After mutiny, Kremlin look to unwind holdings tied to Wagner mercenary boss
Listen 10 min Comment on this story Comment Gift Article Share
RIGA, Latvia — With Moscow still rattled by the Wagner mercenary group’s failed rebellion, the Kremlin has begun the difficult task of dismantling and taking control of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s sprawling empire, which included not only the shadowy army-for-hire but also a propaganda media wing and internet troll factories infamous for interfering in elections in the United States.
Prigozhin, the St. Petersburg mogul known as “Putin’s chef” because he made billions from government catering contracts to feed soldiers and kindergartners across Russia, has dropped out of sight since agreeing last Saturday to halt his mutiny and go to Belarus. Although Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Prigozhin had arrived there, he has not been seen.
In his absence, the warlord’s businesses have already begun to crumble, with his media empire the first to fall apart. But managing the dissolution, restructuring or takeover of his operations poses a challenge for the Russian government. In Africa, for instance, Russia has sought to reassure leaders who relied on Wagner for security that the firm will continue to operate, but it is not clear that will be possible while also cutting off Prigozhin from the stream of public funds that have financed and enriched him for decades.
Advertisement
In addition, the Russian military relies on Prigozhin’s businesses to feed soldiers fighting in Ukraine and cannot afford disruptions.
U.S. intelligence officials, meanwhile, are working to learn more about how the fallout from Prigozhin’s rift with Russian President Vladimir Putin is impacting Russia’s mercenary army and formal defense establishment.
Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the war in Ukraine, has been detained by Russian authorities, according to U.S. intelligence officials, but they said it was unclear whether his detention was temporary or he will face punishment as an accomplice to the Wagner rebellion.
Adding to the complexity in Russia is the gray financing that Prigozhin used — in part because some of his businesses were illegal. Many operated on a cash-only basis with some creative accounting, as evidenced by the billions of rubles stuffed into vans near Wagner’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, and seized by law enforcement after the mutiny.
Advertisement
“Prigozhin is not only the Wagner Group, he represents a structure that is trying to work on the ideological front, on the political front, and so on,” said Denis Korotkov, a Russian investigative journalist who first uncovered the Wagner Group. “All this works in a tight ecosystem with other sides of his business.”
Prigozhin ran the Patriot media group, a network of sites and blogs that amplified his messaging across online platforms and thrived on the Telegram app. This allowed Prigozhin and Wagner to boost their public image, despite being blacklisted on state TV, and to slam regular military leaders for mismanaging the war.
Prigozhin’s online outreach also included the infamous troll factory, whose staff has been placed under sanctions by the United States for election interference. Those efforts have morphed into new projects such as the Cyber Front Z, which recruited people to post pro-Russian comments in discussions about the war in Ukraine on many of the world’s most popular online platforms.
Advertisement
Following the rebellion, Prigozhin’s websites were quickly taken offline by Russia’s internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor. On Friday evening, Yevgeniy Zubarev, the editor in chief of the group’s flagship site RIA FAN, announced that the entire media group was shutting down.
“We are closing down and leaving Russia’s information agenda,” Zubarev said in a surprisingly frank video, in which he revealed that Prigozhin began his first disinformation campaigns in 2009.
It might have taken Russian authorities just a few days to curb Prigozhin’s influence online, but other enterprises, such as his vast recruitment network of fighters across Russia; his operations across Africa and the Middle East; and his catering company — the backbone of the whole empire — will be much harder, if not impossible, to unwind.
Although Prigozhin has not been seen in Belarus, there are reports of a camp being built there following the deal brokered by Lukashenko to end the rebellion. And Wagner’s recruitment efforts in Russia appear to still be functioning as of Friday, despite most of their VKontakte social media pages, which are a main recruitment tool, having been taken offline.
A Wagner recruiter reached by The Washington Post said the group has no plans to sign contracts with the Russian Defense Ministry, and that active recruitment is ongoing. The recruiter also denied reports that the group is moving to Belarus.
Bumaga, a local St. Petersburg news outlet, reported earlier this week that recruitment was continuing, including in local gyms and fighting clubs, even though Russian officials said Wagner would no longer take part in the war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin still refers to as a “special military operation.”
Advertisement
The amount of money at stake is enormous.
By Putin’s own admission, Prigozhin’s catering business was paid at least $1 billion last year through government-awarded contracts to feed tens of thousands of soldiers on the front line in Ukraine. These catering contracts have been the Russian state’s main vehicle of financing Prigozhin and his dealings.
Prigozhin’s main company, Concord, and subsidiary companies provided food and other services, almost certainly at an inflated price, and then used the overflow revenue to finance unofficial endeavors, including the mercenary group.
“Concord runs a group of companies that has been providing food for the servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces since 2006,” Prigozhin wrote in a June letter to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. “The revenue received from these companies is then used to finance the projects in Africa, Syria, and other countries, where the expenses for advancing the interests of the Russian state as of May 2023 amounted to 147 billion rubles [about $1.7 billion].”
