Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as the in the mood for Putin, accused of organizing a coup in Russia, is the mercenary leader who has gone from being a businessman to a symbol of wartime Russia. He controls a private army that operates from the Ukraine to the Central African Republic. He became a millionaire thanks to his personal ties to Putin, winning fabulous catering and construction contracts with the Russian government while also creating a mercenary force known as Wagner.
Three weeks ago, he turned 61 and is in top form and has shaken the Kremlin. His rebellion can change the course of the war and make history. Evgeni Viktorovich Prigozhin (Leningrad, today St. Petersburg, 1961) was a convict in Soviet times, then he was a hot dog seller and currently has around 50,000 men deployed in Ukraine. Of those, 10,000 are contractors and 40,000 are convicts recruited from Russian prisons, according to US estimates. His role right now is key in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, an inalienable objective of the Kremlin. Putin praised his army for his advances in Soledar, but he knew it was the Wagner’s wolves who besieged the Ukrainian soldiers.
Prigozhin, censored in the official Russian media, has set up his own propaganda apparatus on social networks and has a press office that broadcasts his harangues. “We are not traitors, we are patriots,” he replied to Putin when the Russian president announced this Saturday that he would be criminally prosecuted. Meanwhile, Prigozhin’s men advanced towards Moscow, without resistance from the regular army. Only the mediation of the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, stopped an advance that led the mayor of the Russian capital to advise the population not to leave the house and to decree this Monday as a non-working day. It was even said that Putin had left the Kremlin. 200 kilometers from Moscow, Prigozhin stopped saying that he was doing it to avoid bloodshed and then it was said that the tycoon and head of the mercenaries would not finally be prosecuted and would retire to Belarus, no doubt as a result of the negotiation. But the situation has led Putin to his biggest crisis in years and both in Ukraine and in the rest of the planet hold their breath at the halo of hope that Putin’s weakening supposes for a possible end to the war. Who is this super man capable of turning history around?
insulting ostentation
The billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin is by no means an unknown character and before playing Russian roulette with Putin at home this chef made a salad (Russian, of course) for the Americans: he was accused by the FBI seven years ago for interfering in the 2016 elections, defaming Hillary Clinton and taking the White House to Donald Trump. But beyond his role as guerrilla leader, he has a family and, above all, a huge fortune. He lives in a mansion valued at 847 million rubles (almost ten million euros) million), a 40-meter-long yacht and a private jet. Prigozhins became a billionaire through state contracts awarded to him, according to research by activist Alexei Navalny.
The man known as Putin’s chef started selling hot dogs he became the director of a food store and then opened a restaurant and finally met Putin. His yacht, called Vitamin, has “six rooms, a dining room, a sundeck, a kitchen, staff quarters, two decks and a sundeck.
The man who has put Putin against the wall, turning Russian public opinion against the president, was imprisoned in Siberia in the days of the Soviet Union but the generosity of the Russian president has made him who he is. Now, obviously, he has gotten out of hand.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is married and has a son named Pavel (below, goofing around in a sneaker, on the family’s private jet) and a daughter named Polina, quite a influencer on social networks, which he married in one of the most sumptuous palaces in Saint Petersburg, which is popularly called Putin’s palace. She is nicknamed the chef because once, in 2001, she personally served her table in a restaurant and the current rude president liked her. He went from being a court jester to occupying a very prominent place in Putin’s circle, from which he came to organize Putin’s birthdays.
The family of Putin’s main headache uses the tycoon’s private jet with great frequency and exhibits a lifestyle befitting the fortune attributed to Prigozhin. His yacht, luxuriously furnished, is valued at around 6 million euros. The millionaire’s daughter bragged on her social media accounts that the ship had “six bedrooms, a dining room, a terrace, a kitchen, staff rooms, two decks and a terrace.”
When she got married, Polina held the ceremony at the Konstantinovsky Palace (below), nicknamed Putin’s Palace, an official residence of the president in Saint Petersburg originally built by the royal family Romanov. “The hardest thing was getting millions of fresh flowers,” he said, explaining how they cascaded down from the palace roofs.
Another family home, a property in St. Petersburg (hometown of the mercenary boss) that includes a house for him and another for his daughter, costs approximately 100 million euros. But he also owns a cliff top property in Gelenzhik on the Black Sea (below), where Putin is also rumored to have a palace.
Nor does the tycoon make good cars ugly, as you can see in the leaked images of this Cadillac, just a small sample of the many toys bought by the billionaire.
0WhatsApp
Twitter
Linkedin