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The Kremlin has denied any ties to them, claiming that they were private individuals who happened to be ‘on holiday’ in Crimea. When investigative journalists established that many of them had served in or had connections with the Russian special forces, Moscow said they were all ‘retired’ and must have travelled to the war zones off their own bat. Mercenary groups are illegal in the Russian Federation, but Wagner PMC troops have an impressive habit of turning up wherever the Kremlin seeks to exert its influence. And it isn’t always the interests of the Russian state that Wagner PMC is sent to support: more often than not, it seems that Putin and his cronies use its resources to further their own venal objectives. Prigozhin is, we are told, the tool they use, not the instigator – his strings, according to some people, are pulled by Putin’s ‘personal banker’, Yuri Kovalchuk.

Not all of Wagner’s activities have been successful. In early 2018, a dozen Russian military operatives were killed in US airstrikes against Syrian pro-government forces in the east of the country. The world expected the Kremlin to react with fury at so many Russian deaths; but Moscow was silent, evidently embarrassed at having to admit that ‘volunteer’ Russian forces were taking part in military operations abroad.

Also in 2018, Wagner PMC mercenaries began work in the Central African Republic (CAR), where Moscow was hoping to extend it political and military influence, displacing the former colonial power, France. Wagner’s brief was to train the CAR army, in return for which another of Prigozhin’s companies, Lobaye Invest, was granted lucrative diamond mining rights. I provided funding for a group of Russian filmmakers that was travelling to the CAR to investigate Wagner’s operations. In July 2018, the TV journalists Alexander Rastorguyev, Orkhan Dzhemal and Kirill Radchenko tried to film a camp where Russian mercenaries were based. Shortly afterwards, their vehicles were ambushed and all three of them were killed. An inquiry by local authorities concluded that the murders were the work of ‘robbers’, an explanation that was immediately supported by the Kremlin. But investigations by the Dossier Center, my fact-checking media organisation dedicated to probing the Kremlin’s illegal activity in Russia and beyond, uncovered a darker story: the journalists had been lured to a secluded spot by a fixer connected to Prigozhin’s employees and the alleged robbers had stolen nothing after murdering them. The Dossier Center concluded that ‘the murder was premeditated and carried out by professionals … following carefully planned surveillance.’ Its report indicated that Wagner employees had obstructed the inquiry into the men’s deaths by destroying evidence, and when a CNN reporter travelled to the CAR to investigate further, she too was followed and harassed. There is no evidence to suggest that the murders of the journalists were instructed by Prigozhin.

Western experts estimate that Prigozhin commands a force of around 5,000 troops, former regular soldiers and special forces veterans, who have become Putin’s unofficial and usually invisible army. Funded and deployed by the Kremlin to countries as far away as Libya, Sudan and Mozambique, they enjoy almost total impunity, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty. The investigative Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, obtained video footage of Wagner operatives torturing and executing a Syrian deserter. And in the CAR, a United Nations report accused Wagner-deployed mercenaries of human rights abuses, including the random shooting of civilians, extrajudicial executions, gang rape and torture. Britain, like several other Western countries, has added Prigozhin to its sanctions list, citing his ‘responsibility for significant foreign mercenary activity and multiple breaches of UN arms embargos’.

Rather than deny the charges against him, Prigozhin chooses instead to intimidate and threaten those who question his illegal activities. When Prigozhin was challenged by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, he successfully sued in the pliant Russian courts, promising to ‘ruin’ Navalny as he lay in a coma after a state- sponsored Novichok poisoning.