Advertisement
Replacing a supplier of that scale will be difficult, especially as Russian fighters try to fend off a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Any shortfall in revenue from catering could have a domino effect on the rest of the operations that relied on those cash flows.
Although Putin said that Wagner fighters would be allowed to join Prigozhin in Belarus, early indications suggest that the mercenary group is likely to be downscaled in drastic fashion. Putin has essentially offered Wagner fighters three options: follow Prigozhin into exile, join Russia’s regular forces, or go home.
It’s not clear how many fighters joined the mutiny or have stuck by Prigozhin’s side. Prigozhin claimed that his force counted 25,000 fighters, though the real number is likely lower. According to U.S. estimates, there were around 10,000 contractors — a more loyal and trained part of the group — constituting the Wagner force in Ukraine. The rest were convicts recruited from prison who sustained heavy casualties in fighting for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
Advertisement
“I would be surprised if Prigozhin had his paramilitary formation in the thousands of people,” said Ruslan Leviev, a military analyst from the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent Russian open-source intelligence (OSINT) group. “They gave all the armored vehicles to the Ministry of Defense. Access to money, tenders and media empires was cut off. Who will pay their salaries? And why would Prigozhin need them if he now does not receive corrupt money in return?”
There are other private military companies in Russia, but none seem positioned to replace Wagner in Africa, where for years it served as an unofficial extension of the Kremlin’s efforts to exert influence and diminish the sway of the United States and Europe.
“There is no one,” said Korotkov, the investigative journalist, when asked who might replace Wagner. “Technically, you could find some other subcontractor, but Prigozhin had weight and caliber there.”
Advertisement
“Anyone who will try to enter there will likely start by plundering the funding and then will get chopped up somewhere in the jungle,” he added. “So there is no similar figure who would take on this load in Russia.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday said it was up to African countries to decide whether they wanted to continue security contracts with Wagner.
In the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali, the two countries where Wagner has its largest presence on the continent, leaders emphasized that their original connections were with the Kremlin, not the paramilitary group.
Fidèle Gouandjika, a top adviser to CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, said the country initially signed security contracts with Moscow: “We did not know Wagner. We did not sign with Wagner. We signed with Kremlin,” Gouandjika said.
Advertisement
But Gouandjika also acknowledged that Russia ultimately sent Wagner soldiers and that those soldiers, he said, had “saved democracy” in CAR. The “entire population,” he said, was happy with the performance of the contractors, and he dismissed reports of atrocities committed by Wagner soldiers as “fake news.”
According to the Sentry, an investigative organization investigating war crimes, conflict and corruption in Africa, Wagner controls all military operations outside the CAR capital, Bangui, and led “widespread, systematic, and well-planned campaigns of mass killing, torture, and rape” throughout the country.
Sentry said the mercenary group has trained and outfitted a dozen militias.
“In CAR, Wagner has perfected a blueprint for state capture, supporting a criminalized state hijacked by the Central African [Republic] president and his inner circle, amassing military power, securing access to and plundering precious minerals, and subduing the population with terror,” the Sentry wrote in a report published Tuesday.
Gouandjika said no changes were planned. “Wagner saved the Central African Republic,” he said. “For the moment, we are with Wagner. But whether we stay with Wager does not depend on us. It depends on Russia … and we have confidence in Russia.”
But even if Moscow decided to disassemble Wagner’s presence in the country, the group’s roots there may now run too deep. Martin Ziguele, the former CAR prime minister and now an opposition figure, said that Touadéra had “let the sheep into the fold” by allowing the mercenaries “who are capable of anything and who respond to no one” to operate in the already-fragile country.
“The biggest threat is not from armed groups or the opposition; it comes from Wagner,” Ziguele said. “They have infiltrated all the systems. At the heart of the army, in the economy, in the wood industry, in politics, at the airport — everything. They have all the power.”
Touadéra, at this point, Ziguele said, is a “total hostage” of Wagner.
An analyst in Bangui, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said that Wagner contractors remained at their bases as of Thursday, with no changes obvious in the capital. John Lechner, an expert on Wagner activities in Africa, said: “It’s safe to say that they will continue to be around for the near term.”
“Even if there were in a change in management, I think a change in personnel would be relatively slow,” Lechner said.
As the Kremlin has been working to untangle itself from the once-loyal warlord, it has also become clear that Prigozhin was the glue holding together a splintered empire, much as many aspects of modern Russia hang on one man: Putin.
“In the absence of Mr. Prigozhin himself, the Wagner Group will either cease to exist, or it will degenerate into something completely different, incapable of the same level of activity,” Korotkov said.
Ilyushina and Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia; Chason from Dakar, Senegal; and Hudson from Washington.
Gift this article Gift Article
Source: The Washington Post
