• Latest news from the war in Ukraine

The head of the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group has resumed this week a strategy that he uses on a recurring basis: Attack the top military commanders of Russia for the failures in the war in Ukraine. That's something only a few can do publicly without facing Kremlin retaliation.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's comments highlighted his long-standing enmity with the Defense Ministry.

This time, however, the criticism has come at a time when Moscow boasted an unusual and much-needed victory in Ukraine's 15-month-old war, when Prigozhin and his fighters raised a Russian flag in the eastern city of Bakhmut after a long and bloody battle. But after that seemingly triumphant moment, Prigozhin complained about Russian failures in Ukraine.

What exactly is the role of Prigozhin, 61, and his Wagner Group in the war?

What did Prigozhin say?

Using direct, foul language during a nearly 80-minute video interview Tuesday with a pro-Kremlin political strategist, Prigozhin said "somehow nothing is working for us" in Ukraine.

He spoke of the Kremlin's stance at the start of the war in February 2022, when President Vladimir Putin tried to justify the invasion by falsely claiming it was a campaign against "Nazis," even though Ukraine's president is a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust and heads a democratically elected and Western-backed government.

"We arrived abruptly, we walked with our boots on all over Ukraine in search of Nazis. While we were looking for Nazis, we eliminated as many as we could," Prigozhin said, citing areas around Kiev and the southern city of Kherson.

Russia failed to "demilitarize" Ukraine, one of the goals set by Putin from the first day of the invasion, but turned Kiev's army into "one of the strongest" in the world with the highest quality equipment and training.

Prigozhin said that in Bakhmut he lost about 20,000 men of his army of mercenaries.

Who is Prigozhin?

Prigozhin was convicted of robbery and assault in 1981 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Upon his release, he opened a restaurant in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. That's when he met Putin, who at the time was the city's deputy mayor.

Prigozhin used that connection to develop a catering business and secured lucrative contracts from the Russian government that earned him the nickname "Putin's chef." He later expanded into other areas, including media and an infamous internet "troll factory" for which the United States accused him of intervening in the 2016 presidential election.

In January, Prigozhin acknowledged founding, directing and financing the shadowy company Wagner Group.

Where has the Wagner Group operated?

Wagner was first spotted in action in eastern Ukraine shortly after a separatist conflict erupted there in April 2014, in the weeks following Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.

While backing the separatist insurgency in Donbas, the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine, Russia denied sending its own weapons and troops there despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Involving private mercenaries in the fight allowed Moscow to maintain a degree of denial.

Prigozhin's company was named the Wagner Group after the nickname of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Russian army's special forces. It soon acquired a reputation for brutality and cruelty.

Wagner's staff was also deployed to Syria, where Russia supported President Bashar Assad's government in a civil war. In Libya, they fought alongside the forces of commander Khalifa Hafter. The group has also operated in the Central African Republic and Mali.

Prigozhin is said to have used Wagner's deployment in Syria and African countries to win lucrative mining contracts. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said in January that the company was using its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund operations in Ukraine.

Some Russian media reported that Wagner was involved in the 2018 murders of three Russian journalists in the Central African Republic investigating the group's activities. Such murders remain unsolved.

What is Wagner's reputation?

Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner's mercenaries of violating human rights across Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

In 2021, the European Union accused the group of "serious human rights violations, including torture, extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings," and of perpetrating "destabilizing activities" in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

A video posted online in 2017 showed a group of armed people, allegedly Wagner's mercenaries, torturing a Syrian man and beating him to death with a sledgehammer before mutilating and burning his body. Russian authorities ignored requests from media and rights activists for the incident to be investigated.

In 2022, another video showed a former Wagner mercenary killed with a sledgehammer after allegedly switching to the Ukrainian side. Despite public outrage and demands for an investigation, the Kremlin did nothing.

What is the role of the Wagner Group in Ukraine?

Wagner has assumed an increasingly evident role in the war, as regular Russian troops have suffered great attrition and lost territory in humiliating defeats.

Prigozhin toured Russian prisons to recruit fighters, promising pardons if they survived a half-year stint on the front lines with Wagner.

In this week's interview, Prigozhin said he had recruited 50,000 convicts, of whom about 10,000 were killed in Bakhmut.

He claimed that "in the best period" he had 50,000 men at his disposal, and about 35,000 on the front lines at all times. He did not disclose whether those figures included inmates.

The U.S. estimates Wagner had about 50,000 troops fighting in Ukraine, including 10,000 mercenaries and 40,000 convicts. A U.S. official said nearly half of the 20,000 Russian troops who have died in Ukraine since December were part of Wagner's troops in Bakhmut.

The U.S. believes Wagner spends about $100 million a month on the armed conflict. In December, Washington accused North Korea of supplying weapons, including missiles, to the Russian company in clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Both Wagner and North Korea denied this.

How has Prigozhin criticized the Russian military?

If the U.S. accusation is true, Wagner's attempts to obtain North Korean weapons may reflect his long-running feud with Russia's top military brass dating back to the company's inception.

Prigozhin sought full credit in January for the seizure of Soledar, a salt-mining town in the Donetsk region, and accused the Russian Defense Ministry of trying to steal "glory" from Wagner. He has repeatedly complained that the Russian army did not provide Wagner with enough ammunition to seize Bakhmut and threatened to withdraw his men.

Soldiers who were allegedly Wagner's mercenaries in Ukraine recorded a video in which they curse the chief of the General Staff of the Russian army, General Valery Gerasimov, and accuse him of failing to provide ammunition.

Prigozhin has also criticized Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, accusing military leaders of incompetence. Their frequent complaints are unprecedented in Russia's tightly controlled political system, in which only Putin can make such criticisms.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that Prigozhin's comments criticizing the war "could be a kind of strategy to get credit for everything they've been able to accomplish in Bakhmut, while also trying to publicly embarrass the Defense Ministry given the cost that Wagner paid with blood and money and not the Russian military."

Prigozhin, until recently an unknown figure, has increasingly raised his public profile, boasting almost daily of the Wagner Group's supposed victories, sardonically mocking his enemies and complaining about the military brass.

When asked recently about a media comparison of him with Grigory Rasputin, the mystic who exerted a fatal influence on Russia's last tsar by claiming to have the power to cure his son's hemophilia, Prigozhin snapped, "I don't stop the blood, but I shed the blood of the enemies of our homeland."

  • Ukraine
  • Russia
  • War Ukraine Russia

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more