The hot-dog selling warlord who turned Russia’s ‘secret army’ on Vladimir Putin

For one week in 2022, the world thought Yevgeny Prigozhin was dead. The oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” had finally admitted he owned the fearsome mercenary group Wagner and was photographed at its base in Ukraine, head to toe in tactical gear, shaking the hands of troops.

But the photo op also unwittingly gave away the position of that Wagner base to Ukrainian bombers. After the site was reduced to rubble, rumours swirled that Prigozhin’s rise from a hot dog seller ex-con to one of the most influential tycoons in Russia might be at an end.

Until he popped up at a high-profile funeral in Moscow.

Now, for one day in 2023, the world thought Prigozhin was something else altogether: rebel. If he’d succeeded in his extraordinary June 23 coup attempt against Russia’s army chiefs, he might have also done what has been thought next to impossible for two decades: unseat Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Footage of a bombed Wagner base was again in play, only this time Prigozhin was accusing Russia itself of firing on his mercenaries, not Ukraine. He vowed revenge. As Wagner forces seized a city and military headquarters and advanced on Moscow, Putin took to state television to denounce for treason the man once known as his loyal “fixer”.

Then, just as suddenly, the coup was off. Prigozhin and the Kremlin had struck a deal, brokered by Russia’s neighbouring ally Belarus. Prigozhin would accept exile in Belarus in exchange for Russia dropping charges against him. Putin’s attack dog had been muzzled.

Yet exactly what kind of threat the Wagner boss posed to Putin and why he was allowed to walk away after the coup attempt remain live questions.

Prigozhin has tapped into anger in Russia over Putin’s costly Ukraine invasion, an anger suppressed in civil society under Kremlin crackdowns. “He’s been able to actually say it,” says Russia expert Dr Robert Horvath at Latrobe University. “But he’s not a voice of democracy however much he denounces the Kremlin’s elites and their corruption. He’s a war criminal.”

Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves the headquarters of the Southern Military District after aborting his move on Moscow.Credit: Reuters

Now, “he seems to have given up control and is at the mercy of Putin,” adds Russian military expert Katarzyna Zysk. “Still, many pieces of this story do not stick. Did he have any support [in his coup attempt]? And [why was] the Kremlin response so weak? Wagner rolled hundreds of kilometres deep into Russia practically unopposed.”

Horvath says the fact Prigozhin was allowed to live suggests he remains a threat to Putin. And he may not so easily be separated from the powerful organisations he has built over the past decade in service to his president.

Prigozhin isn’t like the other oligarchs in Russia. Where most got rich snapping up Russia’s state-owned assets after the fall of the Soviet Union, he rose through the ranks by virtue of knowing Putin. Prigozhin had been in prison for armed robbery and other offences in the 1980s. But by the late ’90s, he’d turned a hot dog stand into a string of high-class restaurants and then a lucrative Kremlin catering contract. And he set about making himself even more useful to Putin.

Horvath says Prigozhin saw an opening in 2011 during large pro-democracy protests in Russia. The legion of online bots he sent out after Kremlin critics, to disrupt the movement, would later morph into the sophisticated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. (Prigozhin was sanctioned and indicted over his role as founder and financier.)

In 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, Prigozhin created his most powerful entity yet, the Wagner Group, hiring mercenaries from across Russia to join the wave of unmarked “little green men” taking Ukrainian territory. Since then, his fighters have left a brutal trail of atrocities behind them, serving as an unofficial arm of the Kremlin not just in Ukraine, but across Africa and Syria, where they have also taken over lucrative oil fields or gold and diamond mines. “Criminality has been a constant feature of Prigozhin’s career,” says Horvath.

And terror has become part of the Wagner brand, adds researcher Isabella Currie, who tracks the group online. There, the mercenaries are known as “the cleaners” because they do the Kremlin’s dirty work. They post pictures with sledgehammers after using them to murder deserters or enemy soldiers. Prigozhin calls his mercenaries “patriots”.

Prigozhin serves Putin at his restaurant in 2011. Prigozhin is known as “Putin’s chef” for hosting the president at his restaurants and for his catering contracts with the Kremlin but reportedly hates the nickname.Credit: AP

Up until 2022, he had always vehemently denied owning Wagner. But after Wagner joined Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he decided to bring the group out of the shadows. Suddenly, his face appeared on posters, social media and state television. Propaganda films produced by Prigozhin-owned studios painted his mercenaries as the real heroes of the war. Wagner T-shirts (and sledgehammers) were even being sold in Russian stores.

