Latest news with #YevgenyPrigozhin
The Sun
14-07-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Alleged ex-Wagner fighter seeks asylum in Finland: media
HELSINKI: Finland is investigating a man who illegally crossed the border from Russia seeking asylum, the border force said on Monday, with media reporting the man to be a former Wagner mercenary. Named only as 'Yevgeny', the man has publicly claimed to belong to the Russian paramilitary company on social media and recently published videos criticising Russia's military leadership, according to public broadcaster YLE. Founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner earned worldwide notoriety for its brutal methods in the pursuit of the Kremlin's goals in Africa, the Middle East and the Ukraine war alike. Following a short-lived rebellion against Moscow, the mercenary group was disbanded in the wake of Prigozhin's 2023 death in a plane crash, with Russia's army placing its fighters under new management. Finnish border guards arrested on June 17 an individual who had illegally crossed over the border near the town of Kitee in eastern Finland, Tomi Salmi, inspector at the North-Karelia Border Guard District headquarters, told AFP. Salmi confirmed that an investigation was ongoing and that the man had sought asylum. The inspector however said he would not comment on media speculation over his potential Wagner connections. A police spokesperson said they expected the investigation to be wrapped up in early autumn. With tensions between the two neighbours high over the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, Finland shut its 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) border with Russia in December 2023. The Nordic country is now building a 200-kilometre fence along its border with Russia, due to be completed in 2026, at an estimated cost of 380 million euros ($441 million). In 2023, a Russian man claiming to be a Wagner deserter sought asylum in Norway after fleeing to the Scandinavian country in January of that year. His asylum request ended up being rejected, but he was granted a temporary Norwegian residence permit because of the risks a return to Russia would entail. – AFP
DW
08-07-2025
- Politics
- DW
UK court convicts 3 men of arson attack ordered by Wagner – DW – 07/08/2025
The arson attack targeted a London industrial unit where generators and Starlink devices bound for Ukraine were being stored. British prosecutors said Russia's Wagner mercenary group ordered the attack. A UK court has found three men guilty over an arson attack against Ukraine-linked businesses, which British officials said were orded by the Wagner Group paramilitary. The three men, aged in their early 20s, had pleaded not guilty to aggravated arson but were convicted by a jury on Tuesday at London's Old Bailey court. A fourth man aged 61 was cleared of the charge. The two ringleaders, also in their early 20s, pleaded guilty to aggravated arson and a charge under the National Security Act before the trial started. Prosecutor Duncan Penny said earlier that one of the ringleaders was "knowingly acting at the behest of the Wagner Group," which is banned in the UK as a terrorist organization, and "knew he was acting against Ukrainian, and for Russian interests." The arson attack was carried out on March 20, 2024. It targeted a warehouse in east London where generators and Starlink satellite equipment bound for Ukraine were being stored. The blaze caused around £1 million ($1.35 million/ €1.16 million) in damage. Prosecutors said the attack was planned by agents of the Wagner Group who were acting on behalf of Russian military intelligence. The Wagner Group was formed as a paramilitary by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur and associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The group was implicated in human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria and several African countries. Prigozhin launched an ill-fated rebellion against Putin in 2023 and was killed in a plane explosion two months later. The Wagner Group was subsequently weakened and made subordinate to Russia's armed forces.
