Alva Review-Courier -

MOSCOW (AP) — He's been indicted in the U.S. for meddling in the 2016 presidential election with an army of trolls and his private military company has trodden battlefields in Ukraine and Syria. Still, the Russian multimillionaire dubbed "Putin's chef" runs yet another asset that is valuable to the Kremlin: a sprawling Russian media empire.

St. Petersburg restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin is believed to control more than a dozen news portals in Russia that attract tens of millions of visitors and serve as an important state propaganda weapon as President Vladimir Putin runs for re-election in the...