Armed rebellion by Wagner chief Prigozhin underscores erosion of Russian legal system
TALLINN, Estonia — Russia’s rebellious mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin walked free from prosecution for his June 24 armed mutiny, and it’s still unclear if anyone will face any charges in the aborted uprising against military leaders or for the deaths of the soldiers killed in it.
Instead, a campaign is underway to portray the founder of the Wagner Group military contractor as driven by greed, with only hints of an investigation into whether he mishandled any of the billions of dollars in state funds.
Until last week, the Kremlin has never admitted to funding the company, with private mercenary groups technically illegal in Russia. But President Vladimir Putin revealed the state paid Wagner almost $1 billion in just one year, while Prigozhin’s other company earned about the same from government contracts. Putin wondered aloud whether any of it was stolen.
The developments around Prigozhin, who remains unpunished despite Putin’s labeling of his revolt as treason, underscored what St. Petersburg municipal council member Nikita Yuferev called the “gradual erosion of the legal system” in Russia.
Andrei Kolesnikov, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, writing about the mutiny in a column, concluded: “The fabric of the state is disintegrating.”
After Putin indicated the government would probe financial irregularities by Prigozhin’s companies, state TV picked up that cue.
Commentator Dmitry Kiselyov said Wagner and another company owned by Prigozhin earned over 1.7 trillion rubles ($18.7 billion) through government contracts. Russian business daily Vedomosti cited a source close to the Defense Ministry as saying the earnings occurred between 2014 and 2023, years when both Prigozhin and Russian officials denied any ties to Wagner or even its existence.
“Big money made Prigozhin’s head spin,” Kiselyov said Sunday, saying the private army’s battlefield successes gave the mercenary boss “a feeling of impunity.”
One possible reason for Prigozhin’s mutiny, he said, was the Defense Ministry’s refusal to extend a multibillion-dollar contract with his legal catering company, Concord, to supply food to the army.
According to Kiselyov, Wagner earned 858 billion rubles from government contracts, while Concord earned another 845 billion. Those numbers were 10 times higher than what Putin gave last week.
Also unclear is whether Prigozhin will move to Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, under a deal with the Kremlin to end the rebellion. Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday that Prigozhin was in Russia. The Kremlin refused comment.
Russian media on Wednesday — including popular state TV channel Russia 1 — showed video of searches of Prigozhin’s St. Petersburg offices and an opulent mansion he purportedly owned, complete with helipad and indoor swimming pool. They also showed a van with boxes of cash, as well as gold bars, wigs and weapons in the estate.
Russia 1 programs also alleged Prigozhin’s adult children amassed significant wealth through him and said the searches were a part of an ongoing investigation, contrasting his lifestyle to his anti-elite image.
The goal of these revelations is “to smear the person, show he is an oligarch,” said Ilya Shumanov, Russia director for Transparency International, noting Prigozhin often made crude and plain-spoken attacks on the military leadership.
“And here they say that he’s a billionaire, and all this (money) isn’t his, it’s from the (state) budget, and he was sitting on it, and there would have been no private military company without the Defense Ministry,” Shumanov told The Associated Press.
The revelations raised questions of how the government could fund Wagner at all, given that laws prohibit mercenary activities, including funding and training private troops, that put the company in a legal gray area.
Until the rebellion, Putin always denied any link between the state and Prigozhin’s mercenaries. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said as recently as 2020 that “there is no such thing as a private military company in Russian law,” and that he wasn’t aware of one.
By then, however, Wagner had sent its soldiers-for-hire to Syria and African countries as Russia expanded its global influence. By Prigozhin’s own admission, his forces also operated in eastern Ukraine to support a separatist uprising and later fought there after the 2022 invasion.
Shumanov told AP that Wagner was likely funded either with cash through shell companies, or through government contracts via Prigozhin’s other entities. How much is impossible to know, he noted, but added it was clear Putin’s remarks “gave a green light” to investigate the Wagner chief’s finances.
The Kremlin’s message is that “we are dealing with a thief, a corrupt person, a thief and an oligarch, who went too far and stole money from the budget,” Shumanov said: “This is a very clear explanation, and no one needs to be sacrificed except for Prigozhin.”
Besides the finances, there is the matter of whether anyone will face prosecution for the deaths of the Russian troops who died at the hands of Prigozhin’s fighters.
Russian media reported about 15 military troops were killed during the rebellion as thousands of his soldiers seized a military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-ondon, then headed for Moscow, shooting down military helicopters and other aircraft on what Prigozhin called his “march of justice.”