HOW KREMLIN GOT ITS GREMLIN

PUTIN USED THE WAGNER CHIEF'S HUBRIS TO PROVOKE A REVOLT AND EASE HIM OUT, BUT THERE ARE CHALLENGES GALORE FOR THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT

- AJISH P. JOY

If Wagner fighters were asked to pick their weapon of choice, their now exiled boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would have probably chosen a sledgehammer. Last November, the group released a video showing one of its fighters in Ukraine, 55-year-old Yevgeny Nuzhin, getting his skull crushed with a sledgehammer by his comrades. His crime? He surrendered to the Ukrainians. Prigozhin released enough Ukrainian fighters to get Nuzhin back in a swap deal and ordered his execution. “A dog’s death for a dog,” he said. A few weeks later, the European parliament formally condemned the “heinous crimes” committed by the Wagner group, and Prigozhin sent the lawmakers a sledgehammer covered in fake blood.

Decades before he was feted as a ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’, Prigozhin had the opportunity to enjoy the state’s hospitality at a Saint Petersburg prison on multiple charges of violent robbery. He got out in 1990 after serving nine years, just as the Soviet Union was imploding. The streetsmart Prigozhin rose quickly through the subsequent chaos, launching a food business, befriending Putin—then a lowly official at the Saint Petersburg mayor’s office—and branching out into multiple lucrative enterprises. A decade and a half later, he emerged as one of the many oligarchs of Putin’s Russia.

WAGNER’S REAL BOSS