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Putin's regime is beginning to come apart
Almost beyond parody, another senior Russian official is found dead. This time it is the transport minister, Roman Starovoit, who apparently shot himself. One of the richest oligarchs, Konstantin Strukov, is meanwhile arrested whilst trying to flee Turkey in his luxury private jet. Putin's coffers are rapidly running dry; his oil sales, the 'black gold' which keeps his army marching, is rapidly falling. The iron grip of the Kremlin may be about to collapse. Many surmise that Europe is at its 1939 moment again. The modern-day Hitler is on the march East again, and European countries are wholly unprepared militarily and socially to oppose Putin's forces. But as likely, perhaps, is that Russia is at its 1934 moment. On December 1 1934, Sergei Kirov, the Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary, was shot and killed by Leonid Nikolaev. Nikolaev and several alleged accomplices were convicted in a show trial and executed less than 30 days later. Kirov's assassination was used by Stalin as a reason for starting the Moscow trials and the Great Purge; he accused Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and others of being part of a wider conspiracy to undermine the Soviet Union. The parallels with today are clear. Almost 2 years ago Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian mercenary leader and close associate of Putin, died mysteriously after attempting to oppose the Russian president. In short, 'the system', such as it is, cannot sensibly resolve issues like corruption, embezzlement, property-ownership – there's no rule of law. There is, instead, the use of naked thuggery to enforce authority. The most powerful gang or clan wins. It is important to look at the current situation in Ukraine amidst this engulfing chaos. President Putin's 3-day special military operation is now in its fourth year, with over one million casualties and increasing at a rate of 1000 per day; the mothers of Russia who forced the USSR out of Afghanistan in 1989 after 17,000 deaths appear to be stirring at last. The Russian leader, meanwhile, has just had to purchase 30,000 souls off North Korea for heaven knows what in return, a definitive statement that Russia is running out of conscripts to keep the meat grinder fed. Putin's dismissal of the Ayatollah's pleas for help from the US onslaught on Iran's nuclear programme is a further sure sign that that Russia is completely fixed on its misadventure in Ukraine. With the wheels appearing to wobble on the Russian president's ambition to reinstate the borders of the Soviet Union, now is surely the time for the West to turn the screw and enforce a just peace for Ukraine. Unfortunately, with president Trump being showered with false flattery about Nobel Peace Prize nominations, he seems unlikely to jeopardise his chances and get further involved in the messy conflict in Ukraine. Since the Nato Summit last month, when we all threw the 'kitchen sink' at defence spending, most European countries, including the UK, have also appeared to turn inwards once again to play party politics. Let us hope that when the 'want-to-be King of Europe' Emmanuel Macron meets our real King today, Charles III can talk sense to Starmer and the French president and get them to lead a European military alliance that can convince Putin that peace is the only option in Ukraine.
Times
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Times
Slain Wagner chief Prigozhin lives on as symbol of Putin's fragility
A few months before he died in a plane crash after his aborted mutiny against Moscow in the summer of 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group of Russian mercenaries, laughed when asked about his attitude to death. 'We will all go to hell, but we will be the best in hell,' he said. Two years later, if Prigozhin is observing from the underworld, he is unlikely to approve of the fate that has since befallen his private mercenary group, which was once praised by President Putin for its role in the war in Ukraine. It has been largely dismantled and brought under the control of the Kremlin, while any mention of Prigozhin's name is now taboo on state television. Wagner's headquarters in St Petersburg, Prigozhin's home town, has also been closed down. 'What we understood as the Wagner Group ceased to exist at the very moment when the plane carrying Prigozhin crashed,' said Denis Korotkov, a Russian opposition journalist and co-author of Our Business is Death: The Story of the Wagner Group. 'All the scraps and fragments that remain from this organisation, what remains of its brand, are being used [by Moscow] for an array of purposes, but it can't be compared in any respect to what it used to be: Wagner is no longer an independent entity. It was able to exist solely because of Prigozhin's special relationship with Putin and with some others in power,' Korotkov said. Wagner after Prigozhin A catering tycoon who was once known as 'Putin's chef', Prigozhin rose from owning hot dog stands in St Petersburg in the early 1990s to worldwide notoriety. He attempted to meddle in the 2016 US presidential elections that brought President Trump to power and his thugs targeted Kremlin critics. His Concord company provided dinners for schools and nurseries in Moscow as well as the Russian defence ministry. But it was Wagner that