Yevgeny Prigozhin

Guardian journalist Shaun Walker talks about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the tough-talking convict-turned-businessman who recruits soldiers from Russian prisons to ...

Talking to Ukrainians who have been on the other side of the lines and kind of watched the Wagner troops approach them, they've said the same thing: that it's really strength in numbers. There's nothing in the Russian legal code, and there's been no amendments to suggest that it's possible to simply take people out of prisons and pardon them. And the main investigator on these was a woman called [Lyubov Sobol](https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/752912770/the-government-is-very-afraid-meet-moscow-s-new-opposition-leader-lyubov-sobol), who is one of Navalny's top aides. He's not pretending that this is going to be pleasant or this is going to be a holiday. All of the reports we've had of the way that the convicts are used by the Wagner Group is that they're not used on sort of difficult strategic operations or anything particularly targeted and careful. And for those who have not fancied it and have decided that they want to either defect or don't want to advance, we've had numerous credible reports that there's been executions of their own people as kind of punishment for disobeying orders and to keep everybody else in line and forcing them to to sort of surge forward in these pretty grim, almost suicidal movements forward. "It's just so out of the realms of fantasy that this former convict is going to fly around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death," Walker says. And then that moment, I think, is really the beginning of the Prigozhin we have today as the kind of warlord." [Alexei Navalny](https://www.npr.org/2022/02/15/1081009674/russia-opposition-leader-alexei-navalny-new-trial-prison-putin)'s] team did a series of investigations into Prigozhin and into how he was winning these government contracts, back in 2015, 2016. In 2014, Walker says, the nature of Prigozhin's business shifted when Putin decided to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine for the first time. "The basic pitch is six months: It's going to be horrible. As the Russian military has struggled in the war, tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers, many of them convicts recruited from Russian prisons, have joined the fight.