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MOSCOW — On a Friday evening after work, Vladimir Yagudayev was halfway through his dinner when he almost choked on his macaroni.
His de facto boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had just published an audio message on Telegram threatening to advance on Moscow if Russia’s top military brass was not booted out.
“We’d been expecting something to happen, but nothing this brash,” said Yagudayev, a 25-year-old social media manager with blue eyes and a bushy beard, referring to the June 23 mutiny led by the leader of the Wagner mercenary group.
“Many of us understood straight away that it would affect us in one way or another,” said Yagudayev, who works at the media holding Patriot, better known as part of what has become known as Prigozhin’s troll farm.
Yagudayev and his colleagues weren’t wrong. A week later, a top manager at Patriot, Yevgeny Zubarev, announced in an online video that the group would be “exiting the country’s informational sphere.”
The aftermath of Prigozhin’s armed rebellion — arguably the biggest assault on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority in more than two decades — has been mystifying.
Despite official statements that the Wagner boss would be exiled to Belarus, Prigozhin appears to still travel freely, reportedly meeting with Putin in Moscow, and being handed back the equivalent of some $110 million in cash and several weapons.
Only the dismantling of Prigozhin’s sprawling media business appears concrete, with offices shuttered and dozens out on the street.
And yet, even there, there’s reason to believe it may be mounting a comeback.
Political weapon
In 2013, the Novaya Gazeta independent newspaper first reported that a shadowy firm called the Internet Research Agency was employing Russians to sing the Kremlin’s praises and discredit the opposition online.
Working out of St. Petersburg, they descended on media outlets and social media platforms, faking feedback and discussion; shelling out likes and dislikes, tweets and retweets.
A year earlier, there had been mass protests against Putin’s reelection, and “the Kremlin felt that while it controlled television, it had let the internet slip through its fingers,” said Nikolai Petrov, a guest scholar at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Prigozhin, who had already established himself as someone ready to do the Kremlin’s dirty work, got the job.
Like his mercenary army Wagner, Prigozhin’s cyber force transcended national borders and worked on several fronts. It soon expanded into the media sphere, launching a number of innocuously named publications such as the Federal News Agency (RIA Fan), Politics Today and Economics Today.
“They had different logos and claimed to be different media,” said Lev Gershenzon, the former head of Russia’s biggest news aggregator Yandex.News. “But in fact, it was all the same thing: a network of propaganda outlets, trolls and bots.”
The goal, he said, was to “create the illusion of pluralism and imitate public opinion,” while in fact producing an echo chamber of white noise.
Using data from the Liveinternet statistics site, Gershenzon estimates that roughly 90 percent of Russians’ online news consumption comes from aggregators, but almost no attention is paid to the original source of the information.
Prigozhin’s outlets exploited that, flooding search engines like Yandex, and to a much lesser extent Google News, with their own content. Technical hacks like cross-referencing further amplified their online presence.
One of the troll factory’s central tasks was to target enemies — internationally, such as the United States, which has accused Prigozhin of meddling in the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump win, and at home, where the opposition figure Alexei Navalny was a constant target.
In 2019, soon after the veteran opposition politician Boris Vishnevsky announced his intention to run for St. Petersburg governor, Prigozhin’s media, some of which had been united under the Patriot media holding, began calling him a “pedophile” and “sex terrorist.”
Vishnevsky sued Patriot for slander. “I thought it was important to set a precedent so that these entities would be punished,” he told POLITICO.
But authorities rejected his repeated appeals for an investigation, and the smear campaigns continued. In 2021, Prigozhin was cited by an affiliated Telegram channel as saying he would “dissect” Vishnevsky “like an insect.”
Prigozhin’s media empire mirrored Wagner in other ways, too. It was a hydra-like creature, with one head advancing the interests of the Kremlin, and the other those of Prigozhin himself.
Sometimes that led to awkward situations, such as when Prigozhin unleashed his troll army against St. Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov, a long-time ally of Putin’s — in a dress rehearsal of his feud with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
“The Kremlin put up with some of Prigozhin’s excessive behavior because it wanted him, as a supposed outsider, to continue to do its dirty work,” said Petrov, the analyst.
In the meantime — as with Wagner — the Kremlin denied any connection to the troll farm. So did Prigozhin, even after his name appeared on Patriot’s board of trustees.
Crumbling empire
The war against Ukraine, however, changed the calculus.
By the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Prigozhin’s multi-pronged business spanned dozens of media websites, blogs, the social media platform “YaRus” (Russian for “I am Russian”), and legions of social media accounts.
Some specifically focused on spreading Russia’s war narrative. On Telegram, dozens of channels recounted Prigozhin’s every move on the battlefield. Supposedly independent voenkors, war correspondents, received payments for positive coverage of Wagner and Prigozhin personally, according to an investigation published by Dossier Center, an outlet founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
This February, Prigozhin finally came out of the shadows. “I was never just the Internet Research Agency’s financier,” Prigozhin announced in a written post, having already revealed himself as the attention-hungry boss of Wagner. “It was my idea, I created it, I managed it for a long time,” he wrote.
