Mr. Utkin, 53, was a prominent commander in the private Russian military company and a longtime lieutenant to Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. He died in a plane crash, Russian authorities said.
A portrait of Dmitri Utkin at a makeshift memorial in Novosibirsk, Russia, on Thursday.Credit...Vladimir Nikolayev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Since the publication of this obituary, Russia has confirmed the death of Dmitri Utkin.
Dmitri Utkin, a longtime lieutenant to the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin and the man whose nom de guerre inspired the name of their private military outfit, Wagner, was widely believed to have died along with him in a plane crash in Russia on Wednesday. He was 53.
Mr. Utkin’s death has not been officially confirmed by the Russian authorities or by Wagner, but he was listed as a passenger on a plane that went down in a field as it was flying to St. Petersburg from Moscow.
Mr. Utkin, a veteran Russian military officer, was closely intertwined with Wagner from its emergence as a fairly modest fighting group a decade ago to its evolution into a brutal, armed-to-the-teeth force willing to do the Kremlin’s bidding from Africa to the Middle East to, most recently, the hottest spots on the Ukrainian battlefield.
But his exact role was a bit murky.
Over the years, Mr. Utkin was at times referred to as the “founder” of Wagner, which first came to public attention during early forays against Ukraine ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin in 2014, a precursor to the full-scale invasion of 2022. Wagner mercenaries fought alongside pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region, commanded by Mr. Utkin.
Whether he was the group’s actual founder, though, became less and less certain over time. “While Dmitry Utkin has been widely presented as the front man and ‘principal’ for the Wagner PMC, there is ample data suggesting that his role was more of a field commander,” a report issued in 2020 by the investigative website Bellingcat said. Open-source data, the report said, strongly suggested that Mr. Utkin was “not in the driver’s seat of setting up this private army” but rather was a “hired gun.”
The State of the War
On the Front Lines: With Russian troops advancing in the Northeast and Ukraine pressing its offensive in the South, both sides are hoping to force the other to make hard choices about where to send reinforcements.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Funeral: The burial of the Wagner mercenary group boss in Russia was shrouded in misinformation, preventing a public display of support the Kremlin did not want to see.
Part of the challenge in understanding his role was that while Mr. Prigozhin was outspoken of late, delighting in seizing the spotlight and denouncing rivals in the Russian regular military, Mr. Utkin was rarely seen in public. Bellingcat called him “camera shy.”
In many respects, though, his influence on the culture of Wagner appeared clear.
Image
A damaged classroom in Kherson, Ukraine, which had been occupied by Russian fighters until October. Wagner mercenaries have played a major role in Russia’s invasion.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Mr. Utkin, a retired Russian Special Forces officer, was described as fascinated by Nazi history. The mercenary group’s name — and, before that, Mr. Utkin’s military call sign — was said to have been inspired by the composer Richard Wagner, a favorite of Hitler’s. Some of the group’s fighters seemed to share that ideology: Ancient Norse symbols favored by white supremacists have been photographed on Wagner equipment in Africa and the Middle East.
Mr. Utkin, who was born in 1970, served with the military in two wars in Russia’s restive Chechnya region and was in the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency, until 2013, according to a 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After that, the report said, he commanded a Spetsnaz special forces unit and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.
But it was as part of Wagner that he attained notoriety.
In 2015, a year after helping shear off sections of eastern Ukraine, the Wagner group turned its attention to Syria, tasked by the Kremlin not only with bolstering President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war but also with seizing oil and gas fields, American officials have said. Wagner operatives have also fought in Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mali and Mozambique, extending Russian influence in Africa by proxy.
Officially, the Kremlin denied ties to Wagner, but in 2016 Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Utkin military honors at a banquet.
A year later, the United States bestowed its own recognition of sorts: It imposed sanctions on Mr. Utkin over his activities with Wagner — specifically, recruiting soldiers to join separatist forces in Ukraine. (Britain, the European Union and Canada also imposed sanctions on Mr. Utkin and Mr. Prigozhin.)
In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Wagner’s fighters took on a major role, most notably in the bloody, nearly yearlong battle for Bakhmut, where Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenaries ultimately claimed victory.
But the glory was fleeting.
Mr. Prigozhin grew increasingly incensed at what he called the incompetence of Russian military leaders, and while he was careful to profess loyalty to Mr. Putin, he spared no words in his denunciations of the president’s underlings. In late June, words turned to action, and Wagner forces briefly took up arms against Russian soldiers, outraging the Russian president.
Inside and outside the country, many watched closely to see what fate might befall Mr. Prigozhin.
