Dmitry Utkin

Dmitry Valerievich Utkin (Дмитрий Валерьевич Уткин) (11 June 1970 – 23 August 2023) was a Russian military officer and mercenary.

He served as a special forces officer in the GRU, where he held the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He was the co-founder and military commander of the Russian state-funded Wagner Group, with his military alias reportedly being Wagner.

Utkin was reportedly a neo-Nazi.

He rarely made public appearances, but was allegedly the commander of the private military company, while Yevgeny Prigozhin was its owner and public face.

Utkin was awarded four Orders of Courage of Russia.

Utkin was killed on 23 August 2023 when a plane carrying him, Prigozhin and eight others crashed in Tver Oblast, leaving no survivors.

Dmitry Valerievich Utkin was born on 11 June 1970 in Asbest, a village in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia, Soviet Union.

His mother, a civil engineer, divorced Utkin's father when Utkin was very young.

During his early childhood, Utkin and his mother relocated to the village of Smoline in Kirovohrad Oblast in Soviet Ukraine, where he was raised.

He was described by classmates as very studious, but arrogant.

He fathered two children in Smoline.

After graduating from high school in Smoline, Utkin moved to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) where he entered the S. M. Kirov Higher Combined Arms Command School and later joined the GRU Special Forces.

In the 1990s, he married Elena Shcherbinina, with whom he had three children.

They divorced in the early 2000s.

Utkin served as the commander of the 700th Separate Special Detachment of the 2nd Separate Special Brigade of the Russian GRU military intelligence service, stationed in Pechory, Pskov Oblast, until 2013.

After leaving the military, in 2013 Utkin began working for the Moran Security Group, a private company founded by Russian military veterans, which was involved in security and training missions worldwide, and specializes in security against piracy.

The same year, senior Moran Security Group managers were involved in setting up the Hong Kong-based Slavonic Corps, which headhunted contractors to "protect oil fields and pipelines" in Syria during its civil war.

Utkin was deployed in Syria as a member of the Slavonic Corps, surviving its disastrous mission.

Utkin returned to Moscow in October 2013.

Russia's Federal Security Service in November 2013 arrested some members of the Slavonic Corps for illegal mercenary activity.

Almost immediately after returning to Russia, Utkin reportedly created his own mercenary group.

The group's name, the Wagner Group, is a reference to the call-sign Utkin was using at the time, "Wagner", which is itself a reference to German composer Richard Wagner (see political and racial views).

Utkin and the Wagner Group, as well as several veterans of the Slavonic Corps, were seen in Crimea in February 2014 and then in Donbas, where they fought for the pro-Russian separatists during the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Gazeta.ru reported that Utkin and his men could have been involved in the killing of several field commanders of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic.

Turkish newspaper Yeni Şafak reported that Utkin was possibly a figurehead for the company, while the real head of Wagner was someone else.

In 2015, Shcherbinina reported Utkin as missing on a television program.

According to several news outlets, Utkin was an admirer of Nazi Germany and had multiple Nazi tattoos, including Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia.

Utkin also reportedly used call sign Wagner after German composer Richard Wagner, because his work was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler and was appropriated by the Nazis.

Allegedly he greeted subordinates by saying "Heil!", wore a Wehrmacht field cap around Wagner training grounds, and sometimes signed his name with the lightning bolt insignia of the SS.

Members of the Wagner Group have said that Utkin was a Rodnover, a believer in the Slavic native faith.

RBK reported that after completing training in Krasnodar Krai, Utkin and his men returned to Syria in 2015.

Soon after the start of Russian aerial strikes in Syria, reports emerged of the deaths of Russian mercenaries fighting on the ground.

Utkin was seen in the Kremlin during the celebration of Fatherland's Heroes Day on 9 December 2016.

He attended the celebration as a laureate of four Orders of Courage, and was photographed with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Dmitry Peskov, the Press Secretary for the Russian President, admitted that Utkin was among the invitees, but did not comment on his connection with the mercenaries.

This was reportedly Utkin's last public appearance.

Several images spread in social media apparently depicting armed Russian men killed during the Battle of Palmyra in March 2016.

Sky News reported that approximately 500 to 600 people, mostly Wagner mercenaries, were killed in Syria in 2016.

In June 2017, Utkin ordered that a Syrian deserter be tortured and bludgeoned to death on camera.