Former President George Bush (R) this week recalled having dinner served by Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin during a G8 summit in Russia, joking he “survived” the meal.
Asked at the Yalta European Strategy annual summit if it was shocking Prigozhin died in a plane crash last month, Bush said, “No,” before pointing to his encounter with the Russian mercenary more than 15 years ago.
“What was shocking to me was I saw a picture the other day of a G8 summit in St. Petersburg where [Prigozhin] was the guy serving me the food,” Bush said. “He was [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] chef and he was in the picture, and somebody said, ‘Well you remember him?’ And I said, ‘No, all I know is I survived.’”
Bush attended the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July 2006, where he had a bilateral meeting with Putin. He had previously met Putin in 2001, after which he famously said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.”
Prigozhin became a notorious figure amid the Ukraine war, as the head of a mercenary force that recruited prisoners onto the front lines, and as a rare Putin ally openly critical of Russia’s military. Then he launched a short-lived rebellion in June against the Kremlin, before he was exiled to Belarus. Two months later, Prigozhin died while on a private plane that crashed about 100 miles from Moscow.
Prigozhin was also a key figure in Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and had decades-long ties to Putin through his work in the food and catering industry.
After serving time in prison for assault and robbery, Prigozhin opened a restaurant in St. Petersburg in the 1990s where he met with Putin, who was serving as the city’s deputy mayor at the time. He soon developed a catering business and was famously nicknamed “Putin’s chef.”
The Wagner Group was founded in 2014 amid a separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine after Russia annexed Ukraine’s peninsula, but it was not until September 2022 that Prigozhin acknowledged founding, leading and financing the military company.
Thousands of Wagner troops were later involved in the Russia-Ukraine war, with more than 20,000 men dying in the battle for Bakhmut alone, according to The Associated Press.
Western-based survey groups probing Russian public opinion said earlier this month the Russian people remain skeptical over the circumstances surrounding Prigozhin’s death.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.