Who is Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin?
According to Russian official media, Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin will now relocate to adjoining Belarus and all charges towards him and his army might be withdrawn after he known as off the riot towards Moscow.
According to Russian TV station Rossiya 24, the deal to abruptly defuse the state of affairs was reached on Saturday evening after conversations between Prigozhin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Prigozhin is a Russian oligarch and mercenary chief of The Wagner Group, who has been combating alongside the Russian military in Ukraine.
Formerly imprisoned within the Soviet Union for stealing, Prigozhin now oversees a community of highly effective companies, together with the Wagner Group, a state-backed mercenary agency, and three companies suspected of interfering with the 2016 and 2018 US elections.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin grew to become concerned within the grocery retailer enterprise, playing enterprise and the restaurant enterprise.
In the 2000s, Prigozhin began getting nearer to Vladimir Putin. By 2003, he had cut up together with his enterprise companions and opened his personal, stand-alone eateries.
Notably, Concord Catering, one in all Prigozhin’s companies, secured important authorities contracts. He obtained tons of of tens of millions of {dollars} in federal contracts to feed authorities workers and college students. Since Prigozhin owns eateries and caterers that work for the Kremlin, he’s generally known as “Putin’s chef”.
Prigozhin established the Internet Research Agency, a bot farm that meddled within the 2016 US presidential election by speading misinformation on social media.
Although it’s nonetheless unclear if it affected the election’s final result, the US intelligence group known as it out and sanctioned Prigozhin, who admitted final 12 months that he had meddled in US elections and would do so again.
The Wagner Group
After years of denying his involvement with Wagner, he acknowledged he was the founder of the group on September 26, 2022.
He claimed to have began it in May 2014 with the intention to help the Russian army combating in Donbas. This revelation was made in response to a extensively shared movie during which Prigozhin was proven infiltrating a Mari El jail and attractive detainees by providing them freedom in the event that they labored for the Wagner Group for six months.
He claimed to have 50,000 males obtainable to him “in the best times,” with roughly 35,000 of them all the time on the entrance traces.
He didn’t specify if these figures included prisoners, however it’s recognized that he visited Russian jails to search out fighters, providing them pardons in alternate for surviving a six-month stint serving alongside Wagner.
In the times and weeks following Russia’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in April 2014, Wagner was first noticed in motion in jap Ukraine shortly after a separatist battle there broke out.
According to studies, Prigozhin has benefited financially from Wagner’s deployment to Africa and Syria. Using its entry to gold and different assets in Africa, the enterprise is funding operations in Ukraine, in line with US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s assertion in January.
Problematic relationship with Putin
Prigozhin has offered Putin with a conundrum not too long ago by brazenly criticising Russia’s army authorities.
In one significantly ugly video from the start of May, Prigozhin stood subsequent to a pile of useless Wagner fighters and pointed a gun immediately at two military officers. Gesturing in the direction of the our bodies behind him, he mentioned: “The blood is still fresh. They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.”
When Prigozhin launched a fresh rant against the Russian military on Friday and then led his men into the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, he ignited a full-scale uprising against the Kremlin.
Putin reacted to Prigozhin’s actions by saying “it is a stab in the back of our country and our people” in an deal with to the nation on Saturday.