Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Legal Machine

Shakespeare. Hamlet. Bread & Butter. These were codenames for Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s legal projects, which ranged from suing journalists to fighting sanctions to defending against charges of U.S. election interference stemming from the 2017–2019 Mueller investigation. Among the codenames that shielded the legal efforts from cursory observation, Prigozhin himself appeared as “Capulet,” “designated person,” and—perhaps wryly—“beloved.”

Why would Prigozhin invest so heavily in legal battles he seemed destined to lose? Why sue journalists for reporting verifiable facts about his Wagner Group connections? The answer appears to be a complex blend of trolling, publicity-seeking, smoke-screening, and a practical attempt to protect his ability to conduct business beyond Russia’s borders. These sometimes conflicting motivations come into sharp focus in his lawyers’ correspondence.

Prigozhin’s lawyers were just one corner of an expansive back-office network that, by 2018, comprised hundreds of people—a sprawling web of front companies, operatives, and international contacts that made up the shadow architecture of what the world knows as the Wagner Group. Yet this small team was a crucial part of Prigozhin’s paramilitary empire. Prigozhin weaponized his legal team against foreign adversaries, using them to troll and harass prosecutors and journalists. Simultaneously, he relied on them to counter genuine threats to his ability to travel and conduct business. Three key sources offer insight into their inner workings:

• A trove of internal emails from Capital Legal Services (CLS), a Russian law firm that coordinated Prigozhin’s international cases.
• Prigozhin’s personal calendar spanning 2012–2022, containing over 17,000 appointments.
• A “back office” phone directory from June 2018, revealing a network of backup contacts and operational relationships.

New America gained access to the CLS emails through Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit transparency collective, which released 65 gigabytes of emails in April 2022. Prigozhin's calendar and the back office directory came from leaked Wagner Group records on Evro Polis and subsidiary companies, in data held by C4ADS, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit.

This legal machinery, closely connected to Prigozhin’s St. Petersburg Office, operated under the leadership of Yevgeny Viktorovich Burleev. Internal records show that Burleev headed a team of lawyers, with one figure emerging as a key liaison: Pavel Karpunin, a CLS partner. Karpunin’s frequent appearances in CLS emails indicate his role in bridging Prigozhin’s immediate legal team with CLS lawyers, who in turn collaborated with firms in the United Kingdom and United States when necessary. The integration of CLS into Prigozhin’s broader network is further evidenced by emails showing that the firm purchased office supplies from M-Invest, a sanctioned company controlled by Prigozhin and known as a cover for Wagner forces operating in Sudan.

In coordination with the U.S. law firm Reed Smith, CLS spearheaded Prigozhin’s response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which in 2018 indicted Prigozhin for conspiracy to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential election. When the Mueller team subsequently handed the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Prigozhin responded by orchestrating a provocative letter campaign targeting top U.S. officials.

In April 2019, Karpunin and other CLS lawyers drafted a letter from Prigozhin to prominent U.S. political figures, including Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Donald Trump. The letter urged the reappointment of Robert Mueller as a federal prosecutor to bring the case to trial, framing it as “a matter of personal honor” for Prigozhin to defend his reputation in the most public forum possible.

The legal team tried to tone down the language, opting for “prevail” over “win” and reformatting quotes. They also added constitutional arguments, claiming U.S. leaders had distorted the founders’ original intent. The letter ended with an intriguing postscript that suggested internal tension: “This letter is made on behalf of Concord and has been written and delivered against the advice of Concord's able counsel, Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly”—a direct reference to Prigozhin’s lead attorneys at Reed Smith.

Although the letter appears never to have been sent, it reveals both Prigozhin’s close working relationship with CLS and his penchant for provocative stunts. No one involved in drafting the letter could have seriously expected McConnell or Pelosi to respond favorably—that wasn’t the point. It was a classic Prigozhin provocation, designed to mislead and distract. His calendar confirms his hands-on involvement, showing meetings with Karpunin on April 18 and 26, likely to discuss this very letter.

The Wagner Group head’s obsession with maximum publicity, even at the expense of legal outcomes, was evident in his legal actions against journalists, including a lawsuit against Eliot Higgins of the investigative nonprofit Bellingcat. Bellingcat had published several articles linking Prigozhin to the Wagner Group. Falling under the internal label of “Project Bread & Butter,” which appears to have encompassed multiple defamation cases dating back to at least February 2019, the case against Higgins was filed in a U.K. court, with the U.K. law firm Discreet Law leading the effort.

In August 2021, Prigozhin, through Karpunin, called for a press release about his claims against Higgins, but his broader legal team urged caution. Andrew Stephenson of Discreet Law warned on August 13 that such a press release could lead the court to view the lawsuit as abusive, undermining their case.

Despite these warnings, Karpunin conveyed Prigozhin’s insistence on publicity: “The client will be highly disappointed if he can say nothing about the claim for 4 months. Given that the fact of issuance of the claim form is public, can the client release a short statement...?”

This relentless push for public statements, even at the risk of compromising legal strategy, underscores Prigozhin’s contradictory motivations. Rather than simply defending his reputation—the email correspondence suggests the legal team had doubts about the case against Higgins—Prigozhin viewed his legal team as one component in an expansive campaign of information warfare. The legal system was just another tool in his arsenal to confound and confuse his adversaries abroad.

However, Prigozhin was not indifferent to legal outcomes, especially when they impacted his ability to conduct international business. Karpunin lodged an official complaint with Interpol in November 2019, seeking the removal of Prigozhin’s Red Notice—a request that international police forces circulate to detain and extradite an individual to the requesting country, in this case, the United States. Through his legal team, Prigozhin argued that the U.S. case against him was primarily political, not a matter for law enforcement. In June 2020, the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF) agreed and ordered the Red Notice terminated. Prigozhin welcomed the decision, announcing plans to travel to the Baltic states, Turkey, and Germany, where he might otherwise have faced arrest.

Prigozhin has been dead since August 2023, but, despite restructuring and rebranding, there is still considerable continuity from the Prigozhin era of Russian paramilitary operations. Prigozhin was an entrepreneur who did not hesitate to experiment with unconventional solutions to his problems. However, this affinity for operating in gray areas has also been a hallmark of Russia’s intelligence and security services. As the Kremlin recalibrates its shadow armies, peering into the filing cabinets and email inboxes of their support staff offers useful clues. While we cannot be certain whether the same professionals, including the lawyers, are now assisting Prigozhin’s son Pavel, who inherited the bulk of his father’s business empire, we can be confident that Russia is likely to employ similar lawfare tactics in the future.