28 agos 2023 anni - Al-Jazeera: Who was Dmitry Utkin, a key Wagner mercenary who died alongside Prigozhin?

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Who was Dmitry Utkin, a key Wagner mercenary who died alongside Prigozhin?
The secretive war-hardened career-officer-turned-mercenary is said to have given the Wagner group its name.

28 Aug 2023
Dmitry Utkin, a shadowy figure whose call sign “Wagner” allegedly inspired the Russian private mercenary group’s name, died alongside Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash on Wednesday.

Utkin, who served in the Russian military intelligence, is often cited as the founder of Wagner Group, but many analysts now say that rumour was simply a smokescreen for Prigozhin, who only recently acknowledged his leading role in the armed group.

So, who really was the 53-year-old veteran on board the doomed private jet that fell from the sky between Moscow and St Petersburg?

Here is what you need to know:

Utkin’s path from career officer to mercenary
Born on June 11, 1970 in Asbest, a town nestled on the slopes of the Ural Mountains and named after its local Asbestos industry, Utkin appears to have joined the military at the age of 18.

He served in the Spetsnaz GRU, Russia’s military intelligence division, between 1988 and 2008, according to his online CV unearthed by the investigative website Bellingcat.


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As a lieutenant colonel, he served in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya between 1994-2000.

RUSSIA CHECHNYA
Russian soldiers bound for Chechnya look out from the top of a vehicle as they pass through the Adler checkpoint in Ingushetia on January 9, 2000 [WAW via Reuters]
The time at which he left the military remains unclear, but in 2013, he appears to have been employed by a mysterious Hong-Kong-based private military company (PMC) called the Slavonic Corps.

The only known deployment of the PMC was in Syria, where they reportedly lost a battle with the fighters linked to al-Qaeda armed group.

The birth of Wagner
The Wagner Group first appeared in 2014 when Russia sent troops into Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, annexing the territory and began supporting separatist rebels in the east of the country.

The group itself is believed to have been named after Utkin’s call sign Wagner, a reference to Richard Wagner, the favourite composer of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

It remains unclear how involved Utkin was in forming the group, but it has been proven that Utkin played a key role in the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region and is even reported to have been injured in the fighting.

His role in the war was later confirmed by Ukrainian signal intelligence, which intercepted phone conversations between him and GRU Colonel Oleg Ivannikov, as well as to Major-General Evgeny Nikiforov, head of Russia’s 58th Army.

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