Having reportedly fallen out of favour with Moscow, Prigozhin was back in the fold. The Russian army had proven weaker than anyone guessed, hollowed out by decades of corruption, and increasingly it was Wagner filling the gaps, leading charges against Ukraine’s seasoned soldiers. Prigozhin was awarded a Hero of Russia medal last June.

But Prigozhin was also stridently arguing with Russia’s generals on tactics, with each claiming credit for what few Russian victories there were. Kremlin elites reportedly questioned why Prigozhin got away with so much, but experts say Putin didn’t just need Wagner to prop up his failing war. He liked to keep him warring with the generals, wary of any one figure emerging as a hero to the people. Leaving “the dogs fighting around him” has always been Putin’s style, says Katarzyna Zysk.

More and more though, Prigozhin’s rants had been straying uncomfortably close to criticism of Putin himself. After Wagner seized the Ukrainian town of Soledar to exaggerated fanfare in January, Putin appeared to recognise Prigozhin was becoming too popular. He elevated some of the Wagner boss’s “enemies” in the military and appointed an overall commander for the invasion, General Gerasimov. It didn’t work.

With Russia’s offensive still failing in Ukraine and the army pushing for Wagner mercenaries to sign government contracts, Currie says Prigozhin’s attacks on the top military brass, including the defence minister, boiled over. US intelligence chiefs reportedly collected intel of an impending coup earlier in June.

Jon Richardson, formerly a senior Australian diplomat in Russia, wonders how the Kremlin missed Prigozhin’s shift from Putin pawn to warlord. “It’s like Frankenstein’s monster,” he says. “For a long time, I think people rightly assumed he was still directed by the Kremlin.”

As Prigozhin called on Russia’s National Guard and soldiers to join his mutiny, he insisted this was not a coup against Putin but a “march for justice” to “save Russia”. Yet, in the same breath, he raged that the war on Ukraine was built on a lie: Russia had never been under threat from Ukraine; Moscow’s elites just wanted to get rich off its resources and so had deceived Putin.

“We know Putin made the decision to invade,” says Horvath. That meant casting Putin as the foolish old tsar tricked by bureaucrats was a dangerous move indeed.

To Currie, the Wagner coup looks like “the gamble of a man backed against a wall”.

Even if the bombing of the mercenary base Prigozhin raged about was faked, as the Kremlin insisted, Prigozhin may still have been in fear for this life, Richardson says.

“We still don’t know what really happened but he might have thought this is a last throw of the dice. People say he has no obvious protectors, apart from perhaps Putin himself. And he’d seemed to side with the generals.” Or perhaps Prigozhin’s soaring social media stardom had gone to his head. “Was he just deluded into thinking he could take power while the army was away in Ukraine?”

Still both Zysk and Richardson question how far a Prigozhin takeover would have gone. “I don’t think Prigozhin had a shot at a real coup without support from within,” says Zysk. “The big question is whether he had any.”

Some experts have noted that Prigozhin has his own connections in the security services – and certain Russian elites took their time to publicly denounce the coup attempt, as if waiting to see how things unfolded. “Prigozhin has cracked the foundation of the regime and shown Putin’s supporters it’s not as solid as it appeared,” says Currie.

If Prigozhin had succeeded in unseating Putin, someone else in the more established elite might have soon after staged their own coup, says Richardson. “Even if he made it to Moscow, I don’t think he would have survived.”

But will he survive now he’s left his soldiers, his power base, for Belarus?

“He knows all too well how Putin usually treats those he considers traitors: with bullets, radioactive polonium, and military grade nerve agent,” says Zysk.

“Belarus is not the place to hide out from Russian assassins,” agrees Richardson.

But it could be that Prigozhin can again prove his value to Putin. If he really is no longer a danger to the president, Zysk says “he may still be useful to the regime to do what he does best: the dirty job.”

Yet, in launching Saturday’s coup, crossing the uncrossable line for Putin’s inner circle and surviving, Horvath thinks Prigozhin has become a fatal threat to his old boss. “It’s not over yet.”

This story was originally published on June 25 2023.

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