RECIPE FOR DISASTER FOR PUTIN’S CHEF
If there’s any midyear announcement that reeks more of “not seeing the New Year” than entering hospice care with advanced pancreatic cancer, it’s staging a mutiny against Vladimir Putin. I’m not implying Yevgeny Prigozhin did that while suffering from pancan, though that would be impressive. He and Vlad went back many years – Prigozhin accrued billions off a string of successful restaurant ventures in the 90s and used his riches to bankroll Putin’s evils. His Wagner Group, a mercenary group founded in 2014 that was probably named after Hitler’s admiration of Richard Wagner and committed massacres across the Middle East and Africa, proved a useful arm to Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine.
But the war Putin thought would be quick and brutal has instead been long and brutal. And the longstanding grudge Prigozhin had against the Russian Ministry of Defense became harder to conceal, especially while Wagner suffered blows during the war and plans were underway to phase out Wagner for increased presence of official Russian troops. Thus came the mutiny, which Prigozhin retreated from days later under the naïve mindset that there was some way to survive such a public challenge to Putin. The end result, a jet crash that killed him and other senior Wagner officials, proves that Wagner on a plane is just as disastrous as Wagner on a boat.
He was 62 and Reptile’s topical theme team Just in Case cracks open the vodka.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
1 June 1961 – 23 August 2023, aged 62
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 + 👻 + 😲 = 15 POINTS