Russian businessman close to the Kremlin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted Monday that he founded the "Wagner" paramilitary group in 2014 to fight in Ukraine, and that elements of it are spread in Africa and Latin America in particular.

This comes after a video spread on social media in September showing Prigozhin recruiting prisoners in a Russian prison to fight in the ranks of the Wagner Group on the Ukrainian front.

In a post on the social media accounts of his company, Concorde, Prigozhin confirmed that he founded this group to send qualified fighters to the Donbass region of Ukraine in 2014.

"From that moment on May 1, 2014, a group of patriots was born, which took the name of the Wagner Tactical Battalion," he added in a statement.

"And now I present to you a confession (..), these heroic men defended the Syrian people, other Arab peoples, Africans, and the executed Latin Americans. They have become one of the pillars of our nation," he stressed.

Prigozhin, 61, is one of the most controversial figures in Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime, and has been sanctioned by the European Union for his role in the Wagner Group.

In Russia, Prigozhin filed a lawsuit against the most prominent opponent of the Kremlin, Alexei Navalny, who is currently imprisoned, and is accused of being behind the "factory of trolls" on the Internet, who participated in the efforts to interfere in the US elections in 2016, which led to the victory of Donald Trump, and the United States imposed sanctions on him.

While Prigozhin is financing the Wagner Group, according to several sources, Russian media say that the operational leadership of the group is in the hands of Dmitry Utkin, and little information is known about this fifty-year-old man who was in the Russian Military Intelligence.

In December 2016, Utkin was received in the Kremlin to attend a ceremony honoring the "heroes" of Syria, during which a picture was taken of him with Putin.

It is suspected that this paramilitary group has for years been carrying out secret Kremlin missions in various theaters of operations, which Moscow has always denied.

Several Western countries accuse Yevgeny Prigogine of being the financier of the Wagner Group, elements of which were monitored in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, the Central African Republic and Mali.

For a time, Prigozhin supplied the Kremlin with kitchen equipment, which earned him the nickname "Putin's Chef".

The Kremlin has long denied having links with paramilitary groups.