In the 1st part of an ongoing series of investigations into Yevgeny Prigozhin, his troll empire, and his Wagner private military company (PMC), we reveal the state-run nature of Wagner, along with the identity of the man in charge of his Africa operations. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
We obtained Yevgeny Prigozhin’s telephone records for a period spanning late 2013 & early 2014. This period was the key time when the Wagner PMC was first being planned and established, eventually becoming a key cog in the Kremlin's operations in eastern Ukraine and Syria.
While Prigozhin is ostensibly a magnate in the restaurant & catering world, his call history shows extensive contact with government figures in the Presidential Administration Office, Federal Protective Service (FSO), Ministry of Defense, & Russian intelligence/security services
You can view an interactive infographic showing who Prigozhin communicated with during this period here:
public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…
public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…
Travel and phone records show how Russian military intelligence, the GU or GRU, are truly the head of the command structure of the Wagner "private" military company.
For example, airline travel records show how Wagner CEO Dmitry Utkin and Col. Andrey Troshev traveled together with senior GRU officer Oleg Ivannikov, who used the alias "Andrey Ivanovich Laptev" in his work related to eastern Ukraine and the north Caucasus. 
The man who is leading Wagner's Africa operations is not Dmitry Utkin, but instead a mysterious figure never-before identified, previously only known as "Konstantin", "The Colonel", and "Mazay".
For example, "Mazay" was the personal body guard assigned to the Madagascar presidential candidate Pastor Mailhol of the Church of the Apocalypse and working in the Central African Republic (CAR) at the time of the murder of three Russian journalists investigating Wagner.
We have identified "Mazay" as Konstantin Aleksandrovich Pikalov, CEO of the "Convoy" military security company based in St. Petersburg. Pikalov freely travels across Europe on a Schengen visa and has spent significant time in the Africa while overseeing Wagner's operations.
In part 2 of this series we will investigate Yevgeny Prigozhin’s history of surveilling, threatening & harassing independent journalists, as well as fabricating false narratives to pre-empt attempts by Russian & foreign media to uncover his relationship with the Russian military.
Reporting in Russian on this investigation can be found with on the site of our Russian investigative partner @the_ins_ru theins.ru/politika/prig
