Iosif Prigozhin, a Russian music producer, scrolled to the bottom of the contacts app on one of his iPhones and showed me the tally of entries: 11,801.
He and his wife, the pop star known as Valeriya, “know everyone,” he told me. That includes the “generals and criminals” who once harmoniously shared a table at a concert of hers in Crimea.
“That’s Russia, my friend,” Mr. Prighozin said.
We were tucking into chicken and sea bass on the 25th floor of the skyscraper-resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Mr. Prighozin and Valeriya own two apartments. There was a three-story “longevity hub” somewhere above us and a “global street food” spot through a tunnel of faux graffiti somewhere below us. Later, on the pool deck, suspended between two skyscrapers and 300 feet above vast roads and malls and building sites, Valeriya lip-synced for Instagram.
You can learn a lot about Russia by coming to Dubai, which hasn’t joined the West’s sanctions against Russia and has replaced London and Switzerland as a refuge of choice for Moscow’s wealthy. Here you will find Russian elites who never imagined that their president, Vladimir V. Putin, would invade Ukraine — and then found themselves too enmeshed in Mr. Putin’s system to abandon him.
Mr. Prigozhin — no relation to his assassinated acquaintance, the mutineer Yevgeny V. Prigozhin — is one of them, a fast-talking attention magnet whose celebrity straddles politics and pop culture in Russia. I’d been curious to talk to him for two years, ever since a recording turned up online of his purported call with a former Russian senator in which both men are heard slamming Mr. Putin.
“The nation has no future,” a voice that sounds like Mr. Prighozin’s says, with many expletives. “He’s totally screwed us over.”
At the time, analysts saw the conversation as a cri de coeur of the elite. But during my five hours with Mr. Prigozhin, I saw more clearly how members of Russian high society became inured to Europe’s greatest violence since World War II — even as the death and destruction touched their own lives.
‘How Was Lake Como?’
Mr. Prigozhin and his wife had come from Moscow for a few days at their extravagantly named high-rise resort, One&Only One Za’abeel, and a gala dinner at Sakhalin Dubai, one of many Russian hot spots that have opened in the Emirates. (Russian crab claws go for $20 an ounce.)
I was also passing through and was pleased when Mr. Prigozhin finally agreed to an interview. The socialite relishes publicity inside Russia, but hadn’t spoken at length to a Western media outlet in years.
I’m accustomed to meeting well-connected Russians in odd places — a part of the job for journalists, like me, writing about Russia from outside the country. But this was unusual: My interlocutors didn’t mind being recorded.
Also strange: Mr. Prigozhin, 56, and Valeriya, 57, freely reminisced about private gatherings with Mr. Putin. They had only good things to say, naturally. In Mr. Prighozin’s telling, Mr. Putin is “touching, sentimental and soulful,” and his charm is such that “he always disarms you so precisely.”
They echoed a sentiment I’d heard repeatedly from oligarchs and former officials: They had no idea that a president who had seemed so even-keeled and down-to-earth behind the scenes would make the unthinkable decision to invade Ukraine and risk disrupting Russia’s profitable economic ties to the West.
The first meeting they could remember having with Mr. Putin was in 2004, on the sidelines of an event in Sochi, the Black Sea resort city, just after their wedding.
“How was Lake Como?” Mr. Putin asked unprompted, stunning them with his knowledge of where they spent their honeymoon.
They joined a cohort of Russian celebrities whose company the president apparently enjoyed. They never talked politics, recognizing that Mr. Putin wanted to relax in their presence. “Why torture him?” Valeriya said at one point during our conversations.
Unlike other Russian men, Valeriya noted, Mr. Putin never pressured others to drink and barely drank himself. When he arrived at a gathering where the men waiting for him had loosened their ties, he removed his own to smooth over their faux pas. Another time, he praised Valeriya’s cover of a nostalgic Russian ballad that he happened to see when “I came home from work and turned on the TV.”
“Guys, you don’t have to,” Mr. Putin protested, in Mr. Prigozhin’s telling, when Valeriya and another musician who was there decided to perform it on the spot.
The last time they saw Mr. Putin was in October 2019, to celebrate his birthday. During the pandemic, they were twice invited to see him, but with a catch: “You’ll need to spend two weeks in quarantine.” They declined.
This was a telling detail. Others who know Mr. Putin have told me that his self-imposed isolation to ward off Covid appeared to have contributed to his decision to invade Ukraine because it limited his interactions with people who could have told him it was a bad idea.
