Russian mercenary leader, oligarch, restaurateur, former owner of Wagner PVC (1961–2023)
Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (Alternatively: Yevgeniy Vicktorovich Prigozhin, Russian: Евгений Викторович Пригожин; 1 June 1961 – 23 August 2023) was a Russian oligarch and former close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin was nicknamed "Putin's chef" because his restaurants and catering businesses hosted dinners which Putin attended with foreign dignitaries. Prigozhin controlled a network of companies including Wagner Group, a Russian state-backed mercenary group operating in Africa, Syria, and Ukraine; and three companies accused of interference in the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections. Prigozhin long denied any connection to Wagner, however, a video in September 2022 showed Prigozhin in a Mari El prison recruiting inmates, promising them freedom if they served six months with the Wagner Group. On 26 September 2022, Prigozhin further admitted that he had founded the Wagner Group specifically to support Russian forces in the War in Donbas, in May 2014. Prigozhin also long denied his role in Russian interference in U.S. elections, but in November 2022, he admitted his role in such operations, saying they would continue. Prigozhin himself spent nine years as a convict in prisons in the Soviet Union. According to an investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel, Prigozhin's operations "are tightly integrated with Russia's Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU". Prigozhin, his companies and associates face economic sanctions and criminal charges in the United States. In June 2023, he launched a short-lived rebellion against Russian Armed Forces, but a truce was agreed within 24 hours negotiated by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and it was said Prigozhin would move to the country.
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There’s an optimistic scenario and a pessimistic one. I have little faith in the first one. [It looks like this]: Europe and America get tired of the Ukrainian conflict. China sits everyone down at the negotiating table. We agree that everything we’ve already snatched is ours and everything we haven’t snatched isn’t ours. The odds of this are slim.
The recipe for victory in the NWO: general mobilization for two million people, good army management and discipline, shooting deserters. It is necessary to make all the heads of defense enterprises military personnel so that the death penalty can also be applied to them. It is necessary to make the country a military monster so that there are more weapons than in North Korea.
«Если мы воюем дальше, надо объявлять мобилизацию уже сейчас», Meduza (31 May 2023)
The special military operation was done for the purpose of “denazification,” while we’ve made Ukraine into a nation that’s known throughout the world. They’re like the Greeks or the Romans at their peaks. And as far as “demilitarization,” if they had some 500 tanks at the start of the special military operation, now they have 5,000. If they had 20,000 capable fighters before, now they have 400,000. What kind of demilitarization is that? Now it looks more like we did the opposite, somehow or other, and militarized Ukraine.