The Wagner Group’s Inner Circle by Ben Dalton and Candace Rondeaux of Arizona State University and New America.

Click the title right above or here for the post.

From New America:

This blog post offers an overview of key figures in the Wagner Group-Russian government nexus, supplementing our comprehensive report. For a full analysis and deeper insights, we encourage readers to explore the complete report, The Wagner Group’s Little Black Book: Decoding Command and Control of Russia’s Irregular Forces.

Yevgeny Prigozhin

On a day-to-day basis, the head of the Wagner Group managed the businesses that facilitated the network’s paramilitary wing, liaised with high-level officials within the Russian government, including the president’s office, and personally steered information operations such as Lakhta Media, one of the entities accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. From his perch in the back office’s St. Petersburg hub, Prigozhin’s calendar was filled with meetings: lawyers, accountants, filmmakers, media managers, and real estate specialists, all working to keep his sprawling empire of hundreds of limited liability companies (LLCs) humming along.

In the last year of his life Prigozhin often made grandiose claims about his role as a swashbuckling paramilitary leader. But the available data painted a somewhat different picture, indicating that he likely rarely directly oversaw Wagner’s military field operations. He delegated that task to Wagner Group director Andrei Troshev, who served as Prigozhin’s primary conduit to the group’s paramilitary wing. This division of labor underscores the Wagner Group’s dual nature: part business venture, part shadow army.

Analysis of leaked documents, calendar entries, and a network mapping of the paramilitary’s administrative structures and phone book schema further confirms that Prigozhin was more an executive frontman than paramilitary commander. Instead, it appears that high-level Kremlin gatekeepers inside President Vladimir Putin’s office and in the upper echelons of the defense ministry controlled and shaped the overall strategy while active duty and semi-retired reserve officials in Russia’s military and security services coordinated operations at the field level.

Prigozhin’s personal calendar from 2012 to 2022 reads like a Kremlin rolodex, revealing a decade of extensive coordination with Russia’s military and security elite. Between 2012 and 2022, he held 128 meetings with Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff and likely Prigozhin’s most direct line to the president. Prigozhin’s calendar entries confirm that he met at least twice with Andrei Belousov during his tenure as First Deputy Prime Minister and Putin’s economic advisor. Moreover, reporting by the Dossier Center suggests that the two likely met more frequently and enjoyed cozy relations, working closely to resolve any issues that came up with management of the Wagner portfolio on an informal basis almost from the inception of the Wagner Group concept in 2014. Belousov would go on to replace Sergei Shoigu as Minister of Defense in May 2024.

Prigozhin’s calendar shows occasional meetings with then-Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but the bulk of his recorded interactions were with deputy defense ministers and heads of defense ministry directorates. Prigozhin met at least 122 times with Ruslan Tsalikov, the first deputy minister of defense and Shoigu’s longtime close associate. He also met 91 times with Dmitry Bulgakov, deputy minister of defense for logistics, who played a central role in provisioning the Wagner Group with equipment and transportation resources.

Both Tsalikov and Bulgakov were caught up in the sweeping purge the Kremlin initiated in the wake of the Wagner mutiny. Putin removed Tsalikov from his position in June 2024, part of a cabinet shuffle that saw the ouster of four top deputy defense officials on the same day who oversaw ministry finance, contracting, and information management. The government dismissed Bulgakov in September 2022 due to logistical failures during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and arrested him on corruption charges in July 2024. Bulgakov’s replacement, Mikhail Mizintsev, also appears in Prigozhin’s calendar: he served as the Ministry of Defense’s logistics chief for less than a year before joining the Wagner Group as deputy commander. Timur Ivanov, another deputy minister of defense, appeared in Prigozhin’s calendar 15 times. As with Bulgakov, authorities dismissed and arrested Ivanov on corruption charges in April 2024.

Prigozhin’s calendar shows four meetings with Sergei Rudskoy, head of the Main Operations Directorate; 23 with Igor Kostyukov, chief of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; and 17 with Kostyukov’s deputy, Vladimir Alekseyev, who was a key architect of both the Wagner Group and Redut, a paramilitary recruiting hub that has largely supplanted Wagner in Ukraine. This constant engagement with the top echelons of Russia’s military, security, and intelligence establishment points to Prigozhin’s role as the chief liaison between the state and the Wagner Group.

Beyond these high-level government contacts, Prigozhin focused on steering his business interests, taking a particularly keen interest in the network’s information operations. He met frequently with figures like Mikhail Burchik, who headed Lakhta Media and spearheaded Internet Research Agency disinformation campaigns, and lawyer Yevgeny Burleev, whose team coordinated Prigozhin’s international lawfare campaigns, including lawsuits against foreign investigative journalists. Prigozhin also maintained regular contact with Valery Chekalov, the Wagner Group’s logistics chief, likely ensuring the paramilitary wing had what it needed to operate across multiple theaters.