“It all began with the pandemic,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “We all started to drift apart.”
Between Worlds
Mr. Prigozhin got his start as a concert promoter and tour manager. He later created leading Russian record labels and worked with some of Russian pop music’s biggest acts, who belted sentimental tunes in prime-time specials on state TV. Valeriya’s upbeat songs include “We Are Together,” released in 2007, which she reprised in a Red Square concert in March 2014 that promoted the idea that Russia and the about-to-be-annexed peninsula of Crimea belonged together.
“I want to thank you,” Mr. Prigozhin said Mr. Putin told them afterward, “for being there at the right time, in a difficult moment.”
Mr. Prigozhin backed Mr. Putin’s rubber-stamp re-election campaign in 2018. The same year, in a Kremlin ceremony, Mr. Putin pinned Russia’s Order of Friendship, one of the country’s highest civilian honors, to Valeriya’s lapel.
But that closeness to power didn’t stop them from building a life in the West. They held on to their property in London and on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where two of their six children from previous partners went to school.
Mr. Prigozhin described his life as one of constant adaptation, referring to his Jewish identity — one side of his family from Ukraine, the other from the Caucasus.
“Jews are divided into two categories,” he said. “There are revolutionaries, and there are those who adapt. I’m not ashamed. I adapt to live.”
As Mr. Putin massed troops near Ukraine, Mr. Prigozhin said that he — like just about everyone I talked to in Moscow at the time — was convinced there would be no invasion. For Russia’s elites, a full-scale war, prompting an avalanche of Western sanctions, would seem to violate Mr. Putin’s unwritten contract with them: They helped enable his power, while he allowed them to make huge profits at home and spend them abroad.
In February 2022, Valeriya performed at a concert marking a military holiday at the Russian Army Theater in Moscow. Backstage, they ran into an old acquaintance, Sergei K. Shoigu, then the defense minister. He was leaving early and looked pale.
“Is he sick or something?” Mr. Prigozhin recalled asking his wife.
A few hours later, the invasion began.
Making Choices
When Russian missiles started raining on Kyiv, some of Russia’s leading entertainers protested by posting black squares on Instagram, but Mr. Prigozhin and Valeriya decided to play it safe. Many celebrities who became targets of Kremlin retaliation now wish they had done the same, he said.
“No one would go back in time and post those squares now,” Mr. Prigozhin said. “They brought pain upon themselves.”
The couple didn’t take any chances with their money, either. They had around $5 million in a Swiss bank account, according to Mr. Prigozhin. After the invasion, the bank informed them it was dropping them as clients. (Many wealthy Russians reported trouble accessing their money in the West at the time, even when they weren’t directly under sanctions.) Scrambling for a place to put their cash, they bought into a Dubai real estate development.
That is how Mr. Prigozhin ended up becoming a homeowner in a 1,000-foot-tall luxury complex that offers a lifestyle so “immersive,” he said, that there are days on his visits from Moscow that he doesn’t even leave it.
He claimed he can bump into 100 people he knows from Russia when he swings down for breakfast from his 58th-floor apartment. He and his wife still own their European real estate, but like many Russians, they now extol Dubai, where you can fly direct from about a dozen Russian cities and the fault lines of geopolitics feel more distant.
Their property value is up 30 percent, Mr. Prigozhin said.
“The youth of the world” is here, Valeriya said. “Dubai is this amazing energy.”
Moscow is also flourishing, Mr. Prigozhin said, so much so that at one point he referred to the Russian capital as a “little Dubai.”
Still, he acknowledged he had no longer felt comfortable being chauffeured around Moscow in his Rolls-Royce. Capitalizing on Russia’s wartime shortage of luxury cars, he sold the Rolls at a profit and replaced it with a Jeep Grand Wagoneer and then a Mercedes minivan — examples of how Western goods remain accessible through intermediaries in hubs like Dubai. He said he didn’t see a problem in riding in Western cars.
“It’s price to quality,” he said of the Jeep, a good value for the $150,000 he spent. “If you can buy it, that means it’s not prohibited.”
In public, Mr. Prigozhin and Valeriya made it clear they were on Mr. Putin’s side. Valeriya performed at patriotic concerts on Red Square, though Mr. Prigozhin insists that she was only expressing support for her country, not the war. Still, Canada sanctioned them for using “their art to promote Russia’s invasion,” barring any Canadian business dealings with Mr. Prigozhin and Valeriya.
But the notorious phone call got people wondering: Was Mr. Prigozhin’s support of Mr. Putin all an act?
