Candace Rondeaux:
Absolutely. This is a guy who, as a young man, trained as a cross country Olympic skier, didn't luck out because of a couple of different things that happened. He had an injury as a young man, turned to a life of crime, spent 10 years behind bars, while most of the rest of his contemporaries actually fought on the front lines in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. So he has that in common with Putin. He did not go to the front lines of Russia's biggest war other than, of course, Chechnya and this war.
And when he got out of jail, out of prison, he turned himself around and became an entrepreneur of upscale food restaurants, big bistros in St. Petersburg. He was, of course, often connected with Putin because there are a few places at that time in the 1990s in St. Petersburg where you could actually have a good and upscale meal and Putin became sort of a patron.
But there were other patrons that have been operating in the shadows for Prigozhin for many years that people forget, people close to Putin, like Gennady Timchenko, the head of Volga Group, Sergey Chemezov, the head of Rostec, Russia's largest arms dealer.
So that kind of relationship, those sets of relationships, have helped Putin give Prigozhin the path he needs to take the kinds of risk that he did over these last couple of days, as we've seen over the last year and a half.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2Bjsri%2Fx6isq2ejnby4e9ahmK1lpKR6rLrOsGSamp%2BqwW7Ax55kra2ioryquIyipWaqpajAqq2Mmqpmr5Gcu6a%2BjKGYpayjYra1v4yam6%2BZnpiybrvNZqSoq5OkxA%3D%3D