How a sick burn ignited the monster that was Prigozhin

His history in Syria is a legacy that needs reckoning.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin may be dead, but how many horrible men are about to take his place? (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Remember Syria?

Of course you do, when asked. But the war hasn’t been on the front pages for years. And so many of us who covered Syria burned out after years of tracking the ongoing nightmare. We wrote about the shabiha — the gargantuan, bearded, brutal government thugs that terrorized the country. We wrote about rape, bombings, and chemical weapons. We wrote about Russia joining the conflict in 2015, and asked whether this was a proxy war between Russia and the U.S., or Iran and Saudi Arabia.

What most of us didn’t write about was the involvement of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group. But with the reported death (assassination?) today of the group’s head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash north of Moscow, it’s worth looking at what, exactly, Wagner did to the people of Syria — and what else happened while the group was butchering the Middle Eastern country.

In a prelude to his death, during the course of the war in Ukraine, Prigozhin repeatedly accused the Russian Ministry of Defense of holding back ammunition from his group. And, Prigozhin, whose resting face resembled a boxer after a fight, may have attempted a Russian coup in June, but his rancor with Putin’s regime grew far from Ukraine and Russia, a number of years ago, in Syria.