From hot dog seller to mercenary leader: The rise of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin

Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, has become an increasingly important figure during the Ukraine war, his company playing a key role in Russia’s attempt to take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

A new Sky News Daily podcast uncovers some fascinating detail about the mercenary boss.

Prigozhin has a colourful back story, beginning with the time he spent in prison in the 1980s.

“Prigozhin is a former conman – he was a thug,” says Samantha de Bendern, associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

“He was put in prison in the 1980s for basically assaulting a woman in the street. He spent quite a number of years in the Soviet Union’s penitentiary system.”

He left prison during perestroika and glasnost – the period in the 1990s when Russia was opening up to the world.

Ms de Bendern adds: “He very quickly got onto the private property/private enterprise bandwagon and ended up being a hot dog seller.

“And this is where things become very mysterious because he transformed himself from hot dog seller to restaurateur to the grand and great of the new post-Soviet Russian elite.”

Eventually, he became the caterer to a number of Russian state concerns including the Russian army.

He was also catering for a lot of Vladimir Putin’s state visits and met presidents and heads of state.

Then he became the chef at the Kremlin.

“The fact that Vladimir Putin asked Prigozhin to become the Kremlin’s chef is something very important to understand because Putin has been very paranoid for a very long time,” Ms de Bendern points out.

“Putting his food into somebody’s hands is an enormous vote of trust.”

Recently, however, Prigozhin has criticised senior Russian figures and appears to be distancing himself from Vladimir Putin (though that is disputed).

Joana de Deus Pereira, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, says: “Vladimir Putin considers him not a threat but a liability.”

But she does not think Prigozhin wants Putin’s job, adding: “What he wants is recognition. He doesn’t play by the official Russian playbook.”

Ms de Bendern comments: “I think he is a puppet who’s now cutting his puppet strings and trying to become the puppet-master himself.

“He’s behaving like a populist politician.

“But in terms of the losses, in terms of the dire situation the Russian troops are in, in terms of the dire situation of the Russian army, he’s the only person who’s telling the truth – the man at the head of an organisation that people are calling terrorists.

“It’s a very, very bizarre situation.”

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

Podcast producer: Rosie Gillott
Interviews producer: Alex Edden
Editor: Philly Beaumont