made him a household name in Russia. Tens of thousands of convicts were freed from Russian prisons to swell Wagner's ranks at the front in Ukraine, often after a personal visit by Prigozhin, who served nine years for assault and robbery during the Soviet era. The group was instrumental in some of Russia's biggest successes of the war, including the capture of Bakhmut, the town in eastern Ukraine that became known as the 'meat grinder'. Prigozhin's rebellion in June 2023, during which his heavily armed mercenaries came within striking distance of Moscow, was sparked by a vicious row with Russian defence chiefs. It was an unprecedented c hallenge to Putin's rule and one that signalled the beginning of the end for Prigozhin. After retreating from the Russian capital having made a deal with the Kremlin, thousands of Wagner fighters headed to neighbouring Belarus, where they were allowed to set up training camps for new operations in Africa. The camps are long gone, although some of Wagner's former fighters are believed to be training the Belarusian security services as private contractors. Wagner also said last year that it was no longer in action in Ukraine. However, many returned to the front as part of the regular Russian army after Putin urged them to swear an oath of allegiance to Moscow. Pavel Prigozhin, the late Wagner leader's 27-year-old son, was believed to have inherited the leadership of the mercenary group, as well as more than £100 million in assets, yet there are few, if any, indications that he plays an active role in its remaining operations. A potent brand While there is no direct evidence that Putin was involved in Prigozhin's death, it is believed that his plane was blown up on the Kremlin's orders as revenge for his rebellion. All ten people on board, including Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin's right-hand man, were killed when the plane plummeted to the ground in the Tver region, about 200 miles from Moscow in August 2023, exactly two months after the Wagner mutiny. Putin has suggested that the crash was caused by Prigozhin and other commanders drinking and using drugs while handling grenades on board the luxury jet. However, Marat Gabidullin, a former Wagner commander, told The Times that he had never seen Prigozhin or Utkin drink or take drugs. Despite the neutralisation of Wagner as an independent force, the group's name remains a rallying symbol for supporters of the war in Ukraine, both in Russia and in the West, said Candace Rondeaux, the author of Putin's Sledgehammer, a new book about Prigozhin and his mercenary group. 'The [Wagner] brand remains very potent, especially for young men who are disaffected, who are looking for a way to prove themselves,' she told Times Radio. Russia's GRU military intelligence service had sought to 'rebrand and relabel the Wagner Group' as an instrument for recruiting disaffected westerners for sabotage attacks, she added. This month two British men admitted setting fire to warehouses in London that were holding aid for Ukraine on behalf of the Wagner Group. Korotkov said, however, that it was extremely unlikely that there were any independent figures within Wagner who would be able to give the orders for such an operation. 'It's likely the brand is just being used by various [Russian] security structures,' he added. The scramble for Africa Three weeks before his death, Prigozhin shared a video address filmed — pointedly — in Africa, the jewel of the Wagner empire. Wearing camouflage and clutching a rifle, he told the camera: 'We are working, the temperature is 50 degrees — everything we love.' Shared on Wagner-linked Telegram channels, the footage was both a recruitment pitch and a bullish statement of intent. After Wagner's arrival in Africa in 2017, beginning in Sudan, it became a powerful tool of Russian influence. It offered military training, regime protection and anti-western disinformation that often outpaced even Moscow's ambitions. In return, Wagner was paid not just in cash but in gold and mining concessions — a model so lucrative it helped bankroll Russia's war in Ukraine and prompted the US to designate it an organised crime group. After Prigozhin's death, Moscow moved quickly to replace his mercenaries with the newly minted Africa Corps, under GRU control. Commanders were ordered to swear loyalty to the state or face consequences. By January 2024, Africa Corps had boots on the ground — its first confirmed deployment was to Burkina Faso. The shift is more than cosmetic. Wagner offered deniability; Africa Corps signals a bolder, state-backed approach. However, Russians show no sign of forgetting Prigozhin or Wagner: memorials and even statues have been unveiled across Russia, while online shops sell Wagner-themed children's toys, pillows, cups and T-shirts. The memory of his rebellion, while unsuccessful, has also provided a shred of hope to Russia's exiled opposition movement. 'As long as Putin is in power, we are unlikely to find out what exactly happened to Prigozhin. But does it really matter? The question of who and when someone will decide to follow in his footsteps is much more important,' said Daria Firyan, a presenter for the Khodorkovsky Live opposition media outlet. 'Such rebellions are possible … those people who were sent to Kyiv yesterday can turn around tomorrow and head to Moscow. And the authorities will not be able to do anything.'
