The mother of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late Wagner Group mercenary chief, has said her son appeared “doomed” in the days before his death, following his dramatic but short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership.
In her first interview since his death in August 2023, 85-year-old Violetta Prigozhina told the Russian outlet Fontanka that she had urged her son not to march on Moscow. “Zhenya, only people on the internet will support you. No one will go with you. People aren’t like that now. No one will come out to the square,” she recalled telling him.
Prigozhin, a former convict who became a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, rose from running luxury restaurants to securing Kremlin catering contracts, earning the nickname “Putin’s chef.” Later, he built the Wagner paramilitary force, which played a central role in Russia’s war in Ukraine — including the bloody assault on Bakhmut — and recruited thousands of fighters from prisons.
But by 2023, tensions between Prigozhin and Russia’s top military brass had reached breaking point. In June, his forces crossed into Russia from Ukraine, seizing military sites in Rostov-on-Don before advancing towards Moscow. The insurrection ended abruptly, however, with Wagner fighters turning back short of the capital.
“In Rostov, everyone greeted him with open arms,” his mother said. “And then he couldn’t go any further because he couldn’t bring himself to shoot at young cadets.” She insisted that her son never intended to overthrow Putin. “He wanted to get through to the military leadership,” she said.
Prigozhina also expressed gratitude to Putin, recalling how the Russian president personally intervened to save her life years earlier by arranging urgent medical treatment in Germany. “[Putin] literally saved my life,” she said.
Two months after the aborted coup, Prigozhin was killed when his private jet crashed in Russia’s Tver region. He was 62. “When I last saw him on August 15, he looked doomed. And on the 23rd, he was gone,” she said.
Authorities have not confirmed the cause of the crash, and Prigozhina said the family has received no answers. “Of course he knew he would die,” she added. “But no one knows why the plane crashed.”
Despite Western suspicions that the Kremlin may have orchestrated the killing, Moscow denies involvement. The Times UK noted that the Wagner boss’s death came exactly two months after his rebellion, raising fresh questions about Putin’s tolerance of dissent within his inner circle.
Violetta Prigozhina, who now runs a pro-war art gallery in St Petersburg, rejected the notion that her son sought power for himself. “It’s absolutely certain that he didn’t want to be president,” she said. “He cared deeply about Russia; he wanted the country to be great.”
