"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it." The channel "Herald of the Storm" not only analyzes the problems of Russia and the world, but also gives answers to the question "What to do?" ==from Vestnik Buri's "about" page.
This video was produced by one Andrey Rudoy as part of the Russian-language Vestnik Buri YouTube channel. I found it on Matt Taibbi's Russian Dissidents page.
It's a good portrait of Evgeny Prigozhin, who began life as a petty criminal and rose to be a powerful oligarch and head of the Wagner Group, a supposedly private military company that's doing a lot of the fighting in Ukraine.
It also shows the underside of Russian power and autocracy.
Prigozhin's path to power began when he established himself as Putin's personal chef and caterer for important state dinners. Eventually Putin gave him a contract to provide food service for Russian schools.
According to Rudoy, there were so many protests about the bad food that he lost that contract, but got a new contract to provide food service for the Russian military.
One of his enterprises was a "troll farm," which employed large numbers of young Russians to spread propaganda on the Internet. Hillary Clinton blamed them for contributing to her loss in the 2016 presidential election.
Another was the Wagner Group, a supposedly private military group for hire. It did a lot of work in Africa, and fought for the Assad government in Syria. Now it is a key part of the Russian military force in Ukraine.
By all accounts, it is a hard-bitten group something like the French Foreign Legion. The Wagner Group recruited in prisons, although Prigozhin claims this has stopped, and I have heard that it advertises on pornography sites.
Like the Ukraine's Azov fighters, the Wagner Group is found of Nazi symbols. Prigozhin recently announced the Wagner group will not take prisoners of war. This is in response to videos of Ukrainian troops executing Russian POWs.
According to Rudoy, "Putin's Chef" is now head of the most combat-ready military force in the Ukrainian war, issuing pardons, running his own media empire, and reportedly plotting the creation of an ultra-conservative movement that exploits anti-oligarchic rhetoric.
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