Russia’s Wagner Group Founder Admits US Election Interference

Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin says a day before the US election that he will continue to meddle.

A day before the US votes in the midterm elections, the founder of Russia’s Wagner Group, a private mercenary force, admitted to interfering in the US election and vowed to continue.

“We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere, carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do it,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said Monday in comments published by the press service of his Concord catering. sign on Russian social networks.

“During our precise operations, we will remove the kidneys and the liver at the same time,” the Russian businessman wrote on VK, the Russian equivalent of Facebook.

He did not give more details.

A 2018 US Department of Justice indictment accused a Prigozhin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, of sowing divisions in the US electorate during the 2016 election campaign by using from Facebook and Twitter.

Prigozhin usually keeps a low public profile, but has become more outspoken over the course of the Ukraine war and has criticized Russian generals.

In September, after years of secrecy, he admitted to founding the Wagner Group, which has been active in Syria, African nations and now Ukraine.

On Friday, the Wagner Group opened a defense technology center in St. Petersburg, another step for Prigozhin to highlight his military credentials and take a more public role in Russia’s defense policy.

Prigozhin owns a network of businesses and is often referred to as “Putin’s chef” because his catering company has contracts with the Kremlin.

In July, the US State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on Prigozhin related to “participation in US election interference.”

Those accusations have led the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union to sanction Prigozhin.