By Michael Kimmage
Updated Aug. 26, 2023 12:00 am ET
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By the time of his death in a plane crash this week, Yevgeny Prigozhin had come to symbolize the criminal trajectory of the Russian state. In the 1980s, he had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, after which he experienced a rags-to-riches transformation from street vendor in post-Soviet Russia to close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin’s remarkable portfolio ranged from elite catering to election meddling in the U.S. to running the Wagner Group, a government-funded private military apparatus.
Haphazardly, the Wagner Group projected Russian power into Ukraine and Syria. In Africa, it did not operate with the ideological zeal and the hope for economic development that the Soviet Union had once championed, gaining the U.S.S.R. networks of loyalty and cooperation. Instead, the Wagner Group erected a vast criminal enterprise, a protection racket on a continental scale, offering security to amenable dictators and warlords. In return Wagner acquired access to resources, which it used to enrich itself. This was not the application of hard power or soft power. It was the application of criminal power.
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