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 unusual: 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.
