The Russian Security Service demanded the arrest of Wagner's leader Yevgeny Prigogin for inciting civil war after Russian President Vladimir Putin promised him a "harsh and cruel" response.
The name of the 62-year-old Prigogine appeared at the height of Russia's first secret invasion of eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014.
Putin's close man, or" his cook" as described in the media, gained great fame among military leaders but was often unpopular.
He was born in 1961 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg; his father died when he was young, so he joined a crowd of petty criminals."
Court documents from 1981, according to the Guardian, confirmed that in March 1980, when Prigogine was 18 years old, he robbed a woman with his companions from a St. Petersburg street and later committed other robberies for several months to be sentenced to 13 years in prison, and then released in 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to St. Petersburg, where the city was on the verge of a tremendous transformation.
The man began to sell sausages in the kitchen of his family's modest apartment, but his ambitions were much more significant. It was not long before Prigogine owned a restaurant chain, the most famous of which is located on the waterfront in his hometown of St. Petersburg, where he had previously greeted French President Jacques Chirac with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who opened the door to the Kremlin for him and became his "chef" through his business.
His relationship with the Kremlin helped him receive hundreds of millions of government orders to deliver meals to schoolchildren and government employees. He also won orders to provide meals to the Russian army worth at least one billion US dollars in a year, and his company was accused of corrupt business practices.
And after that, further opportunities arose for "Putin's cook" when Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and, shortly after that, intervened militarily in eastern Ukraine.
While Putin denied that regular Russian troops were involved in both cases, Wagner's troops were on the ground.
Since then, the intervention of this particular military group under the leadership of Prigogine in many countries, especially in Africa, began militarily to land in Ukraine months ago, the arena that divided the ranks of the Russian troops, showing the "rebellion" of the sausage seller.
Many questions surrounded the Russian militia of the Wagner Group, which was stationed in more than one country, including Syria, Libya, Mali, Ukraine and others. While investigative journalists tried to answer some of them, three Russian freelance journalists paid the price for their lives in Central Africa in the summer of 2018 when they landed as part of a field investigation of the group.
For those who fought with him in Ukraine or other countries, "he calls him brutal and ruthless."