‘No one voted for you.’
CHAPTER 15
INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS
Among the band of criminals who run Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, some stand out. Yevgeny Prigozhin has something of a personal connection to me. Prigozhin is Putin’s trusted counsellor; in addition to advice, he provides many of the technical, logistical and military resources that Putin needs to impose his will. But the way in which Prigozhin attained such eminence is unusuaclass="underline" a street thief who served time in jail, he later became a caterer and food merchant, running a hot-dog stall in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. With the help of friendly local officials, he was able to open a restaurant, then a convenience store, eventually expanding his activities to become one of the city’s most powerful operators, providing food for public bodies. This brought him into contact with the first deputy chairman of the St Petersburg city government, Vladimir Putin. Their partnership has endured for over a quarter of a century; and even now, with Prigozhin wielding influence in every area of Kremlin activity, he’s still universally known as ‘Putin’s Cook’.
As I have mentioned, one of Putin’s responsibilities during his time in St Petersburg was managing the relationship between the municipal authorities and special services and the city’s organised crime groups. The Russian mafia wielded great power in St Petersburg in the lawless 1990s, to the extent that it was impossible for the authorities to control their activities. The only solution was to do deals with them, a task that the mayor entrusted to his deputy. Putin dealt with the worst elements of the St Petersburg underworld, so he probably didn’t bat an eyelid when he learned that his associate, Yevgeny Prigozhin, also had a criminal record. Prigozhin served nine years in jail – covering most of the 1980s – for offences including robbery, burglary and fraud. Extracts from some of his convictions suggest a significant level of violence, with charges of assault and battery against young women. ‘Prigozhin continued to strangle Ms Koroleva,’ runs one graphic indictment, ‘until the point at which she lost consciousness…’
It seems prudent to ask why a man with such a chequered past became, and still remains, an adviser to the Russian president. Prigozhin himself has used his position to pressure internet search engines to remove references to his criminal convictions, with some degree of success. In more recent times, his actions have been equally unsavoury, but now they are carried out at the behest of the Kremlin and bring him approbation rather than jail sentences. His Concord Management and Consulting Group has become a multi-billion-dollar company, with deals to provide school meals throughout the country, and to feed conscripts in the Russian army and patients in Russia’s hospitals. Periodic outbreaks of dysentery caused by contaminated food have not persuaded Putin to terminate Concord’s contracts, and investigations of fiscal impropriety have been discreetly shelved.
More worrying than run-of-the-mill corruption, however, are Prigozhin’s international activities. A number of reputable news outlets have reported that Prigozhin finances a group of outfits collectively known as the Wagner Private Military Company (Wagner PMC), a secretive organisation of mercenaries that carry out missions dictated by the Kremlin. Prigozhin has denied any links and gone as far as to use the English courts to try and sue those who repeated and adopted the allegation. Wagner first came to the world’s attention in 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s illegal seizure of the Crimean peninsula was preceded by the appearance of groups of unmistakeably military men wearing unmarked uniforms and staying largely in the shadows. Their self-effacing behaviour earned them the nicknames ‘polite people’ and ‘green men’, but their mission was to prepare the way for a brazen land grab that trampled on the norms of international law. The same ‘green men’ were later spotted in eastern Ukraine, supporting pro-Moscow separatist rebels, and in Syria, fighting alongside government troops loyal to Bashar al-Assad.
Yevgeny Prigozhin serves Vladimir Putin at a banquet near Moscow in November 2011
The Kremlin has denied any ties to them, claiming that they were private individuals who happened to be ‘on holiday’ in Crimea. When investigative journalists established that many of them had served in or had connections with the Russian special forces, Moscow said they were all ‘retired’ and must have travelled to the war zones off their own bat. Mercenary groups are illegal in the Russian Federation, but Wagner PMC troops have an impressive habit of turning up wherever the Kremlin seeks to exert its influence. And it isn’t always the interests of the Russian state that Wagner PMC is sent to support: more often than not, it seems that Putin and his cronies use its resources to further their own venal objectives. Prigozhin is, we are told, the tool they use, not the instigator – his strings, according to some people, are pulled by Putin’s ‘personal banker’, Yuri Kovalchuk.
Not all of Wagner’s activities have been successful. In early 2018, a dozen Russian military operatives were killed in US airstrikes against Syrian pro-government forces in the east of the country. The world expected the Kremlin to react with fury at so many Russian deaths; but Moscow was silent, evidently embarrassed at having to admit that ‘volunteer’ Russian forces were taking part in military operations abroad.
Also in 2018, Wagner PMC mercenaries began work in the Central African Republic (CAR), where Moscow was hoping to extend it political and military influence, displacing the former colonial power, France. Wagner’s brief was to train the CAR army, in return for which another of Prigozhin’s companies, Lobaye Invest, was granted lucrative diamond mining rights. I provided funding for a group of Russian filmmakers that was travelling to the CAR to investigate Wagner’s operations. In July 2018, the TV journalists Alexander Rastorguyev, Orkhan Dzhemal and Kirill Radchenko tried to film a camp where Russian mercenaries were based. Shortly afterwards, their vehicles were ambushed and all three of them were killed. An inquiry by local authorities concluded that the murders were the work of ‘robbers’, an explanation that was immediately supported by the Kremlin. But investigations by the Dossier Center, my fact-checking media organisation dedicated to probing the Kremlin’s illegal activity in Russia and beyond, uncovered a darker story: the journalists had been lured to a secluded spot by a fixer connected to Prigozhin’s employees and the alleged robbers had stolen nothing after murdering them. The Dossier Center concluded that ‘the murder was premeditated and carried out by professionals … following carefully planned surveillance.’ Its report indicated that Wagner employees had obstructed the inquiry into the men’s deaths by destroying evidence, and when a CNN reporter travelled to the CAR to investigate further, she too was followed and harassed. There is no evidence to suggest that the murders of the journalists were instructed by Prigozhin.
Western experts estimate that Prigozhin commands a force of around 5,000 troops, former regular soldiers and special forces veterans, who have become Putin’s unofficial and usually invisible army. Funded and deployed by the Kremlin to countries as far away as Libya, Sudan and Mozambique, they enjoy almost total impunity, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty. The investigative Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, obtained video footage of Wagner operatives torturing and executing a Syrian deserter. And in the CAR, a United Nations report accused Wagner-deployed mercenaries of human rights abuses, including the random shooting of civilians, extrajudicial executions, gang rape and torture. Britain, like several other Western countries, has added Prigozhin to its sanctions list, citing his ‘responsibility for significant foreign mercenary activity and multiple breaches of UN arms embargos’.