John Lechner
Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin’s facial features rested in a natural scowl. He had, by all accounts, a penetrating gaze. “I felt,” said one woman who worked for him, “that he could see right through me.” His aura, she believed, was that of a living historical figure, someone who pulsated some grand, obscure fate. A polished dome complimented Yevgeny Viktorovich’s sharp visage, evoking a Bond villain. And like any good antihero, his origins, and his path to success and fame, were anything but ordinary.
In his youth, Prigozhin spent nine years in prison for robbery and fraud. After his release, he claimed he sold hot dogs until he had enough money and connections to enter the restaurant business. In 1997, he and a partner opened a restaurant in St. Petersburg that one client in particular, Vladimir Putin, came to enjoy. That special relationship launched the restaurateur into the lucrative world of government contracting. Prigozhin’s companies provided Russian schools and the army with meals, earning him the nickname “Putin’s Chef.”
In 2014, Prigozhin became a purveyor of both meals and men. On the heels of Moscow’s invasion of Crimea, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) was sponsoring small bands of mercenaries and volunteers to fight in eastern Ukraine on behalf of the Luhansk People’s Republic, which had declared itself independent. Prigozhin wanted in and linked up with Dmitry Utkin, a career soldier with the call sign “Wagner,” a name that would eventually become a catchall term for the companies and entities connected to both men. To insiders, Wagner Group was simply “the Company.”
“Like it or not, a twenty-first century ‘scramble for Africa’ is underway.”
Prigozhin’s men proved themselves an effective fighting force on the front, and brutal enforcers in the rear. The Company grew with Russia’s increasing assertiveness abroad. Starting in 2015, contractors worked closely with the Ministry of Defense in Syria. Wagner forces helped take Palmyra from the Islamic State, only for the generals in the MoD to claim credit for the victory and unceremoniously pull them out of the campaign. A year later, Wagner-affiliated mining companies and “security types” were arriving in Africa, a continent largely free from the bitter infighting and rivalry inherent to Russia’s competing security institutions.
It was only in 2018, however, that Prigozhin started making a name for himself. “Putin’s Chef” was known back home mostly for poisoning school children and soldiers with his food. His infamy went international when he took on the world’s sole superpower on multiple fronts. In February, Prigozhin ordered his mercenaries to attack the Conoco gas plant in Khasham, where U.S. special forces and their Syrian partners were embedded. A four-hour battle ensued between Russian and American citizens that, at its worst, could have “plunge[d] both countries into bloody conflict.” Only eight days later, a grand jury for the District of Columbia indicted Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency for its role in interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
After that, it seemed like Wagner was everywhere. Prigozhin’s political operatives were found funding candidates in Madagascar’s presidential election while Wagner soldiers were fighting a jihadist insurgency in northern Mozambique. U.S. and European governments took notice. A new Cold War was emerging, and it seemed Wagner was the tip of Russia’s spear. The U.S. Department of State called the mercenary group a state-backed organization that “exploits insecurity to expand its presence in Africa, threatening stability, good governance, and respect for human rights.” The former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, Major General Marcus Hicks declared, “Like it or not, a twenty-first century ‘scramble for Africa’ is underway.”
Back in Russia, however, who wielded the spear was never quite clear. In Putin’s system, Russian elites enjoy outsized freedom to lobby for and pursue lucrative policies they can frame within Russia’s “national interests.” Prigozhin had a unique talent for selling what Russia’s national interests were, and how Wagner fit in.
Yet he was only one of many to make riches in this second Cold War, a world where state and non-state actors position themselves to balance, and profit from, tensions among great powers. As colleagues would attest, Wagner’s boss was rarely the smartest guy in the room. What he was good at was recognizing opportunity in instability and bringing a team together to take advantage.
The siren song of war and reward echoes across Libya’s coast, luring states, jihadists, armed groups, and mercenaries of all stripes to its shores. It is hard to imagine Libya would not eventually pull in Prigozhin as well. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the civil wars that followed, Tripoli—the capital and center of the country’s public and private institutions and thus its oil wealth—has been the key prize for a shifting web of local warring parties and their foreign patrons interested in the country’s geostrategic location and its relevance to energy markets.
In General Khalifa Haftar, ruler of east Libya, Prigozhin found his opportunity. Haftar was part of the group of officers who brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969. Nearly twenty years later, Chadian forces captured Haftar during the Great Toyota War. Gaddafi disavowed him, and Haftar turned on Gaddafi, going into opposition in Chad and eventually receiving asylum in the United States. Living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., he reportedly worked closely with the CIA on the Libya file.
In 2011, the general returned to lead forces against Gaddafi, but his clear ambition earned only distrust from other revolutionary forces. Haftar turned to building up his own military force, the Libyan National Army (LNA), in the east, establishing a base in Benghazi and framing his consolidation of power in anti-Islamist and anti-jihadist terms.
He could point to real threats. In 2014, Syrian returnees and foreign jihadists declared the eastern city of Derna a province of the Islamic State. Haftar rallied the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to his side, both of which sent funds and advisors. France deployed special forces. The United States, however, was less convinced the Islamic State represented a threat in Libya.
The Egyptians took the Islamic State on their border most seriously. And it was likely Egypt, political scientist Jalel Harchaoui notes, who first connected Haftar to Moscow. In the twilight of the Arab Spring, Egyptian military forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. The United States briefly suspended delivery of weapons in response, but it was a wide enough window for Russia to step in. In 2014, the UAE and Saudi Arabia funded a $3.5 billion weapons deal between Russia and Egypt.
A year later, Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia were ramping up their lobbying efforts on behalf of Haftar. During Putin’s visit to Cairo in February 2015, President Sisi invited a Libyan officer close to Haftar to meet the Russians, and the provision of weapons and military equipment was discussed. The UAE then delivered Russian-made attack helicopters. The following year, Haftar’s force ordered another eleven.
Haftar needed more and more mercenaries. For his 2016 attack on the oil crescent, he hired thousands of men from the main Darfur rebel groups in Sudan, including factions of the Sudan Liberation Army, as well as Musa Hilal’s forces.
Later that same year, a private military company, or PMC, RSB Group, landed a demining contract for a cement factory in Benghazi, underbidding a British firm by the equivalent of $25,000,000. RSB Group, founded by Oleg Krinitsyn, a former officer in Russia’s border guards, is known to be “the first Russian PMC.” Krinitsyn’s company offered a wide variety of services: maritime security in the Gulf of Aden and Gulf of Guinea; consulting; demining; and convoy, site, and personal protection. In 2007, RSB worked with American security companies guarding convoys in Iraq. “Everyone has the same task—to make money,” Krinitsyn later told Russian state-affiliated media. “Where the U.S. Army appears, private military companies follow. If you imagine a war on foreign territory as a hunt by predators for herbivores, then the American army is a lion, and PMCs are jackals that eat up the carrion of the king of beasts.”
By 2017, it was clear to many in both Russia’s private and public sectors that there was money to be made in Libya, particularly in the region under Haftar’s control. After the factory deal was signed, the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence agency, which often competed with the FSB-friendly Krinitsyn—made RSB’s boss an offer he couldn’t refuse. “[The GRU] basically said to Oleg [Krinitsyn], ‘Look, let us buy your company, and we will work more in Libya,’” a person close to the matter told me.
Krinitsyn sold RSB, reportedly for a fair price, paid in cash, then registered a new company, “RSB Security Services.” The GRU then put their own man in Benghazi.
RSB’s new owner would be Jan Marsalek, an Austrian national and GRU asset. Marsalek was the chief operating officer of the German payment processing company Wirecard, whose collapse would become the largest fraud case in German history.
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