In St. Petersburg, the grand opening of the PMC Wagner Center, associated with the recidivist criminal Yevgeny Prigozhin, was held, photos and videos from the event were published on social networks. At the same time, the building of the class A business center, in which IT specialists will “improve the defense capability of Russia”, turned out to be an object of “construction in progress”. This drew the attention of Sota, whose correspondents were present at the opening.
The Russians who came to the unfinished event were offered to watch Vika Tsyganova's video for the song "PMC". Earlier, the singer published on the YouTube channel a video from a concert in Yekaterinburg "Sima-Land", but it was removed "for copyright infringement". The day before, the video reappeared on the platform. The same clip was shown at the opening of the Wagner Center. The song contains the following lines:
So come on, Wagner, play
Raise your orchestra members.
Raise with a light stroke of the bow
Our Russian PMC.
Also, an exhibition of drones was opened for visitors, after which they were invited to lectures. Judging by the footage, the center was visited by some PMC fighters, on the form of which there were appropriate stripes.
The speakers, among other things, criticized the people who left Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine, foreign agents, in particular, Maxim Galkin and Alla Pugacheva. Separately, at the event, they spoke negatively about the fact that YouTube issues FBK videos in recommendations. They also discussed the desire to create their own social network in the Russian Federation.
Earlier, Prigozhin commented on the opening of the center, his words were published by the press service of the Concord company on VKontakte:
"PMC Wagner Center" is a complex of buildings in which there are places for free accommodation of inventors, designers, IT specialists, experimental production and start-up spaces.
The mission of PMC Wagner Center is to provide a comfortable environment for the generation of new ideas in order to increase the defense capability of Russia, including information. If the project shows its success and relevance, we will consider the need to open branches.”
In September, a video appeared on the network in which Prigozhin recruited prisoners from IK-6 of Yoshkar-Ola to participate in the war against Ukraine, where he publicly spoke for the first time about his connection with the Wagner PMC. Prigozhin was tried for theft, fraud and involvement of minors in criminal activities. His mercenaries are involved in many operations abroad, in some cases (as, for example, during the invasion of Ukraine) under the direct command of the GRU. Prigozhin is nicknamed "Putin's chef" because he organizes Kremlin dinners. He also funds the Internet Research Agency, the largest troll factory in Russia.