Yevgeny Prigozhin
The Wagner boss failed with his uprising – now his empire is being smashed
A Wagner mercenary in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. After his failed uprising, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s media empire is now being smashed.
© Erik Romanenko/TASS PUBLICATION / Imago Images
For ten years, Yevgeny Prigozhin built up a media empire. Now the failed Wagner boss has to watch as it is smashed and thousands of his trolls suddenly work against him.
After his uprising against the Kremlin collapsed, the Moscow regime is now dismantling the empire of Yevgeny Prigozhin. His media holding “Patriot” was dissolved on Saturday night. The most important medium of the former Wagner boss “Nevskiye Nowosti” ceased to exist. In the past, compromising materials about the activities of the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, were published here – a close friend of Putin, but with whom Prigozhin had a feud.
“We are closing and leaving the country’s news segment,” said Ria Fan general director Yevgeny Zubarev. The publication was one of the best-known editions of the so-called “media factory,” the successor organization to the “troll factory,” which, under Prigozhin’s aegis, manipulated the information field, spread fake news, and carried the Kremlin’s narrative out into the world through thousands upon thousands of “trolls.” has.
As a farewell, Zubarev released a ten-minute video about the work of the “troll factory” and openly admitted to having worked against the imprisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny and other opposition figures. He described his activities as “work for the state”: “Back then it was important to strategically question the work of opposition journalists who were destabilizing the situation in the country and trying to destroy our country,” said the now unemployed head of the newspaper trolls
“There will be no administrative responsibility for work in the holding,” the company’s management promised the Prigozhin trolls. This emerges from a correspondence that an employee of Ria Fan dem independent medium “Sever.Realii”. “The media regulator won’t be unblocking our websites anytime soon, so our messages make absolutely no sense. So now it’s time to rest and wait for salaries.”
Prigozhin trolls are now working against him
But some of the trolls have apparently found new work. As the Russian investigative publication “Agency” reports, about 13,000 Prigozhin trolls are now working against their former boss. According to two sources, they have been spreading negative comments about the failed Wagner leader on the Russian social network VKontakte (VK) since last May.
These bots may have “worked for Prigozhin for the last few years, but now they obviously don’t work for him anymore because they write comments against him in a clear and coordinated way,” explained an expert who has tracked the activity of around 127,000 bots since 2019 UK monitored.
“I suspect that this structure was simply taken away from Prigozhin. It works the same as before, only its tasks have changed,” the analyst said. At the same time, according to him, there are only about 1400 profiles in VK that support Prigozhin. By May 2023 there were around 15,000. But most of them would work against him now.
Prigozhin’s counterpart to Instagram stops working
The Prigozhin counterpart to Instagram, Jarus (Яrus), also no longer exists. “After analyzing the current situation, this is the only possible decision,” the social network said in a statement. “Due to the unstable political situation, support for the project has ended. We are looking for new investors.” Apparently, Jarus still hopes to survive – under the aegis of a new financier.
Kremlin censorship turns on failed Wagner leader
While his media empire is being dismantled, Prigozhin is said to have no other way of making his voice heard. At VKontakte, his messages and announcements published by his press service are blocked. The search engine Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google, is removing content related to Prigozhin. And the marketplaces, Ozon and Wildberries, which are very popular in Russia, are removing items with the symbolism of the Wagner mercenaries from their offer.