Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges on Russian influence operations

Tim Starks

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Without Prigozhin, expect some changes around the edges in Russian influence operations

Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin at a funeral outside St. Petersburg last year. (AP) (AP)

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who ran Russia’s Internet Research Agency and had an important role in developing the nation’s modern digital influence operations — most notably, interference in the 2016 U.S. elections — was reportedly on board a deadly plane crash Wednesday.

A failed mutiny diminished Prigozhin’s status in Moscow after once being known as “Putin’s chef” for his catering business and closeness with the Russian president, and the Internet Research Agency had declared that it was shutting down. So it’s possible he wouldn’t have had a major impact on Russian disinformation and misinformation campaigns going forward if he was/is alive.

Nevertheless, the Wagner Group boss was a formative figure, and his Internet Research Agency serves as a model for autocratic regimes for a quasi-state-connected entity without leaving definitive fingerprints, an expert on Russian information warfare told me.

But successors within Russia could exhibit diminished effectiveness, said the expert, Gavin Wilde, who served on the National Security Council as director for Russia, Baltic and Caucasus affairs.

“Prigozhin was for Russian information operations kind of what Kurt Cobain was for grunge music,” said Wilde, now a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. “The guy ushers in a certain era and perfects a certain craft, but now that he’s gone, what’s likely to follow is a saturated market of copycats, and that will probably end up falling far short of the kind of heyday or the prominence of what it once was.”

Prigozhin’s possible death "while maybe a temporary setback for the Wagner Group, doesn’t preclude the GRU and other entities in Russian intelligence and security services from continuing operations all over the globe,” David Salvo, senior fellow and managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, told me. “With Russia likely setting sights on the 2024 election here, there’s plenty of time to get their ducks in a row.”

(I conditioned my questions to Wilde and Salvo on the presumption that Prigozhin is actually dead, but as my colleagues write this morning: “Russian officials and the Wagner Group have yet to officially confirm" his fate. What we know is that his name was on the passenger list for a plane travelling Wednesday from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport to St. Petersburg that crashed, killing all 10 on board, according to Russia’s civil aviation agency.)

Origins and accomplishments

In blustering fashion, Prigozhin has claimed credit for all of the Internet Research Agency, after once denying any connection.

“I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time,” he said this year. “It was founded to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian narrative from the West.”

The first known signs of the Internet Research Agency emerged in 2013 when it registered with the Russian government as a 2018 indictment of Prigozhin and affiliated figures by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III showed. My colleague Philip Bump had a fully detailed timeline following that indictment, and in it, Prigozhin is intertwined from the beginning.

Efforts to influence the 2016 election began not long after then-candidate Donald Trump entered the race, according to the indictment.

A 2017 intelligence community analysis outlined the overall influence effort in the 2016 presidential campaign, of which the Internet Research Agency was but one part. Furthermore, the interference included hack-and-leak operations, not just disinformation, misinformation and attempts to manipulate social media.