Yevgeny Prigozhin

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (Евгений Викторович Пригожин; 1 June 1961 – 23 August 2023) 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.

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was born an only child on 1 June 1961 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia).

His mother, Violetta Kirovna Prigozhina, was a hospital nurse.

His father, Viktor Yevgenyevich Prigozhin, was a mining engineer who died when Yevgeny was nine.

His grandfather, Yevgeny Ilyich Prigozhin, was a captain in the Red Army during World War II, who fought in the Battles of Rzhev and received a medal "For Courage".

Aspiring to be a professional skier, he graduated from Leningrad Sports Boarding School No. 62 in 1977.

However, he abandoned his sports career after an injury.

He later worked as a fitness trainer at a children's sports school.

In 1979, 18-year-old Prigozhin was caught stealing and was given a suspended sentence of two years and six months in prison.

He served his sentence working at a chemical plant in Veliky Novgorod.

In 1980, he returned to Leningrad and joined a gang.

He participated in a burglary spree in Leningrad, before being caught after choking a woman on the street during a robbery, with him and accomplices then stealing the woman's earrings and boots.

In 1981, he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment in a high-security penal colony for robbery, theft, fraud, and involving minors in criminal activity.

According to Prigozhin, he violated the terms of his solitary confinement "on a regular basis" until he was sent to general population in 1985, where he started to "read intensively" and worked as a lathe operator, tractor driver, and cabinet maker after receiving training at a vocational school.

In 1988, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union reduced his sentence to ten years on good behavior, noting that he had begun "corrective behavior".

He was sent to a medium-security penal colony and was released in 1990.

In 2014, Prigozhin reportedly founded the Wagner Group to support pro-Russian paramilitaries in Ukraine.

Funded by the Russian state, it played a significant role in Russia's invasion of Ukraine and supported Russian interests in Syria and in Africa.

In November 2022, Prigozhin acknowledged his companies' interference in United States elections.

In February 2023, he confirmed that he was the founder and long-time manager of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company running online propaganda and disinformation campaigns.

Prigozhin's companies and associates, and formerly Prigozhin himself, are subject to economic sanctions and criminal charges in the United States and the United Kingdom.

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".

In October 2020, the European Union (EU) imposed sanctions against Prigozhin for his financing of the Wagner Group's activities in Libya.

In April 2022, the EU imposed further sanctions on him for his role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The FBI offered a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to Prigozhin's arrest.

Prigozhin openly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for corruption and mishandling the war against Ukraine.

Eventually, he said the reasons they gave for invading were lies.

On 23 June 2023, he launched a rebellion against the Russian military leadership.

Wagner forces captured Rostov-on-Don and advanced toward Moscow.

The rebellion was called off the following day, and the criminal charges against Prigozhin were dropped after he agreed to relocate his forces to Belarus.

On 23 August 2023, exactly two months after the rebellion, Prigozhin was killed along with nine other people when a business jet crashed in Tver Oblast, north of Moscow.

The Wall Street Journal cited sources within the US government as saying that the crash was likely caused by a bomb on board or "some other form of sabotage".

Since then, researchers and other analysts have reached the conclusion that an on-board bomb or explosive likely downed the plane.

Prigozhin sponsored the 2020 war film Rzhev (film), based on a 1991 novel by Vyacheslav Kondratyev that mentions his grandfather.

His father and stepfather are believed to be of Jewish descent.

Prigozhin's great-uncle was Soviet scientist Yefim Ilyich Prigozhin.

He settled with Yefim for several years during his childhood in the Ukrainian city of Zhovti Vody, where he worked in an open-pit uranium mine.

His stepfather, Samuil Fridmanovich Zharkoi, was a ski instructor and introduced Prigozhin to cross-country skiing.