In the absence of facts, it’s hard to understand what got into Yevgeny Prigozhin. I spoke to the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky about Prigozhin and Putin and their odd relationship. He says that criminality unites and explains the pair.
Prigozhin went to prison for almost ten years, for robbery. The legend is that he opened the first hotdog stand in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and then moved on to luxury restaurants. Khodorkovsky says Prigozhin must have remained deeply connected to the underworld to succeed in the restaurant business in the St Petersburg of the 1990s. And he says Putin was the intermediary between the state security agencies and the city’s ‘mafiya’.
‘Putin is a bandit. He’s a gangster. In the early years, he worked in organisations that were above the law or beyond it, like the KGB. Then he became the president… and he really started disregarding law completely. The appearance of Prigozhin in this situation is absolutely logical.’
There is a famous photograph of Prigozhin presenting Putin with a fussy-looking main course. The perfect touch is Putin’s expression, a Mafia-don pout of approval. Prigozhin earning the nickname ‘Putin’s chef’ demonstrated that he occupied a position of absolute trust: Russian leaders have a traditional fear of being poisoned. It allowed him to go on to run the Wagner Group and also the internet ‘troll farm’ that tried to sway a US presidential election, and which still pumps out a slurry of propaganda. Could it be that the two men cooked up an elaborate hoax?
That is one of several theories that, even while probably mistaken, reveal some truths about Putin’s Russia. Rebekah Koffler, a former US intelligence officer who dealt with Russia, told Fox News the mutiny was a ‘classic false flag operation… classic Putin’.
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