How “Putin’s chef” built the world’s most notorious private army

ON AUGUST 23RD 2023 a private jet crashed north-west of Moscow, killing everyone on board. Among the ten victims were senior members of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary firm, including its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin (pictured). No one thought it was an accident. Prigozhin, once Vladimir Putin’s favourite hired gun, had fallen out of favour by launching a mutiny against his boss. People who do such things rarely live long. The Kremlin denied involvement, but Mr Putin added ominously that Prigozhin had “made serious mistakes in life”.

Two new books chronicle his extraordinary, villainous career and how Wagner came to be. From an early age, Prigozhin was opportunistic. He began as a street thug, and served nine years in prison for robbing and choking a woman. Later he became a restaurateur. His eatery in St Petersburg was frequented by Mr Putin; favour followed, as did government contracts. In 2014, after hearing that the Ministry of Defence was funding mercenary groups to fight in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin traded borscht for bullets.

The Wagner Group was far from Russia’s only paramilitary outfit, but it was particularly well-funded by the state. (In the year from May 2022, Wagner was given 86bn roubles, or $1bn, to spend on fighters’ salaries.) Mr Putin used Wagner to wage shadow wars with a degree of plausible deniability. After Ukraine, the group concentrated on Africa, beginning with Sudan in 2017. The continent was not one of Russia’s core foreign-policy interests and Prigozhin operated without direct supervision by the Kremlin. He took bets on places such as the Central African Republic (CAR), where there were mineral deposits to exploit.

Before the war in Ukraine, Wagner had roughly 6,000 mercenaries in Africa, spread across CAR, Libya, Mali and Sudan. They earned a reputation for extreme violence. “The most important thing is respect,” Vitaly Perfilev, the former head of Wagner’s operations in the CAR, told John Lechner, the author of “Death Is Our Business”. Units were advised to kill even women and children simply to send a message.

When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Prigozhin’s men were brought in to help. When the Ukrainians proved much tougher opponents than Mr Putin had expected, Prigozhin sought fresh cannon fodder. He promised criminals in Russian prisons large sums and amnesty if they signed up; some 40,000 did, the White House estimated. “Wagner grew by orders of magnitude just as Russia was struggling to continue to staff its war effort,” notes Jack Margolin, a researcher of international crime and the author of “The Wagner Group”.

Yet “more important than Wagner’s wins on the ground”, Mr Lechner writes, “was the perception of its success”. And Prigozhin was a master marketer. Videos of battlefield victories were widely shared on Telegram, a messaging app. Wagner even made schlocky action movies set in Africa. Inevitably, in these yarns the heroes are Wagner mercenaries who courageously defend the helpless.

Prigozhin’s men, with noms de guerre such as “Zombie”, built a distinctive subculture of ultra-nationalist, neo-pagan and often fascistic symbols. These could be turned into merchandise and sold for a profit, Mr Margolin notes. Wagner became a ghoulish brand.

Among anxious Westerners, the group became a lightning rod for fears that “Russia was back, a great power ready to take on US hegemony,” Mr Lechner writes. This proved useful for Prigozhin. To maintain preferential access to state tenders, he had always had to vie for Mr Putin’s attention. Now, the terror he inspired among Russia’s enemies was “proof to the Kremlin that his initiatives were a worthy investment”.

However, by early 2023 Prigozhin had realised that the war was going badly wrong. He publicly blamed the generals leading Russia’s regular army. The Ministry of Defence hit back by announcing that all “volunteer” fighters would come under its control. The power struggle that followed was never likely to end without bloodshed. As Mr Margolin writes, “Wagner could not be peacefully subsumed or destroyed while Prigozhin lived.”

Facing the loss of his empire, Prigozhin posted a tirade of criticism of the war online—a serious crime in Russia. Then he staged an abortive mutiny, marching his troops towards Moscow on June 23rd. For a day, the regime looked vulnerable. But then Prigozhin backed down, and agreed to go into exile in Belarus. In August he recorded a video from the CAR in which he seemed both defiant and nonchalant. A few days later, he was dead.

Since then, Wagner’s assets have ostensibly been under the control of his 26-year-old son, Pavel Prigozhin. The market for mercenaries—perhaps inspired by Wagner—has grown increasingly competitive. In Ukraine, Russian volunteer battalions funded by private businessmen are proliferating. In Africa, the group and its successor organisation, the Africa Corps, face rivalry not only from Russian upstarts, but also from foreign outfits such as Turkey’s Sadat. As the world grows more chaotic, more governments are tempted to pay for deniable deadly force. A hoodlum from St Petersburg showed the way. ■