How Putin's chef became a warlord: 1843 magazine investigates the rise of Yeveny Prigozhin
drew up outside the headquarters of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg. Inside a hush descended as word spread thatA meeting was under way in one of the conference rooms and Prigozhin marched straight into it. He cut an imposing figure: a stocky, bullet-headed man in his mid-50s, flanked by bodyguards. But many of his employees had never met him.
Instead he made his first mark on the public record as a criminal. In 1979, aged 18, Prigozhin was given a two-year suspended sentence for theft. While still on probation, he committed a series of burglaries. There wasn’t much worth stealing in Soviet-era Leningrad. In February 1980, Prigozhin and an accomplice broke into an apartment and stole a vase, a napkin holder and six wine glasses.
Putin’s rise to power carried Prigozhin in its slipstream. After Putin became president in 2000, Prigozhin became the caterer of choice at grand state occasions, earning him the nickname, “Putin’s chef”. The role offered him proximity to the most powerful man in the country, not to mention various world leaders. Photographers snapped him whipping a cloche off Putin’s dinner and hovering next to President George W. Bush.
His position was one that required great trust. There is a long tradition of political poisoning in Russia. A former American intelligence officer told me that the role of the official chef is more important in the Kremlin than anywhere in the West: “You really have to trust your personal chef. Big deal.” Putin knew that better than anyone – his grandfather had been Stalin’s personal chef.
The deserter’s brains are bashed in with a sledgehammer, a method of execution that has become Wagner’s trademark. Prigozhin called the video “excellent director’s work” Though some believe Prigozhin is a mere creature of the Kremlin, he did seem to have a certain amount of latitude to act on his own initiative. According to Gabidullin, in February 2018 Prigozhin took the “sole decision” to send his men to seize oil wells in Kurdish-controlled territory. Prigozhin didn’t realise that American special forces were operating in the area, a major intelligence failure.
The Wagner Group’s role was clarified in September 2022, when a remarkable video popped up on Twitter. It showed Prigozhin in a prison yard, drumming up recruits. Hundreds of men stand around him as he tells them that “God and Allah can get you out of here – in a coffin. I can get you out of here alive.” All they had to do was fight for Wagner in Ukraine. He dangled a promise many found impossible to resist: “You will not return back to prison under any circumstances.
Then he moved farther east to the town of Bakhmut, which he also claimed Wagner would capture by itself. But Russia’s generals weren’t prepared to help. According to Khodorkovsky, both Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of general staff, see Prigozhin’s men as cannon fodder whose job is to clear minefields by walking through them and identify enemy positions by drawing fire.
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