Prigozhin Pointing

About

Prigozhin Pointing refers to an image of the Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin pointing behind him. Taken from a viral video of Prigozhin complaining about the lack of support from Russian officials during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, the image achieved meme popularity due to its similarity to the two Soyjaks pointing meme.

Origin

On May 4th, 2023, Telegram^[1] channel @concodgroup_official, the press service of the Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, published a video in which he, standing next to corpses of Wagner Group fighters, blamed Russian government officials for not supplying enough ammo to the private army. At one point, Prigozhin moves aside and points back at the corpses, telling the officials to look at them (censored image shown below).

Spread

On May 4th, 2023, an anonymous 4chan user linked the video in a /pol/^[2] thread, with another user replying^[3] with an image of Prigozhin pointing behind him, referencing the popular two Soyjaks pointing meme.

In the same thread, a user replied with a transparent cutout of Prigozhin pointing (shown below, left). Later that day, another /pol/^[4] user uploaded a Soyjak version of the image (shown below, right). On May 5th, 2023, Soybooru user Chud archived^[5] the image on the site.

In the following days, multiple images based on both the exploitables were shared on imageboards, Twitter and Telegram. For example, on May 9th, Twitter^[6] user @OAlexanderDK posted an edit of Prigozhin pointing at a tank participating in a parade, with the tweet gaining over 190 retweets and 2,400 likes in one day (seen below, left; another example seen below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References