Yevgeni Prigozhin, from Putin's "chef" to enemy of the Russian Army

MADRID, 24 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Yevgeni Prigozhin, born in 1961 in former Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, is a product of Russia's transformation, educated on the streets and a born survivor buoyed up by the far-reaching political and economic changes the country underwent during the 1990s. , a wild environment that facilitated such radical transitions as the one experienced by the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, a former hotelier.

Prigozhin's first big experience with the system occurred in 1981 when, at the age of 20, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for robbery, nine of which he spent behind bars. When he was released from prison, Prigozhin found himself in a different world. He was freed in 1990, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, a land of opportunism where the Wagner leader began to prosper selling hot dogs. In just five years and after buying part of a supermarket chain, he ended up opening his own restaurant.

The place was the epicenter of the network of contacts that Prigozhin would build over the next few years, as he expanded the business. One in particular: New Island, a ship that sailed on the Neva River, where Russian President Vladimir Putin began taking his guests.

Prigozhin, in an interview collected by the BBC, approximately sets his first meeting with Putin around April 2000, at the beginning of the president's term, during a visit by the then Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Three years later, Putin would be celebrating his birthday on Prigozhin's ship.

The first phase of the relationship between the two had a purely commercial nature. Prigozhin founded a catering company, Concord, which was contracted by the Kremlin to supply food to the country's military and public schools, and the Wagner leader remained more or less in the background for the next decade.

A leaked document from the Russian law firm Capital Legal Services, which counted Prigozhin among its clients, details that the Wagner leader spent the 2000s in the hospitality business through Concord. Absent from this biography, collected by the portal 'The Intercept', is nonetheless his decisive turn to the arms business with the founding of the group of mercenaries, of which public knowledge was first made public in 2014.

Sources from the newspaper 'The Guardian' point out that Wagner's creation had a lot to do with the concept of "plausible deniability", since, at that time, Russia had declared private military companies illegal. "I think it was Prigozhin who raised the issue directly with Putin. Perhaps Russian military intelligence was involved, but I suspect that this project was completely in Prigozhin's hands," according to a former Russian Defense Ministry official, who was not anonymous.

The ministry provided Prigozhin with land in Molkino, in southern Russia, the group's first training base, which from there began to grow in importance. First, intervening on behalf of separatists in the Ukrainian region of Lugansk, and then spreading to Syria -- where Russia acted as an ally of Damascus in the civil war -- and from there to Africa, where according to the US and its allies it acts as an armed wing. of the military juntas that have assumed power in recent years, as in Mali.

The United States has also accused Prigozhin of organizing online troll groups to interfere in the 2016 US election through a series of pro-Donald Trump Facebook and Twitter campaigns.

After years of denials, and already in the middle of the Ukrainian war, Prigozhin ended up confirming that he had founded the group of mercenaries in 2014, in a decision that gave the organization a face and made him a star on social networks, in which he announced constantly the group's operations against Ukrainian forces.

As the months passed, however, his rejection of the strategy proposed by the Russian Defense Ministry, which he accused of depriving his men of ammunition during campaigns as intense as the one waged in the city of Bakhmut, triggering the current crisis.