In 2019, the founder of PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, organized surveillance of lawyer Lyubov Sobol and her family, spending more than 11 million rubles on this. This is stated in the investigation of the French magazine Paris Match and other media (a short retelling of the material in Russian is provided by Lyubov Sobol herself).
In addition to testimonies about the connections of "Putin's chef" with the President of Russia, the Ministry of Defense and the "troll factory", these materials included the "Sobol project". He assumed the establishment of round-the-clock surveillance for the oppositionist, in which stringers participated daily. In total, Prigozhin's structures spent 11.5 million rubles to pay for their services.
The stringers worked in shifts "taking photographs or videos in accordance with a special mission." Usually, 2-3 people went to the shift, for which they were paid 5,000 rubles each, but sometimes their lump-sum number reached nine. This continued from at least March to November 2019.
Igor Mangushev acted as the curator of the Sable surveillance project. This man became known in the spring of 2022, when he called for the genocide of Ukrainians, holding in his hands the skull of an alleged UAF fighter who defended the Mariupol Azovstal plant. In 2023, Mangushev was shot in the back of the head in the rear, on the territory of the Luhansk region occupied by the Russian army.
In an interview with The Insider, Lyubov Sobol emphasized that it was already obvious who was putting pressure on her, “but now it has been confirmed through documents that journalists have access to.”
“It is significant that the people who work against the Russian opposition and me in particular are the same people who are killing Ukrainians now,” she said.