Maria Butina told me last year that she worked for the Foundation for the Protection of National Values, a thinktank that the U.S. government sanctioned for aiding Yevgeny Prigozhin’s global propaganda efforts. The website is now defunct, like him.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the notorious Russian leader of the invasion of Ukraine and the failed coup against Moscow, reportedly died yesterday in a plane crash near Tver. The U.S. Defence Department has said that while it believes Prigozhin was assassinated, there is no definitive conclusion on what caused the crash. Russian president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has called Prigozhin “a talented man” who “made serious mistakes.”
Prigozhin has a storied resume. He began his career as a caterer for the Kremlin, which earned him the nickname “Putin’s Chef,” before emerging as a key figure in Russia’s disinformation apparatus. He was one of 13 Russians indicted in 2018 for conspiring to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, later joining the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 2021. He gained international fame last year when he confessed to being the leader of Wagner, a mercenary group that spearheaded the Ukrainian attack.
Months before he confessed, I reached out to Prigozhin for a BuzzFeed News story I was working on about his new breed of propaganda: feature-length films that used Hollywood-style techniques to fictionalise Russia’s global exploits and justify its militant foreign policy, such as invading Ukraine. True to form, Prigozhin mocked us (then-Buzzfeed News tech editor John Paczkowski and me) when we asked him for comment, calling us “boorish and offensive.” He then boasted on his network of Russian propaganda sites that he had “trolled American journalists.” What a prankster.
I also contacted Maria Butina, a former Kremlin agent who spent 15 months in U.S. prisons and now works for Russia’s state-run media and parliament. She admitted that she had been consulting for the Foundation for the Protection of National Values, a Russian thinktank that the U.S. sanctioned in 2021 for aiding Prigozhin’s disinformation campaigns.
As of publication, the foundation’s website appears to be kaput.
Butina did not return a request for comment.
The site was part of a network of sites allegedly backed by Prigozhin, including the once-dominant Federal News Agency, that closed after his failed coup in June. But this site was different from the others, which mainly targeted a Russian audience. It was aimed at Africa, where its chairman Maxim Shugaley reportedly did the Kremlin’s bidding before shifting focus to Ukraine. I was unable to contact Shugaley.
Asked for comment, the foundation’s creator, Alexander Malkevich, was evasive, writing:
“I left the fund in December 2020
Today is August 2023″
I was unconvinced by that answer, so I asked Malkevich how he could be so well-versed in Russian politics yet be ignorant of his former organisation’s fate. His reply:
“right now I have no time to look over things that I had left in my past
For year and a half I am deeply integrated into new regions of Russia”
Malkevich – a regular subject on this blog – seems to be alluding to his recent role as a propagandist in the “Wagner-linked network in Ukraine,” according to a recent investigation by Reporters Without Borders. He added that he did not know what happened to his former boss.
With Prigozhin, you never know what is real and what is not. In 2019, for example, a site reportedly run by another regular subject of this blog, Alexander Ionov, claimed that Prigozhin had died in a plane crash in the Congo. So, just to cover all bases, I’ve emailed the press contact that I had used to reach Prigozhin for my BuzzFeed News story.
It has not bounced back.
Shooting the Messenger 