In the days that followed, Mr. Utkin stayed by the Wagner chief’s side. And the next month, video emerged that appeared to show Mr. Prigozhin delivering a speech to Wagner fighters who had relocated to Belarus. After finishing, he turned the floor over to Mr. Utkin, who this time did not maintain his customary discretion.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, Renegade Mercenary Chief Who Rattled Kremlin
A tycoon and a Putin ally, he built a paramilitary force that fought by Russia’s side even as he castigated its military leaders. He died at 62 in a plane crash, Russian authorities said.
A screengrab from a video provided by Concord Press Service, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s information agency, showing him at a cemetery for Wagner fighters in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region in April.Credit...Concord Press Service
Since the publication of this obituary, Russia has confirmed the death of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin.
Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the outspoken tycoon who built a private paramilitary force that fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine and Africa but whose harsh judgment of its army leadership led him to instigate a rebellion, was widely believed to be dead on Thursday, a day after a plane in which he was said to be traveling crashed in Russia. He was 62.
Listen to This Article
Listen 11:16
Although his death has not been officially declared by the Russian authorities or confirmed by family members or business associates, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke of Mr. Prigozhin in the past tense on Thursday and offered condolences to the families of the crash’s 10 victims. And Pentagon officials for the first time openly said they believe that Mr. Prigozhin did not survive the crash, in which all on board were killed. His name was on the passenger list.
Image
Mourners at a makeshift memorial near the former Wagner headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday.Credit...Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters
Officers near the site of the plane crash in the Tver region of Russia on Thursday.Credit...Anton Vaganov/Reuters
Mr. Prigozhin had long leveraged a close relationship with the Kremlin to gain lucrative government construction and catering contracts, and he built up the paramilitary force, known as Wagner, in close cooperation with Russia’s military intelligence services.
For years he kept a low public profile. Even as Wagner conducted operations on Moscow’s behalf in Syria and in several African countries, he denied any affiliation.
Mr. Prigozhin began to embrace a public profile only after Mr. Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, acknowledging later that year that he had founded and run Wagner. Signing contract soldiers and recruiting prison inmates, he built Wagner into a force estimated at 50,000.
In remarks a day after the plane crash, Mr. Putin said he had known Mr. Prigozhin since the early 1990s — a revelation, since the timing of their relationship had long been a mystery. Mr. Prigozhin once said in an interview that he first met Mr. Putin in 2000.
Speaking in a meeting broadcast on television, Mr. Putin continued: “This was a person with a complicated fate. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results.”
He said that Russian investigators would pursue the investigation into the crash “to the end,” and offered his condolences to the families of those who perished in the crash.
Mr. Prigozhin had emerged as a public power player in the past several months, using social media, in particular the Telegram messaging platform, to create a personal brand out of tough talk, obscenity-laced videos and a willingness to endorse extrajudicial killing.
Mr. Prigozhin also became a harsh critic of the way Russia’s military leadership conducted the war in Ukraine, issuing denunciations that Mr. Putin left unchecked even as the government cracked down on other critics. Close enough to the president that he was known as “Putin’s chef,” Mr. Prigozhin had been careful not to take on Mr. Putin directly. And for his part, Mr. Putin seemed interested in creating a sort of competition among his military leaders.
Image
Ukrainian soldiers loading the body of a Russian soldier into a railway car on the outskirts of Kharkiv in April. Mr. Prigozhin was critical of the way the Russian military was running the war in Ukraine.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
A drone image of the destruction in Bakhmut, Ukraine, taken in May. Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner fighters were instrumental in the fight to take over the city.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
But Mr. Prigozhin escalated his feud with the military leadership exponentially on June 23, saying in a 30-minute video that the invasion of Ukraine was a “racket” perpetrated by a corrupt elite chasing money and glory without concern for Russian lives. Within hours, he had accused the Russian Army of attacking his forces, pledged to retaliate, and deployed his forces on Russian ground itself, soon claiming control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, the home of the Russian southern command about 60 miles from the border with Ukraine.
Then, as his troops advanced toward Moscow, Mr. Prigozhin abruptly called off the short-lived mutiny, which had challenged Russia’s veneer of political stability. He agreed to withdraw from Rostov-on-Don under a deal that would drop charges against him and allow him and any fighters loyal to him to leave for Belarus. Since then, he has published videos that appear to place him in locations in Belarus, Russia and Africa, but none could be independently verified.
Image
Members of the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, in June.Credit...Associated Press
Image
Mr. Prigozhin leaving the headquarters of the Southern Military District as Wagner forces pulled out of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, in June.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
Mr. Prigozhin (pronounced pree-GOH-zhin) was born in 1961 in the same hometown as Mr. Putin: St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. He spent nine years in prison in the 1980s on robbery and other charges. Shortly after he was freed in 1990, just as private enterprise was exploding across Russia, Mr. Prigozhin and his mother, Violetta, set up a network of hot-dog stands. His business interests came to include a supermarket chain, casinos, construction and, eventually, work related to the military.
