Moscow Attacks Wagner Chief’s Secret Weapon: His Ability to Post

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary leader of the Wagner group who led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership and who once sat atop a Russian-speaking media empire, hasn’t posted on his official channels in more than a week.

Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny was built on the back of a business and media empire, one that ruled the Russian information sphere. Prigozhin controlled multiple news outlets, influenced thousands of independent posters, and sent frequent dispatches from the frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine via Telegram that were closely watched in his home country and in the West. Now, weeks after he marched his Wagner mercenaries into Russian cities, communication has dried up. 

The radio silence  may be because Prigozhin, as the leader of a rapidly crumbling military business empire who directly challenged Russia’s military leadership before agreeing to live in effective exile in Belarus, has other things on his mind. But it’s also because the Kremlin is hitting the mercenary leader where it hurts: his ability to post.

Moscow didn’t wait around, it hit Prigozhin on June 24 while the mutiny was in full swing. According to the Guardian, agents of the FSB stormed the headquarters of the Prigozhin-owned media organization Patriot-group and seized computers and files. Later, the Kremlin blocked in-country access to Prigozhin-linked websites. Then some of the news organizations attached to Wagner began to shut down. 

"I am announcing our decision to close down and to leave the country's information space," Yevgeny Zubarev, the director of Prigozhin-backed news organization RIA FAN, said in a video on the site’s social media accounts on July 1.

Prigozhin is a self-proclaimed master of social media. He has  long claimed responsibility for the Internet Research Agency, a group of Russian trolls that screwed around with the U.S. election in 2016 using troll farms. “We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012,” Prigozhin told The Intercept in 2022. “50 young guys, whom I personally organized, kicked the entire American government in the ass. And we will continue to do so as many times as needed.”

There’s evidence that this troll army has now either abandoned Prigozhin or been taken over by the government. Prigozhin’s mutiny was shocking, but he’d been laying the groundwork for it in his posts for months. IRA-linked accounts on Russian social media site VK, Telegram, and Twitter that once praised Prigozhin have begun to attack him.  Darren Linvill, the lead researcher at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said IRA-connected social media accounts on Twitter had turned against Prigozhin as early as May. 

“The first thing you do with someone planning a coup is take away their troll farm,” Linvill told Motherboard. 

Prigozhin’s last post on his official Telegram channel was an 11-minute audio message on June 26. It was also his first statement since the mutiny. He used the post to thank everyone who helped him march into Russia, stressed that the goal wasn’t to overthrow Putin, and claimed that Wagner was the most fit fighting force in the world. On July 3, Russian-language sources reported that Prigozhin dropped a 40 second audio clip on the Telegram channel Grey Zone, which is friendly to Wanger but not one that is officially linked to Prigozhin. . In the brief clip, the Wagner chief said his “March for Justice” had “achieved a lot.”

The lack of posts from Prigozhin and his array of media assets is a change. This is a man who posted repeatedly through a mutiny that saw his troops march from Ukraine to the Russian city of Rostov. The entire rebellion played out on Telegram and other social media sites like theater. Prigozhin announced his intention to take down Moscow’s military leadership in a video that he alleged showed the Russia MoD had attacked, and killed, Wagner troops. Every hour of the march into Rostov was accompanied by photos and videos across the various social media channels Prigozhin controlled.

Prigozhin’s posts drew billions of people to Telegram. As of this writing, the last video showing Prigozhin in Rostov posted to his official Telegram channel has almost 4 million views. But now, he’s essentially a ghost. His media empire is in shambles, the Kremlin is rooting through his businesses, and he hasn’t posted anything on his official channel in more than a week.