The Call
The 35-minute audio recording appeared online in March 2023. A phone catch-up between Mr. Prigozhin and Farkhad Akhmedov, a business magnate and former Russian lawmaker, seems to spiral from routine gossip into unbridled anger over Mr. Putin and his entourage.
“We have no way out,” the person presumed to be Mr. Prigozhin is heard to say.
Mr. Prigozhin claimed the recording was stitched together from bits that were real and bits that were generated by A.I. He insisted to me that his offensive comments about Mr. Putin were fabricated, that the real parts were mere “thinking out loud,” and that he might have fallen victim to a mix-up in an operation targeting the other Prigozhin — the one who would lead a short-lived mutiny three months later. Mr. Akhmedov did not respond to a request for comment.
Real or not, the tape electrified Russia’s Telegram and YouTube commentariat, who saw it as proof of the elite’s hidden rage. The Carnegie analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote that it appeared “all too similar to what can constantly be heard unofficially in Russian elite circles: that Putin has failed Russia.”
The backlash toward Mr. Prigozhin was furious. Just 10 people called to wish him a happy birthday that April, he said, rather than the usual hundreds. Many “simply turned away, treacherously.” Some friends advised Mr. Prigozhin to flee the country and Valeriya to divorce him. Business partners dropped him, leaving the management of Valeriya’s career as his main remaining enterprise, he said.
Even the government of Canada got involved, suggesting that he could have avoided sanctions if he owned up to what he appeared to say on the leaked call, Mr. Prigozhin said. Afterward, he sent me an excerpt from a December 2023 letter from Ottawa in response to his efforts to contest the sanctions.
“When you were provided the opportunity to voice your views publicly,” the letter said, “you reiterated the regime’s disinformation narratives.”
“What is this blackmail?” Mr. Prigozhin erupted as we finished lunch. Referring to Mr. Putin, he said, “I did not betray him, and I will never betray him.”
The Son-in-Law
After lunch, on a lower floor, Valeriya waded into a pool in her dress, lip-syncing to her new album while it played from tinny smartphone speakers. She and an assistant were making short clips for Instagram, she explained, which remains crucial to marketing music in Russia even though the social network was banned as “extremist” by the Kremlin shortly after the invasion began. (Many Russians use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get access to blocked websites.)
We rode the elevator back up, and while Valeriya headed for a costume change, Mr. Prigozhin walked me through a deserted food court, in a section connecting two skyscrapers 300 feet above ground, and then up on top of it, revealing an expansive view of Dubai.
There was a pool there, too, for Valeriya to wade into as she continued to lip-sync. Finally, we rode up to the lounge on Floor 53. I thought it was time to say farewell, but Mr. Prigozhin ordered a diet cola.
“There’s two parallel worlds going,” he said. “One part is immersed in this. Another part is not.”
He meant the war, which much of Russian society still sees as little more than background noise. Mr. Prigozhin has seen both worlds.
His daughter’s husband, he told me earlier, volunteered for military service after the invasion. Mr. Prigozhin asked whether he was sure, but the son-in-law, Yevgeny Tkachenko, said he had made his decision. He and Mr. Prighozin’s daughter had just had their first child.
“I want my son to be proud of me,” Mr. Prigozhin said Mr. Tkachenko had told him.
The last text he got from his son-in-law said: “We’re leaving on a mission today. I love you all.”
In December 2023, Mr. Tkachenko went missing. The family now believes he is dead.
“My grandson will now live without a father, because he defended the interests of the motherland,” Mr. Prigozhin says.
When I asked whether Mr. Tkachenko’s death changed his view of the war, Mr. Prigozhin brought up the widespread accounts of Russia’s shortages of ammunition and other matériel after the invasion.
“This shows that no one was preparing” for a big war, Mr. Prigozhin said, echoing an assessment I’ve heard over and over from people close to the Kremlin — the idea that Mr. Putin thought that Ukraine would quickly crumble.
But after the initial shock of the invasion, Mr. Prigozhin, like almost everyone else around him, accepted the new reality. After all, he told me, Mr. Putin surely never wanted the war himself.
Instead, Mr. Prigozhin told me, Mr. Putin had been “forced” to invade because the West was trying to use Ukraine to weaken Russia. Europe and the United States then “got together and started beating up” Russia by supporting Ukraine. It was a narrative common on Russian state television.
“I am no judge and I don’t make judgments,” he said, before distilling a life philosophy I hear often from Russians close to power: “I am just following the rules in which I exist.”
Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
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