Charged ‘Putin’s chef’ runs news sites along with troll army
MOSCOW — He’s been indicted in the U.S. for meddling in the 2016 presidential election with an army of trolls and his private military company has trodden battlefields in Ukraine and Syria. Still, the Russian multimillionaire dubbed “Putin’s chef” runs yet another asset that is valuable to the Kremlin: a sprawling Russian media empire.
St. Petersburg restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin is believed to control more than a dozen news portals in Russia that attract tens of millions of visitors and serve as an important state propaganda weapon as President Vladimir Putin runs for re-election in the March 18 vote.
While the media outlets themselves have been tight-lipped about their owners, an investigation by the respected RBC business magazine and reports by other Russian media have revealed their connections to other Prigozhin assets, including the “troll farm,” 12 of whose operatives were indicted in the U.S. along with Prigozhin.
The troll factory, the innocuously named Internet Research Agency, initially operated under the same roof with the Federal News Agency and other media outlets that allegedly belong to Prigozhin, but later they split and moved to different buildings on the northern edge of St. Petersburg. RBC reported that Mikhail Burchik, one of the indicted troll farm operatives, also played a key role in Prigozhin’s media holdings.