His company Concord Catering began winning lucrative contracts to supply food to schools, government workers and then the army. According to Russian news media reports, companies affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin persuaded Russia’s Parliament to change bidding laws, a rare step, so they could qualify for military construction contracts worth millions.
Wagner’s roots trace to 2014, when Russia launched its first invasion of eastern Ukraine, a clandestine operation. Mr. Prigozhin sought land from the Defense Ministry to train a private army that could fight on behalf of Russia without an official link to the government. He was given the land, in the western Krasnodar region.
It was a convenient combination, said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, because it allowed Moscow to deploy professional, Russian-led military operations abroad while maintaining plausible deniability.
Soldiers trained by Wagner would go on to engage in wars in the Middle East and across Africa, in addition to Ukraine. Human rights groups have accused Wagner soldiers of committing atrocities in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique.
A sign proclaiming collaboration between Russia and the Central African Republic in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 2019.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
Image
Members of the Wagner group guarding the V.I.P. stand during a May Day celebration in Bangui in 2019. Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times
Mr. Prigozhin also oversaw an entity known as the Internet Research Agency, based in his native city, which sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by spreading false news and disseminating messages supporting Donald J. Trump.
In 2016, the United States imposed financial sanctions on Mr. Prigozhin and several of his businesses in relation to those activities. Two years later, he was one of 13 Russian citizens indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on charges of meddling in the election. He denied his involvement with the agency for years, just as he had denied his affiliation with Wagner, but after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he went public about his activities.
“I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency,” he wrote in a statement to a consortium of Western journalists in February. “I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time. It was created to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian theses from the West.”
Similarly, he acknowledged founding and running Wagner only in September 2022. Mr. Prigozhin’s paramilitary force took on an increasingly public role after the Russian Army’s plan to capture Kyiv immediately in the initial days of the war had failed. He was seen in videos personally recruiting inmates from prison to serve in Wagner.
Image
Mr. Prigozhin, left, used his close relationship with the Kremlin and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to secure lucrative catering contracts with the Russian government and its armed forces.Credit...Pool photo by Misha Japaridze
Image
The Wagner group headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia.Credit...Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock
“If you serve six months, you are free,” Mr. Prigozhin told a group of uniformed inmates in one video published in September. But he was also blunt about their fate should they prove disloyal. “If you arrive in Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we will execute you,” he said.
He was able to recruit many thousands of prisoners before announcing in February that he would stop the practice.
As his soldiers were thrown into brutal battles for control of cities in eastern Ukraine, including Bakhmut, Mr. Prigozhin regularly recorded videos near the front lines, seeking credit for battlefield victories, praising his troops as “probably the most experienced army in the world today,” and lambasting the Russian military leadership. In domestic polls, he became one of the best-recognized political figures in Russia.
Image
The grave of a Wagner soldier in a cemetery in Talofka, a town in the Buryatia region of Russia, in May.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
Image
A Wagner recruitment poster near Moscow in June.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
On his social media channels, and on a media outlet he controlled, RIA FAN, he regularly published videos that struck populist themes and drew implicit contrasts with the Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who had never served as a soldier. Mr. Prigozhin frequently traveled to Wagner encampments, and his criticism of the military leadership and Moscow’s “elite” became blistering as the war continued.
He also embraced ruthless violence against perceived enemies. When a video surfaced of a man who had defected after agreeing to fight for Wagner being killed with a sledgehammer, Mr. Prigozhin appeared to endorse the action.
Recently, he called for the imposition of martial law and the cessation of normal government activities in Russia, claiming such steps were needed to win the war.
“We must stop building new roads and infrastructure facilities and work only for the war, to live for a few years in the image of North Korea,” he said in an interview published on the Telegram messaging platform in May. “If we win, we can build anything.”
Image
Yevgeny Nuzhin, 55, a Russian prisoner of war held by Ukraine, in October. He defected after agreeing to fight for Wagner and was killed. A video depicting his brutal murder made the rounds on social media, and Mr. Prigozhin appeared to endorse the killing. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Image
The word “Wagner” was carved into the wall of a classroom that served as a military position during the occupation of Kherson, Ukraine.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Mr. Prigozhin was often seen as a creation of Mr. Putin, who analysts say watched and even enabled his public feud with Mr. Shoigu to spur competition for results. But many wondered how long it could continue before escalating into something violent.
In the Telegram interview, Mr. Prigozhin forecast political violence caused by relatives of dead and wounded soldiers increasingly disillusioned by what he described as a coddled elite.
“Society always demands justice,” he said, “and if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”
