Dmitri Utkin: Prigozhin’s Nazi right-hand man | The number two of the Wagner Group was also traveling in the wrecked plane

2023-08-26 05:01:00

In the plane that crashed on Wednesday in the Russian region of Tver, north of Moscow, not only the leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was traveling, but also his partner and right-hand man, Dmitri Utkin (photo).

According to official sources, almost nothing is known about this former officer of special units of Russian military intelligence. In one of the few known photos of him, he appears with a shaved head and a murderous look. On both of his collarbones, he has the same tattoo: the symbol of the SS, the paralimit organization serving the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

Russian media, including state media, presented him between 2015 and 2016 as Wagner’s commander, at a time when the authorities denied any relationship with the group, then active in Syria and Ukraine. However, the curtain was parted slightly in December 2016 when he was invited to a reception in the Kremlin paying tribute to Russian heroes of the Syrian civil war. He was even photographed alongside President Vladimir Putin.

According to an April investigation by dossier.center, Utkin was born in 1970 and served in the 2000s in the Russian army’s war against Chechen independence rebels and jihadists in the North Caucasus. In 2012 he left the army and founded his first security company.

It is a mystery how Utkin met Yevgeny Prigozhin and created the paramilitary group, which is called Wagner as its code name. According to the AFP agency, many see in this election further proof of their Nazi sympathies, since Hitler was passionate about the German composer Richard Wagner and the mercenaries of the group call themselves “the musicians”.

Utkin was responsible for the group’s operations and Prigozhin was in charge of the financial part and relations with the Russian government, because he had known Putin since the early 1990s. In barely a decade, the two men and their group have become as famous as they are mysterious, operating from the shadows and being accused of all kinds of outrages, torture and executions in various countries such as the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria or Ukraine.

Telegram channels close to Wagner were full of praise upon learning of the death of Prigozhin’s right-hand man. Some suggest he was assassinated and all eyes are on the Kremlin because Putin considered those who rose up in July to be traitors. “Dmitri Valerievich Utkin was a hero of Russia, a four-time knight of the Order of Valor and known throughout the world by his nom de guerre ‘Wagner,'” the Gray Zone channel said on the night of the accident. He died “because of the traitors of Russia,” he claimed.