This is stated in his statement published by the press service of the Concord company.
According to Prigozhin, he created the company in 2014. The businessman said that after the beginning of the so-called "Russian Spring", he tried to recruit a group that would "go and protect Russians in Donbas." However, he allegedly encountered the fact that many intermediaries tried to profit from this, taking money for themselves and sending mercenaries "barefoot to real death."
"Then I flew to one of the training grounds and did it myself. I cleaned the old weapons myself, figured out the bulletproof vests myself, and found specialists who were able to help me. From that moment, on May 1, 2014, a group of patriots was born, which later acquired the Wagner PMC name," he noted.
He then boasted about the company's participation in the war with Ukraine in the Donbas and noted that thanks to Wagner, "the fate" of the "republics" has fundamentally changed.
"It was thanks to their courage that the liberation of the Luhansk airport and many other territories became possible, and the fate of the LPR and the DPR was fundamentally changed," Prigozhin's agency said in a statement.
It should be noted that Yevgeny Prigozhin previously denied his involvement in the Wagner PMC. In 2017, he assured that he was "surprised by the very fact of the existence of this company":
"We are not aware of the activities of the organization you mentioned. Yevgeny Viktorovich [Prygozhin] also asked to convey that he is extremely surprised by the very fact of the existence of this company and has nothing to do with its activities."
Prigozhin also sued journalists who called him the owner of PMC. Most recently, on August 15, 2022, the Presnensky Court of Moscow recognized as false the words of the former Editor-in-Chief of Echo of Moscow, Aleksey Venediktov, that Prigozhin is the "master of the Wagner PMC."
For reference. The beginnings of the so-called Wagner group were laid by Dmitry Utkin with the military nickname "Wagner". It is difficult to find it, because it is not a registered company. This is an association of security firms. The financier of the group is the oligarch Prigozhin, who previously organized catering for events in the Kremlin, for which he received the nickname "Putin's cook".