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“Complément d’Enquête” contacted Evguéni Prigojine on several occasions. The leader of the dreaded Russian Wagner militia was kind enough to speak to a Western media. “Politely”, according to him, before a last answer… scathing.
The world really discovered his face in 2022, when, with his powerful private Wagner militia, he eclipsed the Russian army on the front lines of the war in Ukraine. “Complément d’Enquête”, France 2’s investigative magazine, wanted to question Evguéni Prigojine on his links with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the war crimes of which his paramilitaries are accused, on his influence operations across the world, especially in Africa… Without response from him, the journalists of the France 2 magazine relaunched him. On the phone, his personal assistant promised to pass on their request. But still nothing.
At the end of May, when his troops were seizing Bakhmout in Ukraine, the journalist Louis Milano-Dupont sent his press service a series of questions relating solely to his activities in Africa. Will he redeploy men on the continent? In which countries? In the Central African Republic, are its mercenaries responsible for the fire which destroyed the Mocaf brewery of the French group Castel three months earlier? The answer comes the same day, in the form of a voice message accompanied by a written translation in French. Prigozhin announces that he will continue “to develop all its projects” in Africa. “We have never been terrorists”, he defends himself.
“To discredit Wagner” is “to do evil”
If the boss of Wagner agrees to speak to Western media, the tone does not take long to become threatening. Convinced that the document that the journalists of “Complément d’Enquête” are preparing aims to portray him as “a monster” and to “discredit Wagner” – SO “doing evil”according to him – he predicted to them during another conversation “that this evil will one day turn against them”.
But “Complément d’Enquête” has not finished with its questions. With his increasingly virulent diatribes against the Russian army and the political ambitions that some ascribe to him, isn’t Yevgeny Prigojine becoming cumbersome for the Kremlin? Asked again for an interview, he ends up putting an end to these exchanges in unequivocal terms… “I answered you politely, but the meaning of my answer was rather ‘Fuck off! And don’t ask me any more questions'”, he asserts, specifying that he will not answer any more.
Extract from “Prigojine, Poutine’s butcher”, a document to see in “Complément d’Enquête” on June 15, 2023.
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