Wagner Remains a Force For Chaos Around the World, With or Without Prigozhin

We may never know what or who caused the deadly airplane crash that reportedly killed Prigozhin and Wagner’s top operational commander Dmitry Utkin and eight others on Wednesday. Either way, it looks to all the world that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, bent on revenge for the mutiny Prigozhin fomented in late June delivered a very cold dish indeed to his former chef, and everyone is asking, now what?

The only more fitting coda for the Wagner Group’s leaders than an Icarus-like fall from the sky for all to see would have been a trial in The Hague on war crimes charges. Given that there are still several dozen Wagner commanders whose status and whereabouts are as yet unknown a day in court may still come. But until it does, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the trajectory of Prigozhin’s life and career, and how he managed to shift the world’s understanding of Russian military power over the course of the last decade.

Like Putin, Prigozhin was a native son of St. Petersburg. Born in 1961, Prigozhin was nine years Putin’s junior but both came of age in the Soviet Union during the waning days of the Cold War. His father died when Prigozhin was young, initially leaving his mother, Violetta, and his grandmother to raise young Zhenia, as he was sometimes affectionately called, on their own. Prigozhin’s fortunes changed when his mother remarried a champion ski instructor who helped enroll him in an elite boarding school for future Olympic athletes. His luck shifted again after an accident made him lame. Presumably it was idle downtime after his leg injury that propelled Prigozhin next into a life of crime. He was twice convicted in a string of brutal robberies that earned him a 12 prison year sentence. Russia’s Supreme Court later downgraded his term to 9 years on appeal, but not before Prigozhin endured several years in and out of solitary confinement and hard labor in an isolated penal colony.

More From TIME

After his release from prison in 1990, he made good on a promise he made to himself to turn his life around and never look back. He famously opened a hotdog stand in one of St. Petersburg’s downmarket shopping malls. Mafia ties catapulted him into influential circles from there forward. After opening his first upscale restaurant in the city's Old Customs House in 1996, government patronage drove Prigozhin's success from his earliest days as a restaurateur in the so-called “Wild 90’s” when car bombings and drive-by shootings were an everyday occurrence. He hobnobbed with notable figures in the northern capital’s famously corrupt casino business. Putin’s political mentor and St. Petersburg’s one time mayor Anatoly Sobchak was a regular at Prigozhin’s restaurants. Notable backers of Prigozhin’s enterprises reportedly included Moscow mobster Aslan Usoyan aka “Ded Hasan.”

Read More: What Prigozhin's Death Reveals About Putin's Power

Prigozhin boasted of hosting state dinners for kings, queens, and prime ministers. He catered birthday celebrations and inauguration dinners for Putin and former president Dmitry Medvedev. Most notably, former U.S. President George Bush and his wife Laura supped at least twice at Prigozhin’s high end St.Petersburg eateries. Prigozhin’s career encompassed grocery retail, luxury dining, catering services (earning him the moniker “Putin’s Chef”), real estate development, and election interference, including in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

In 2018, U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Prigozhin and a dozen other Russians affiliated with his holding company Concord Management and Consulting on charges of defrauding the U.S. in connection with the election interference allegations. Federal prosecutors alleged that Prigozhin directed employees of the Internet Research Agency, a beehive of online trolling, to post hundreds of gigabytes of disparaging content about Trump’s challenger, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Prigozhin managed to elide a trial when frustrated members of Mueller’s team suddenly dropped the case against the mercurial catering magnate in 2020 after Russian hackers leaked sensitive information about the prosecution’s case to the public.

But, it was Prigozhin’s role as head of the Wagner Group that made him infamous. While Utkin and several under his command were first in during Russia’s 2014 raid on Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine the paramilitary cartel built its brand first off the well-timed assassinations of several recalcitrant Russian separatist commanders in early January 2015 amid negotiations that led to the Minsk II ceasefire. From there, Prigozhin built Wagner Group into a covert juggernaut, delivering major foreign policy wins for the Kremlin in Syria, Libya, Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.

Yet, even as he helped Russia try to win back its Great Power status, Prigozhin left a trail of destruction in his wake that invited ever greater scrutiny from journalists and human rights activists. Eventually, the scale of the atrocities attributed to the Wagner Group also drew sanctions from the U.S. and Europe, as well as strong admonitions from a UN expert panel on mercenaries. Hopefully, the actions of those left standing who are implicated in the Wagner Group’s bloodiest campaigns will eventually draw the attention of the International Criminal Court and other fact-finding bodies. Count on Putin doing his level best, in the meantime, to reshape the narrative surrounding the Kremlin’s relationship with the Wagner Group.

