Who was Dmitry Utkin? What we know about Wagner commander onboard plane in fatal crash
Among those presumed dead alongside Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash near Moscow was Dmitry Utkin, who was often described as the founder or co-founder of the mercenary group although his exact role was disputed.
His own call sign was “Wagner”, after Hitler’s favourite composer. The investigative website Bellingcat wrote in 2020 that Utkin had “an obsessive fascination with the history of the Third Reich” while another recent report described him as “festooned with numerous Nazi tattoos, including a swastika, a Nazi eagle, and an SS lightning bolts”. The Wagner group was apparently named after him.
However, according to a 2020 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American thinktank, “it cannot be verified whether Utkin initiated the establishment of Wagner group or was only a frontman for someone else.”
Bellingcat said it had open source data suggesting he was “employed as a convenient and deniable decoy to disguise its state provenance”.
Prigozhin himself only acknowledged founding the group in September 2022 having previously sued news outlets who linked him to it. Both the US and EU have imposed sanctions on Prigozhin and Utkin over Wagner’s role in Ukraine.
Born in 1970, Utkin was a former officer in Russia’s GRU military intelligence service and served in both Chechen wars, as well as in Syria. He was also among the Wagner members who took part in Russian operations in eastern Ukraine, from 2014, and had received awards for his service from the Kremlin.
In the early 2000s he served 10 years as commander of GRU’s Second Spetsnaz Brigade on the Estonian border before retiring from the army. However, according to his ex-wife, he missed life on the battlefield.
Rarely seen or heard from in public, he was last seen in a video posted by Prigozhin in July, in which the Wagner boss addressed fighters in Belarus, where they were sent after their aborted mutiny a month earlier.
In the video, Prigozhin introduces a man he says is Utkin; it was the first time the commander had been filmed speaking to his troops.
“This is not the end, this is only the beginning of the greatest work in the world, which will continue very soon,” Utkin says in the video. “And welcome to hell,” he adds, the last words in English.
Reports from Russian social media channels associated with Wagner suggest other members of Wagner’s leadership may also have been on the flight.
According to Fontanka, a St Petersburg news outlet that has covered Prigozhin’s operations extensively, the other passengers onboard were a cameraman, Wagner’s logistics manager, and Prigozhin’s personal security detail.
They were named as Sergey Propustin, Evgeniy Makaryan, Aleksandr Totmin, Valeriy Chekalov and Nikolay Matuseev. Chekalov was sanctioned by the US last month over his links to Prigozhin and for facilitating munitions shipments to Russia.