Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin shows Russian President Vladimir Putin his school lunch factory outside Saint Petersburg on September 20, 2010.
ALEXEY DRUZHININ/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images
Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted to founding the Wagner mercenary firm in 2014.
“I cleaned old weapons myself,” the billionaire, known as “Putin’s chef,” said in a statement.
Prigozhin previously denied founding the group and sued those who reported on his Wagner ties.
A billionaire and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged founding a shadowy mercenary group that has been used to fight the Kremlin’s wars from Libya to Syria, claiming the group was instrumental in seizing Ukrainian territory back in 2014.
In a statement to a friendly media outlet, Bloknot, Yevgeny Prigozhin — the financier of the Internet Research Agency, whose paid trolls intervened in the 2016 US election — said he founded Wagner Group eight years ago. The admission comes after a video surfaced of him recruiting at a Russian prison, offering detained men their freedom if they agreed to fight in Ukraine.
“I cleaned old weapons myself, sorted out body armor myself, and found specialists who could help me with it,” Prigozhin said, according to Meduza, an independent Russian media outlet. “From that moment, on May 1, 2014, a group of patriots was born, which later acquired the name PMC Wagner.”
Wagner was first deployed in Ukraine, allowing the Kremlin to annex Crimea while claiming it had not deployed Russian soldiers. The group was also active elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, where its forces could masquerade as pro-Russia separatists.
“It was their bravery and courage that made the liberation of the Luhansk airport and many other territories possible,” Prigozhin said of Wagner’s mercenaries.
Wagner’s forces have been linked to numerous war crimes.
In April, for instance, Der Spiegel reported that German authorities had intercepted radio transmissions in which Russian soldiers discuss mass killings in Bucha, a town outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv where hundreds of civilians were killed under Russian occupation. According to Der Spiegel, the transmissions showed that Wagner’s men “played a leading role in the atrocities.”
A recent report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project also found that the group had regularly attacked civilians in Mali and the Central African Republic, where it has deployed to help embattled regimes fight insurgencies. Timothy Lay, a coauthor of the report, told Insider that Wagner’s actions — including widespread looting — were akin to “criminal violence.”
Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef” due in part to his state catering contracts, had earlier denied any connection to the group, suing Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins in 2021 for reporting on his ties. In May, a London court threw out his claims of defamation against Higgins.
Responding to his admission on Monday, Higgins said in a statement to Insider that “this demonstrates exactly how the UK legal system has been abused by people like Prigozhin.” The lawsuit, Higgins argued, was intended only to silence journalists by forcing them to incur legal costs for reporting the truth — a tactic known in the legal profession as “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.”
“I hope serious action against SLAPP cases are taken by the UK government,” Higgins said.
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