In the 1st part of an ongoing series of investigations into Yevgeny Prigozhin, his troll empire, and his Wagner private military company (PMC), we reveal the state-run nature of Wagner, along with the identity of the man in charge of his Africa operations. https://t.co/ZeNXnptYVX
— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) August 14, 2020
Yevgeny Prigozhin has also been linked to Kremlin-friendly political engineering across dozens of African countries while he has been sanctioned by the US over his funding for the Wagner Group, an unincorporated private military company with a history of clandestine operations in Eastern Ukraine, Syria and several African countries. It was most recently accused of placing booby-trapped mines around Libya’s Tripoli. The EU has yet to sanction him or his metastatic group over any of his activities, Bellingcat reports:
Now, a long-running investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider and Der Spiegel has uncovered that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s disinformation, political interference and military operations are tightly integrated with Russia’s Defense Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU. Prigozhin’s private infrastructure – along with that of other government-dependent entrepreneurs, like Kostantin Malofeev – it appears serves as a deniable veneer and a round-tripping money laundering channel for government-mandated overseas operations. RTWT
As usual, great work by @bellingcat convincingly showing that “Wagner Group mercenaries are integrated in an overall chain of command under central Kremlin control with its military intelligence (GU/GRU) apparatus.” https://t.co/xZNqrGRnIx
— Michael Carpenter (@mikercarpenter) August 14, 2020