Days after Prigozhin led thousands of his forces on a so-called March for Justice in late June, Putin acknowledged that his government had subsidized the Wagner Group’s operations in Ukraine from May 2022 to May 2023. Putin told Russian military leaders during a videotaped address  that the government spent nearly $1 billion on Wagner Group operations before Prigozhin and his paramilitary force were publicly banished to Belarus. It was a stunning moment. After nearly a decade of clinging to the fiction that the Wagner Group operated independently as a “private” military company, Putin appeared to abandon all pretense of plausible deniability.

The Russian dictator admitted to the world that his government paid for the operations of an off-book paramilitary force implicated in widespread torture, illegal detention, extrajudicial killings, and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. The subtext of Putin’s speech seemed to imply that before Russia’s full-scale invasion Prigozhin was operating on his own, and that everything that came before February 2022 was the work of a private entity unconnected to the Russian state. That, of course, is nonsense.

Before his death Prigozhin enjoyed the backing of Russia’s ministry of defense for at least 10 years. After he won his first multimillion dollar contract for catering meals to the Russian army in 2012, he went on to rake in billions more from a guns for gold, oil, and minerals scheme that has both benefited the Russian state and the oligarchs who prop up Putin. According to at least one estimate touted by a well-known Russian television personality and pro-Putin propagandist, Prigozhin may have earned nearly $10 billion from defense contracts. That figure likely grossly underestimates the profits reaped by the dozens of shell companies linked to Prigozhin’s business networks.

Indeed, since the key beneficiaries of the Wagner Group’s activities and Prigozhin’s enterprises include multi-billion dollar state run Russian companies like Gazprom and Rostec, it is safe to assume that the revenues that have accrued to Russia’s treasury likely run into the tens of billions. While Prigozhin’s back office administrator Valery Chekalov also died in Wednesday’s fatal plane crash the methods of deception he employed to hide the flow of black cash earned by hidden Kremlin beneficiaries from Wagner operations did not die with him.

From its inception, the Wagner Group was purpose-built to defy definition and confound Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leaked data and open source information that my research team and I have been pouring over for years indicate that Chekalov, and others central to the cartel’s operations, stood up dozens of front companies to obscure the Wagner Group’s payments and profits. A close review of correspondence between the American, British and Russian lawyers Prigozhin hired to silence investigative journalists like Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins reveals Prigozhin as an egotistical blowhard obsessed with reputation laundering. This is one of the many things Prigozhin held in common with Putin, and the tight circle of ultrawealthy oligarchs who greased the wheels of Wagner’s operations with money, access, and favors.

Prigozhin leveraged his wealth, talent for spin, and Kremlin connections to transform the Wagner Group into a mythical band of shadowy special forces operatives who were capable of anything. In doing so, he often succeeded in exploiting the credulousness of policymakers, journalists, and even aid workers who in turn promoted contradictory narratives about Russia’s irregular paramilitary forces. With the world’s attention diverted away from Prigozhin’s tight relations with Russia’s super rich and powerful, he and others were free to profiteer virtually unobstructed despite a bevy of American and European sanctions.

We now know thanks to Putin’s statements that most of the payments to Prigozhin fell under the oversight of Voentorg, one of several subsidiary branches of Russia’s state run defense procurement agency, Garnizon. This, too, was a surprising admission. As the U.S. and its NATO allies begin formulating their responses to the fallout from the Wagner rebellion and Prigozhin’s exit from the scene it will be vitally important to dig deeper into the institutional and legal architecture in Russia that has made it possible for Garnizon and others to facilitate irregular paramilitary operations.

It is almost guaranteed that Redut, the Russian defense ministry’s officially mandated paramilitary force, will operate under a similar scheme though possibly on a less grand and more fragmented scale. While all eyes are on Belarus where thousands of Wagner fighters are believed to still be, Putin is also apparently scaling up his Frankenstein like experiment under a new Russian law that calls for Russia's 89 federal subjects (provinces) to stand up their own paramilitary force. This would seem to suggest the nightmare of Russia's muscle for hire foreign policy will only end either when the war in Ukraine has reached its terminus or when Putin's time in the Kremlin has expired.

The U.S. and its NATO allies can ill afford to wait that long to take more decisive action to curtail the operations of Russia's irregular forces. One need only to look to Russia’s rumored involvement in the recent coup in Niger to predict where things are heading. But instead of repeating the mistakes of wars past like those in Iraq and Afghanistan where the endless tug of war between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency doomed U.S. strategy from the start, Washington and Brussels should let international law do the needed work to rein in the Wagner Group’s remaining commanders and their presumed replacements. In this instance, justice truly may be the best deterrent against more Russian aggression.