July 19, 2023. Exiled to Belarus after his failed June 24 coup, Yevgueni Prigojine speaks for the first time since his impeded march on Moscow. In a video posted on Telegram, the head of the Wagner Group promises his supporters to “come back” to fight in Ukraine. Then the businessman gives the floor to the “commander, the one who gave us the name Wagner”. The face of the new speaker does not appear. But his identity is beyond doubt: Dmitry Utkin, 53. “This is not the end [of the paramilitary group], but only the beginning of the greatest work in the world,” he urges.
The 50-year-old will probably never see his grand designs come to fruition. A plane from Moscow to Saint Petersburg crashed on August 23. Among the travelers on the plane, according to Wagner officials and media, were Yevgeny Prigozhin — whose presumed death came as “no surprise” to US President Joe Biden — and Dmitry Utkin. Subject to any official confirmation from Russian power, the Wagner Group would not only lose its leader and grand financier, but also its true founder.
Dmitry Utkin was as discreet and mysterious as Yevgeny Prigozhin was loud and talkative – even vilifying Russian ministers and their strategy in videos captured from the Ukrainian front. Yet it was he who in 2014 gave his nickname to the powerful private militia, deployed wherever Russian interests required it – Syria, Mali, Central African Republic, Sudan. “Wagner” therefore, for his immoderate fondness for the German composer, Adolf Hitler’s favourite. Because the fifties was also a fervent admirer of the Third Reich and its imagery, he who had the chest tattooed with several SS crests.
Decorated by Vladimir Putin
Before the founding of the Wagner Group, Dmitri Utkin had a career in the army. The Bellingcat investigation site details in an investigation published in 2020 the career of the man born on June 11, 1970, an officer during the two Chechen wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2009). Having become a commander in the Russian military intelligence directorate (GRU) in the 2000s, he was reportedly assigned to the town of Pechory, on the Estonian border. Enough to attract, in 2013, the attention of Slavonic Corps, a private security company based in Hong Kong, which would have intervened at the end of 2013 in Syria.
When Evgueni Prigojine creates and finances his own group of mercenaries, he entrusts the training to Dmitri Outkine. The training will be conducted in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia at a base belonging to the GRU. Difficult then to know its possible assignments. At least we know that the intervention of the Wagner Group in Syria, in 2015 and 2016, will earn him to be decorated by Vladimir Putin himself. A photo, published in January 2017 on the Russian social network VKontakte, shows him in the company of three men surrounding the Russian president, medals exhibited on the chest.
Until his last – and rare – intervention in July, Dmitri Utkin will cultivate absolute discretion. Its name has however been hijacked several times to serve as a screen for the sprawling group developed by Evgueni Prigojine. The Bellingcat site revealed that in 2017 and then 2018, the Wagner boss renamed two front men “Utkin” to artificially run companies belonging to him. A “cloning” in which several Russian media saw a way of taunting the American authorities, who had not forgotten to place the real Dmitry Utkin among the Russian personalities targeted by the sanctions for his activities within the Wagner Group in Ukraine, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
