Inside the grisly world of Russia’s mercenaries, where ex hotdog salesman sends convicts into ‘meat grinder’

AMID the bloodbath of Bakhmut, Russian war-lord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries have a powerful incentive to run towards the “meat grinder” front line.

If they don’t, the sinister boss of the Wagner Group likes to see those who displease him bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer.

When an alleged defector from his rag-tag convict army was murdered using the gruesome method, Prigozhin gloated that it was “a dog’s death for a dog”.

It helps to explain how a former hot dog salesman — who “never refused to do dirty deeds” — has risen from jailbird to be one of Vladimir Putin’s most powerful lieutenants.

Oafish Prigozhin, who, like a mafia henchman, calls Putin “Papa”, formed private army Wagner to give the Russian president “plausible deniability” over its sordid activities.

From Ukraine to Syria and some of Africa’s most brutal conflicts, Wagner has fought dirty wars, allowing Russia to deflect blame.

A British mercenary told of an incident off Africa’s east coast: “The Wagner guys had caught some pirates.

Two grenades

“They tied them up, put them back in their boat, poured petrol over them and lit them.

“If you’d said some-thing they wouldn’t have thought there was anything strange — ‘That’s what we do to pirates’.”

Now billionaire Prigozhin’s private army could be instrumental in deciding Ukraine’s fate. Recruiting from the dregs of Russian jails, he tells murderers, rapists and robbers: “I need your criminal talents.”

He promises that if they sur-vive six months on the front line — a tall order amid Russia’s chaotic battle plans — their con-victions will be quashed and they can go home as free men.

In one video, 61-year-old Prigozhin is heard telling convicts: “Do you have anyone else who can get you out of this jail, if you’ve got ten years to spend behind bars?

“God and Allah can, but in a wooden box. I can get you out of here alive. But I don’t always bring you back alive.”

Those on the front line would be given two grenades — to blow themselves up if surrounded.

Prigozhin said: “No one is retreating. No one backs down. No one is being taken prisoner.”

Deserters, he told the lags, “will be shot”.

Others are terrified they will get the sledgehammer treatment.

One recruit — enamoured by the Wagner leader’s brutal manner — said: “He’s one of us.”

Indeed, Prigozhin is a violent convicted criminal himself. Born in Leningrad — now St Petersburg — in the Soviet Union in 1961, he was raised by his single mother, who worked at a local hospital.

Dreaming of a career as a professional cross-country skier, he graduated from a prestigious athletics boarding school in 1977.

A life in sport eluded him — so instead he turned to crime.
In 1979, aged just 18, he got a suspended two-and-a-half-year sentence for theft. Instead of jail he worked in a chemical factory.

Two years later Prigozhin and accomplices went on a robbing spree, during which they mugged a female victim at knifepoint.

Prigozhin grabbed the woman from behind and choked her until she lost consciousness. He was jailed for 13 years, nine of which were in a high-security prison camp.

Last year a video emerged claiming he had performed sex acts on other prisoners.

A tattooed man claiming to be a crime boss said of Prigozhin: “He knew his place and he agreed to his place.”

Pro-Kremlin bloggers say the claims were a smear by Ukraine, while analysts believe his many political enemies inside Russia may be behind the suggestions.

He was freed from prison in 1990, and the Soviet Union collapsed the following year.

Prigozhin opened a hot dog stand — which soon flourished amid the chaos as Russia switched to a capitalist economy.

Soon he was running a chain of convenience stores, then several top-end restaurants in St Petersburg.

The jewel in his culinary crown was a floating restaurant called New Island, which sailed up and down the Neva River. When Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori visited Putin in April 2000, the pair dined on board the New Island.

Prigozhin recalled that Putin “saw how I built a business out of a kiosk” and “saw that I had no problem serving plates to dignitaries in person”.

In 2002 US President George W Bush dined at the New Island with Putin and a year later the Russian president celebrated his birthday there.

Although not a cook himself, Prigozhin soon earned the nickname “Putin’s chef” and the trust of Russia’s leader.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny — now behind bars — said of Prigozhin: “He became something like the court jester.”

Soon he was awarded £2.5billion-worth of government contracts to cater for the army, schools and state banquets. Riches flowed and the father of three — married to business-woman Lyubov — was said to own a £7.5million estate, a private jet and a 121ft yacht worth £4.4million.

Then he went from Putin’s chef to his private military contractor. In 2014 Prigozhin’s Wagner Group — named after Hitler’s favourite composer — began fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region as Russia attempted to seize it.

Gaining a fearsome reputation for barbarity, the mercenary group propped up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, where a video showed

Wagner murderers smashing a prisoner’s wrists and ankles with a sledgehammer.

Then they laughed as they decapitated the man and torched his remains.

Russian journalist Denis Korotkov identified one of the killers as a former Russian policeman and said: “They’re out of control. I don’t think it’s an isolated case.”

Prigozhin glories in his army’s grisly reputation. Russian shops are selling a Wagner-engraved “souvenir” sledgehammer, etched with the mercenary fighters’ logo and a pile of skulls, in a presentation box that resembles a coffin as well as similarly-branded key rings and car stickers.

And when the EU parliament labelled Russia a state sponsor of terrorism last November, Prigozhin said he was sending them one of the hammers.

In a video posted on one of Wagner’s Telegram channels, a sledgehammer daubed with fake blood was then seen being packed into a violin case.

In another film Prigozhin told “traitors” and rich Russians abroad: “The Wagner sledge-hammer will be waiting for you.”

For much of the unprompted invasion of Ukraine, which began last February, Wagner mercenaries have been engaged in “human wave” attacks at the logistics hub of Bakhmut.

Former Wagner recruit Andrei Medvedev, now seeking asylum in Norway, said: “They would round up those who did not want to fight and shoot them in front of newcomers.

“They buried them in the trenches dug by the trainees.”

On Sunday, after months of trench warfare, Prigozhin claimed to have planted a Russian flag on the city’s town hall, adding that “in a legal sense, Bakhmut is ours”.

The Ukrainians robustly deny the city has fallen. Yet the 50,000-strong private army — around a quarter of Russian forces in Ukraine — has added considerably to Prigozhin’s clout.

He has publicly insulted Russia’s military top brass, even “behaving like a parallel government”, as one analyst put it.

Some believe he may even be jockeying to succeed Putin as president. Yet recently there are signs that Putin may be reining in his former caterer.

Wagner can now no longer recruit from prisons and some believe the Russian high command has starved his group of munitions and support to cut Prigozhin down to size.

Ex-Wagner man Medvedev — who calls his former commander “mad” — predicts a grisly end, saying: “Once this whole spectacle is over, I think his own men will kill him.”

Putin’s chef may yet feel a sledgehammer blow himself.