Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
After Yevgeny Prigozhin staged his failed revolt in Russia two months ago, the Kremlin promptly clamped down on his empire. The paramilitary boss and his mercenaries were exiled to Belarus, while Wagner-linked media companies that spewed Russian propaganda online were blocked. The future of his information operations were further put into question last week, when Prigozhin was reported dead in a plane crash that bore all the signs of an assassination ordered by President Vladimir Putin.
But despite the clampdown on Wagner’s propaganda minions and the apparent death of the mercenary boss, signs are emerging that Prigozhin’s information operations network never really went away.
A couple of hundred Russian-language accounts pushing pro-Russia and pro-Putin narratives sprung up early this month on Twitter, or X, before Prigozhin’s reported death, according to Clemson University research shared exclusively with The Daily Beast.