Yevgeny Prigozhin
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Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was a Russian mercenary leader and oligarch. He led the Wagner Group private military company and was a close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin until launching a rebellion in June 2023. Prigozhin was sometimes referred to as "Putin's chef" because he owned restaurants and catering businesses that provided services to the Kremlin. Once a convict in the Soviet Union, Prigozhin controlled a network of influential companies whose operations, according to a 2020 investigation, were "tightly integrated with Russia's Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU".
Prigozhin (standing in background) hosted Russian President Putin and US President George W. Bush on his floating restaurant New Island in Saint Petersburg on 25 May 2002.
Touring the Concord Catering factory in 2010. Left to right: Presidential envoy to the Northwestern Federal District Ilya Klebanov, Chief Sanitary Inspector Gennady Onishchenko, Leningrad Region Governor Valery Serdyukov, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Concord factory director Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Bakhmut in April 2023. At the end of April, Prigozhin said that his forces were losing around 100 men a day.
The rivalry between the then-head of Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the leadership of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, headed by Sergei Shoigu, in the public sphere began in 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ultimately led to the Wagner Group rebellion on the 23rd to 24th of June 2023.
According to United States officials, Yevgeny Prigozhin had longstanding disputes with the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) "for years" prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, these tensions escalated and became more public during this stage of the Russo-Ukrainian War. During the initial stages of the invasion, the Russian Ground Forces suffered significant casualties, but the announcement of mobilization for reservists was delayed by Russian president Vladimir Putin. As a result, authorities actively sought to enlist mercenaries for the invasion, which led to a heightened influence and power for Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. Prigozhin was allocated substantial resources, including his own aviation assets. Additionally, starting in the summer of 2022, he gained the authority to recruit inmates from Russian prisons into the Wagner Group in exchange for their freedom. Western intelligence estimated that the number of Wagner mercenaries increased from "several thousand" fighters around 2017–2018 to approximately 50,000 fighters by December 2022, with the majority comprising criminal convicts recruited from prisons.