France 24
19-06-2025
- Politics
- France 24
Russia steps out from shadows in Africa with state paramilitary
Russia is using the Africa Corps force to increase its influence in particular in francophone west Africa where the presence of former colonial master France is dwindling. Africa Corps, which is believed to be run by the Russian defence ministry, is stepping up its presence and filling the gap left by Wagner, the mercenary group founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, which announced its departure from Mali in early June. The Kremlin always denied it was behind Wagner, whose founder died in a plane crash in 2023 after earlier that year leading his fighters in an unprecedented but short-lived rebellion where they advanced towards Moscow. "The usage of plausible deniability is now replaced by managed visibility," Tbilisi-based security researcher Nicholas Chkhaidze told AFP. "The transfer of Wagner assets in Mali to Africa Corps, which is a state-coordinated mechanism of influence is more than symbolic, as it demonstrates a strategic transition from proxy to a power chain operated by the government." Africa Corps is expanding its presence as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which are led by juntas who seized power in coups between 2020 and 2023, have turned away from France and moved closer to Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow intended to develop comprehensive cooperation with African countries. "This cooperation also extends to such sensitive areas as defence and security," he said. 'Myriad risks' Wagner, whose brutal methods have been denounced by rights groups, is Russia's best-known mercenary group. Following Prigozhin's death, the Russian defence ministry has worked to incorporate Wagner units and dismantle some of its operations. According to the RAND Corporation, a research organisation, Russian mercenaries are clearly present in five countries apart from Mali: Burkina Faso, Libya, Niger, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Christopher Faulkner, of the US Naval War College, said the transition was both a pragmatic and a symbolic step. "The handover to Africa Corps means that Russia is comfortable having a ministry of defence asset openly operating there," he told AFP. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Central African Republic is the "last bastion" of Wagner operations in Africa, with the Russian defence ministry trying to replace Wagner with Africa Corps there, too. Beverly Ochieng, an Africa analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Kremlin sees the Sahel as a region where the Russians can have a geopolitical strategic presence and counter Western influence. "The Kremlin will continue to provide direct support to Africa Corps, they'll continue sending in shipments of equipment and weapons," she said. "We'll see a steady pace of violence by the Al-Qaeda group in resistance to the involvement of Russia," she added. However, the Institute for the Study of War warned the shift to more overt Russian state presence in Africa could lead to "myriad domestic and geopolitical risks for the Kremlin". "The risk to Russian prestige may lead Russia to get more deeply entrenched in long-term conflicts to 'save face', which would ensnare the Kremlin in its own series of 'forever wars'", the think tank said. "Wagner was more immune to such long-term entanglements and even abruptly withdrew from places, such as Mozambique, when the benefits outweighed the costs." - 'Brutal tactics' - Analysts do not expect tactics of the Russian paramilitary groups to change despite the shift, pointing to human rights violations. "It is not unlikely to expect that the Africa Corps could present a more professional approach, but the operational playbook of including violence will remain intact," said Chkhaidze. "The brutal counterinsurgency tactics, such as massacres and collective punishment, are structural, not just personal," he added. According to the RAND Corporation, at least half of Africa Corps' personnel are Wagner veterans, with priority given to those who fought in Ukraine, many of them former convicts. According to a report published last week by a journalist collective, in its more than three years in Mali, Wagner kidnapped, detained and tortured hundreds of civilians. The victims, who were interviewed by a consortium of reporters led by investigative outlet Forbidden Stories, spoke about waterboarding, beatings with electrical cables and being burned with cigarette butts. Bakary Sambe, executive director at the Timbuktu Institute think tank in Dakar, said for Malians the distinction between the two Russian paramilitary groups was largely artificial. "In the eyes of the population, this is merely a name change with no positive developments in one of the worst security situations in 10 years," Sambe said.
