The boss of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, the sulphurous businessman Evgueni Prigojine, admitted on Tuesday for the first time to being the creator of a "troll farm", paid to carry out propaganda campaigns on the Internet. Reputed to be close to Vladimir Putin, Evgueni Prigojine has acknowledged since the start of the conflict in Ukraine last year a series of facts which have been attributed to him for years.
He thus admitted to being the founder of the group of mercenaries Wagner, who today fight on the front line in Ukraine, or to have sought to interfere in the American elections. On Tuesday, he admitted to having created the Internet Research Agency of Saint Petersburg, a company dubbed the "troll farm" by the Russian press and whose employees have been accused of carrying out disinformation campaigns on the Internet in the service of the Kremlin.
"I was not only the sole financier of the Internet Research Agency, but I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time," said Yevgeny Prigozhin, quoted by his service of press on Telegram. According to him, this "troll farm" was created "to protect the Russian information space from the crude and aggressive propaganda of the West's anti-Russian theses".
The Internet Research Agency has been accused of having carried out, in particular through false accounts on social networks and online newspapers, campaigns intended to defend the policy of the Kremlin, criticize Russian opponents, denigrate the French presence in Africa or even create discord around Brexit and the US elections. Washington had sanctioned several alleged members of the Internet Research Agency in 2018.
