions cannot be proven until after the event, bold or otherwise.
Unless of course you really did mean predications. If you did I have nothing useful to add.
Simply point out any Russian politician who could succeed Putin.
They don’t exist.