Russians mark year since Prigozhin's death with flowers, tributes

 

People light a candle at an improvised memorial in tribute of fallen members of the Wagner private military company in central Moscow on August 23, 2024. [AFP]

At a curbside tribute to Russian paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin in Moscow, just a few hundred metres from the Kremlin, streams of his supporters came Friday to lay bouquets of flowers.

The late mercenary boss died a year ago, two months after leading an armed rebellion against Russia's military leadership, but he is still revered by many who see him as a patriot.

"For me it was such a blow," a masked man visiting the memorial said of Prigozhin's death, wishing to remain anonymous.

"He tried to tell it like it is," he added, calling the mutiny a "mistake" but praising the Wagner group founder for speaking truth to power.

Plain-spoken and often vulgar, Prigozhin recruited tens of thousands of men, many of them prison convicts, to prosecute some of Russia's longest and bloodiest offensives in the first year-and-a-half of its assault on Ukraine.

Thousands of his fighters were killed in the battle for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, an offensive that Prigozhin called a "meat grinder" and that resulted in the city's complete destruction.

In the months leading up to his aborted mutiny, he had taken to angry criticism of Russia's military leaders -- then defence minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov -- on an almost daily basis, shared in audio recordings published on his social media pages.

"For me it is courage, charisma, heroism," 23-year-old student Aleksei Bogomolov told AFP of Prigozhin's qualities while visiting the memorial.

"I believe with my soul that he is alive," he added, an apparent reference to conspiracy theories that he was not really killed when his private jet exploded mid-air, but had instead disappeared into hiding.

'It's a brotherhood'

A former hotdog seller and convicted criminal, Prigozhin became acquainted with future president Vladimir Putin some time in the 1990s, later running catering businesses that served the Kremlin, the army and Russian schools.

Nicknamed "Putin's chef", his influence quickly grew and he won millions of dollars' worth of government contracts.

He is believed to have founded the Wagner Group some time in 2014 to support Russian paramilitaries in east Ukraine, setting up the venture alongside shadowy former military officer Dmitry Utkin.

Both men were killed when their plane crashed en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in unexplained circumstances on 23 August 2023.

Wagner soldier Ivan Glushkov, who came to the memorial, said the date of Prigozhin's death had become an important occasion in his military unit's calendar.

"Wagner is a brotherhood. That says it all," the 41-year-old said.

The day after the plane crash, Putin praised the late renegade as a  "talented businessman" who made "serious mistakes".

The Kremlin has always denied responsibility for the crash, with Putin saying a hand grenade could have exploded on board and implying the passengers might have been under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

The rebellion -- in which Prigozhin took control of Russia's military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and then advanced on Moscow -- represented the biggest challenge to Putin's near quarter of a century in power.

He was greeted by cheering crowds after calling off the mutiny, and many Russians saluted the mercenary boss and his fighters as heroes.

"They were there so that we could live peacefully here," said 39-year-old volunteer Svetlana of Wagner's fighters in Ukraine and other countries.

"Their meaning of life was to serve the Fatherland," she said.