Just under six months after that confession, however, Prigozhin made what looks like a misstep.
On Saturday June 24, as the Wagner chief’s army was marching on Moscow, his information warriors were in disarray.
With no central guidance, some outlets reported the story as it developed, maintaining a mostly factual tone, while others kept silent. “There was total disorientation,” said Yagudayev, who started working for Politics Today three-and-a-half years ago. “People were afraid, for themselves and their close ones. It was unclear how things would turn out.”
Some of his colleagues, erring on the safe side, immediately handed in their notice.
That morning, law enforcement in balaclavas conducted raids at the Wagner Center and Patriot’s headquarters in Prigozhin’s Lakhta 2 building in St. Petersburg, confiscating servers and other equipment.
Management told staff to continue working from home. But then on Friday, a week after Prigozhin announced his “march for justice,” the government internet regulator blocked their most important sites. The message was clear: Prigozhin was being cut off the air.
According to the Bell, an independent outlet, Prigozhin called a meeting that same evening in St. Petersburg and told his top managers to shut down their operation.
News quickly trickled down the hierarchy. “We were told that it’s over, shit, it’s fucked. We’re shutting down,” one Yarus employee recounted on Telegram. “Investment has been abruptly cut off, and no crying or pounding your fist on the table will result in extra money. So guys, come on, let’s round off our work, pack up our stuff and leave.”
At St. Petersburg’s Wagner Center, the logo has been scraped from the windows. A former spokeswoman told POLITICO that Wagner’s press service “no longer exists.”
Cyber Front Z, a prominent troll farm dedicated to spreading Russia’s pro-war message online, did not respond to a request to comment. “People are still digesting the shock,” a person close to the group who asked to remain anonymous said.
New transparency
One consequence of the formal disbanding of Prigozhin’s media assets is unashamed frankness from some of its former employees.
In his goodbye video, top manager Zubarev said that Patriot’s work began in 2009, when its “commenters worked against opposition members such as Alexei Navalny, who were seriously trying to destroy our country.”
“Work for the government” continued in 2011, when it was important “strategically to sow doubt about opposition journalists who were rocking the boat.” It was also then that the “first international commentators” joined the group, he said.
Presumably less fearful of repercussions, lower-level employees are also talking to independent media about their experiences, such as, for example, having to take a mandatory lie detector test before being hired.
“There were questions about bad habits; alcohol, drugs or gambling addictions; about our employment history, and also a block about politics: participation in unauthorized protests and support for Navalny,” said a former RIA Fan employee who wanted to remain anonymous.
Yagudayev, from Politics Today, said “people with communist views” were also shunned. But he added there were a variety of views at the company, and many of his colleagues were not ideologically motivated but simply “typed letters for money.”
Most former Patriot employees approached by POLITICO expressed deep distrust of Western media, with one person refusing to talk to “the enemy.”
There are signs, however, that the death of Prigozhin’s empire may be short-lived.
A number of prominent figures in the pro-Kremlin journalism scene have publicly called on colleagues to hire his newly out-of-work journalists. “We need to support them,” the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, wrote on Telegram, without mentioning Prigozhin or the mutiny. “They have nothing to do with this.”
Several of Prigozhin’s outlets are already exploring comebacks. Nevskiye Novosti, which covers St. Petersburg politics, said it might launch a crowdfunding campaign, “as is common among independent media.”
Gershenzon is skeptical that the outlets can survive without constant cash infusions and traffic referrals. “Just as they were artificially inflated, they’ll now deflate and no one will notice,” said Gershenzon, who quit Yandex in 2012 and founded his own aggregator, The True Story.
Prigozhin’s empire is unlikely to be allowed to collapse completely, however. According to the investigative outlet Agentstvo, groups that monitor bots associated with the network report the overall activity has not decreased.
Rather, it seems like thousands of them switched sides as early as May, producing posts against the Wagner boss, in what could be an indication of a change in leadership even before the mutiny.
“Prigozhin was merely the nominal owner and manager of these assets,” Petrov, the analyst, said. “Whatever happens today should be seen in terms of a process of rebranding and a leadership shuffle.”
Prigozhin’s downfall, he added, offers the Kremlin an opportunity to streamline the troll farm and adapt it to current needs. “They’ll take over some [outlets], rebrand some, and close others,” he predicted.
According to The Bell, one candidate for a potential takeover is the National Media Group (NMG), owned by the banker Yury Kovalchuk, one of Putin’s closest allies.
“Without these dumpsters [outlets], the air is cleaner, it’s easier to breathe,” said Vishnevsky, the opposition politician. “But though one troll farm might close, I wouldn’t be surprised if others appear in its place.”