‘Since the early 90s’

Vladimir Putin’s comments about when he first met Yevgeny Prigozhin raise questions about the historical record

In his first public comments on the plane crash that killed mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Vladimir Putin said he’d known the St. Petersburg businessman “for a very long time, since the early 90s.” As journalist Farida Rustamova noted on her Telegram channel, Russia’s president had never before revealed this information. Meduza reviews the conflicting reports about when and where exactly the two men first became acquainted.

Before today, the “early 90s” origins of the Prigozhin-Putin relationship were unknown. In fact, Putin’s remarks contradict what had been reported previously about his relationship with Prigozhin, including what Prigozhin himself had said about his acquaintance with the president. According to the most popular telling of their meeting (a story attributed to the newspapers Moskovsky Komsomolets and Argumenty i Fakty), the two men first met in the early 2000s when President Putin dined with his French and American counterparts, Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush, in St. Petersburg at the restaurant New Island, which Prigozhin owned. As the heads of state shared a meal, Prigozhin served as the waiter.

In April 2023, in an interview with the outlet Defence Web, Prigozhin said rumors about his relationship with the president were “very, very exaggerated.” “Of course, I’ve spoken with him, but rumors about our acquaintance are just rumors,” said Prigozhin, adding that he didn’t meet Putin until after the latter became Russia’s president.

At the same time, Prigozhin admitted that Putin may have visited his restaurants in St. Petersburg while acting as the city’s deputy mayor (a position Putin held from 1992 to 1994), though the Wagner Group founder said he “had no interest” in talking to Putin then.

According to investigative journalist Andrey Zakharov, there is one version of events where Putin and Prigozhin met as far back as the early 1990s “through a casino connection.” Some reporters have traced the relationship to when Prigozhin worked in the casino network controlled by Mikhail Mirilashvili, while Putin as deputy mayor was responsible for licensing casinos. Despite these reports, Zakharov says his sources deny this story. “But today Putin himself presented us with a puzzle,” the journalist wrote on his Telegram channel. “Or maybe he just misspoke — it happens to all elderly people.”