“Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering and we will...

“Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering and we will interfere,” said Yevgeny Prigozhin Prigozhin, who has previously been accused of influencing the outcome of elections across continents, said in a statement posted by his catering company, Concord.

“Carefully, precisely, surgically and the way we do it, the way we can,” Prigozhin, 61, added.Prigozhin was responding to a request to comment on a recent Bloomberg report saying Russia was interfering in Tuesday’s US midterm elections.

The US social media analysis firm Graphika last week said that suspected Russian operatives have used far-right media platforms to criticise Democratic candidates in the lead-up to the midterm elections in a number of US states, including Georgia, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Prigozhin, with a dozen other Russian nationals and three Russian companies, was indicted in 2018 as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections.

A key point of Russian hybrid warfare – with its focus on political interference – is that it does not necessarily matter whether the interference actually succeeds in any meaningful way.

Instead, a significant part of its function is actively to sow distrust about the health of democratic institutions – not least by suggesting an outsized reach and capability.

By Prigozhin saying he is continuing to interfere – a day before the US midterm elections – he appears to be trying to shape the idea that the results cannot be trusted.

And the public nature of his statement suggests that there may be other agendas at work than simply his feelings of enjoying impunity.

Known as “Putin’s chef” because his catering company operates Kremlin contracts, the former convict has long been accused of sponsoring operations that seek to influence western politics and spread disinformation across the globe, attracting international sanctions.

Prighozin’s latest comments come as the previously publicity-shy Putin confidant has chosen to come out of the shadows in recent months.

One possibility is that Prigozhin’s remarks should be seen as part of his efforts to position himself in a more formal role in Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in alliance with a faction of hardliners who blame Russian generals for bungling the prosecution of the war.

But efforts being led by Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenaries around the key Donbas town of Bakhmut are not much more impressive than Russia’s conventional military and they have made imperceptibly slow progress.

It is possible that Prigozhin himself needs to claim a success on the hybrid warfare front as his own fighting force has visibly underperformed.

What is clear, however, is that, after years of denying his involvement with Wagner and with influence operations – to the point of pursuing journalists through the courts – Prigozhin now sees it more useful to emphasise his claimed usefulness to Putin in public.

Or, just perhaps, he has done so with an eye to whoever might follow Putin.

In 2018 US Cyber Command claimed to have knocked Russian operatives offline during the 2018 US congressional elections, raising questions over the scale and impact of Moscow’s continuing efforts.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/07/putin-ally-yevgeny-prigozhin-admits-interfering-in-us-elections

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/07/yevgeny-prigozhin-russia-us-election-interference-analysis