It had no stripes, but no limits either. He could insult a general or bless an execution. His dead men do not exist and his victories shone on social networks before the Ministry of Defense drew them on the maps. Evgeni Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary company, was the mister wolf Vladimir Putin in the Ukrainian war. Just like John Travolta’s and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters in Pulp Fiction, the Kremlin is now up to its neck in blood and trouble. Evgeni Viktorovich Prigozhin (Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, 1961) was a convict during the USSR. In 2023 he was the highest-ranked former hot dog vendor in Russia. After his advance in Soledar, in the Ukrainian war, he seemed to have the magic recipe to win. But after years of success in the dark, his exposure to the light of putinism burned it
Two months ago Prigozhin, 62, starred in a failed military rebellion against the Kremlin in which he came to take one of the most important cities in southern Russia, Rostov-on-Don.
Wagner came to have 50,000 men deployed in the Ukraine. Of these, 10,000 were contractors and 40,000 convicts recruited from Russian prisons., according to US calculations. His role was key in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, an inalienable objective of the Kremlin.
When Putin praised his army for its advances in Soledar, he knew full well that it was the lobos of Wagner those who besieged the Ukrainian soldiers among those demolished houses and abandoned salt mines.
Moscow last year proclaimed Lugansk and Donetsk “republics” of Russia, but has not succeeded in expelling the Ukrainians, especially in the latter. Wagner’s boss declared earlier this year in a rare interview that It could take Russia two years to subdue the entirety of these two eastern Ukrainian regions.. And he was the spearhead.