How did this man go from Putin’s servant to his biggest threat ever? Yevgeny Prigozhin is a man from St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin’s hometown, and he spent most of the ’80s in jail. When he was released in the sort of freewheeling ’90s, he started his career in business. And it was actually at one of his restaurants that he met Vladimir Putin and started working for him and eventually becoming very, very rich. Prigozhin became so close to Putin that he started calling Putin “Papa.” That’s when Prigozhin earned the nickname “Putin’s chef.” The first images we see of Prigozhin are actually him just as a silent servant at state dinners hosted by Vladimir Putin. We see his unmistakable ears poking out when Putin hosted George W. Bush in St. Petersburg. Putin is famously paranoid, but you know, this is the man who’s literally preparing and serving the food. This is a very specific kind of vulnerability and trust that he placed in Mr. Prigozhin. A real business opportunity came as Russia, and Russia’s military, started becoming increasingly involved in conflicts around the world. There was Prigozhin, ready to assist. You know, he and another man called Dmitry Utkin became the founders of the Wagner Group. And both of those men realized that they could also use this opportunity to enrich themselves. That’s happened in Central African Republic, in Syria and in many of the other places where Wagner has operations. Prigozhin was also really out of the limelight during this time. But all of that changed once the war in Ukraine started. Relying on hired guns and freed convicts, Prigozhin created one of the most combat-ready units fighting for Russia in Ukraine. As he became increasingly more public, his image changed. He often appears in army fatigues. He’s often also on the front line and talking about fatalities. He’s really been the only one to speak about the carnage and the horror of this war. On June 23, Prigozhin and his Wagner fighters seized the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and staged a march that stopped within 125 miles of Moscow. The 36-hour rebellion became the biggest threat to Putin’s regime since he came to power. Prigozhin’s fate has been shrouded in mystery since the aborted mutiny. As part of a deal with Putin to end the rebellion, Belarus’s authoritarian leader offered exile to Prigozhin and his Wagner fighters. Then, a video of a man whose silhouette and voice bear a striking resemblance to Prigozhin appeared on Telegram, welcoming hundreds of Wagner fighters at a camp in Belarus. The man, whose face is obscured throughout the video, has a clear message: You may not have seen the end of “Putin’s chef” yet. Prigozhin is the embodiment, in a lot of ways, of Russia’s trajectory from the difficult and chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union through the flourishing of capitalism — and now, through what’s becoming a society where hatred and celebration of war are really front and center. The level of real violence and vulgarity in public political life is something that Prigozhin has given to Russia.
