Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian businessman, chief of Wagner Group (born 1961)

Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin was a Russian mercenary leader and oligarch. He led the Wagner Group, a private military company, and was a close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin until launching a rebellion in June 2023. Prigozhin was sometimes referred to as "Putin's chef" because he owned restaurants and catering businesses that provided services to the Kremlin. Once a convict in the Soviet Union, Prigozhin controlled a network of influential companies whose operations, according to a 2020 investigation, were "tightly integrated with Russia's Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU".

The Wagner Group, officially known as PMC Wagner, is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin, and since then by Pavel Prigozhin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.

August 23 is the 235th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 130 days remain until the end of the year.