Dmitry Utkin: The Life and Death of a Prominent Russian Nazi and Friend of Putin

If you are interested in paramilitary units, the name Dmitry Valerievich Utkin is certainly not unfamiliar to you, as he is the co-founder of the infamous Wagner mercenary group. Let’s take a closer look at Utkin’s life, his youth and journey through special forces and the Wagnerites to his death.

Dmitry Utkin was born on June 11, 1970 in the village of Asbest in the Sverdlovsk region of Russia. His father was a geologist and his mother a civil engineer. Not long after Utkin’s birth, however, the parents divorced and the mother moved with little Dmitri to the village of Smoline in the Kirovohrad region. He was a very diligent student at school, but his classmates rated him as very arrogant and condescending. After finishing school, he moved to Leningrad, today’s St. Petersburg, where he entered the SM Kirov Officers’ School. After finishing school, he began his service with the GRU units, the Soviet intelligence service. It is probably here that his interest in Nazism and Hitler’s Germany began to appear, because, as is well known, Nazism is generally popular in Russian high circles.

Photo: Dmitry Utkin | Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

With the GRU units, he took command of the 700th separate special detachment, the 2nd separate special brigade stationed in Pechory in the Rostov region, with which he went through both wars in Chechnya. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the military and retired in 2013, the same year he joined the Moran Security Group, a security agency founded by Russian military veterans to privately train government and non-government forces around the world in the fight against maritime piracy. In the same year, the Slavic Battalion was established in the agency, the aim of which was to support Russian interests during the Syrian Civil War. Utkin also becomes a member of the battalion and, together with 267 contractors, leaves for Syria to defend the Syrian oil fields in Deir ez-Zor. Soon the battalion’s objectives were changed and orders were given to reinforce Syrian Army units in the city of Al-Suchna. During the fighting with the Islamic State, however, the battalion proved to be not very combat-ready and constantly withdrew from its positions. For failure to meet the assigned goals, the battalion was withdrawn back to Russia and the mercenaries were detained by the Russian FSB at the Vnukovo airport.

Photo: Coat of arms of the Wagners | Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Utkin evaded arrest and is still thinking about his own mercenary unit in 2013. He manages to establish it after meeting Yevgeny Prigozhin in 20145. At that time, the unit did not yet have an official name, but in documents it is referred to as RTG – company tactical group. In 2014, the name is also changed to Wagner Group. Wagner was Utkin’s call sign in the Slavonic Battalion, and he chose it after the German composer Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. The group begins to grow to include members of the former Slavonic Battalion, and Utkin himself becomes the commander. A training camp is established at the Molkino military base, where the Russian Specnaz is also based. Utkin is known for walking around the base in a Wehrmacht field cap and demanding the Nazi salute “Heil!” from his subordinates when they meet. He also became famous for his signature, which he supplemented with the Nazi SS rune.

In 2014, Russian secret services organized a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine, mainly in the Donbas and Luhansk regions. Because Russia wants it to look like a spontaneous popular uprising, there are officially no Russian soldiers participating in it, but in reality most of the rebels are unmarked Russian soldiers. Utkin and his Wagners are among them. He first participates as one of the “green men” (Russian soldiers without markings) in the occupation of Crimea and then in the battles for Donbas. The Wagners mostly fight alongside the insurgents from the so-called Luhansk separatist republic. The Wagners and Utkin also take part in the well-known Battle of Debaltseve, where the Wagners infamously gain popularity when they shoot several Luhan rebel commanders who refused to attack the most strongly defended Ukrainian positions and thus tried to avoid high losses. After the battle, the Wagners were transferred to the rear, where their task was to eliminate the Luhansk and Donetsk separatists, who wanted their republics to be truly independent and not just another Russian region.

Utkin mostly returned to Russia with the Wagners in 2015, when the Russian intervention in Syria was about to take place. Here, the Wagners play a big role, and their war crimes also come to light, when the Wagners torture prisoners in Syria, castrate them, or execute them with a sledgehammer. Utkins will make his first official appearance in the Kremlin during the Heroes of the Fatherland Day celebration on December 9, 2016, when he is awarded the fourth Order of Courage. A joint photo with Putin will raise a wave of resentment in Russia, because officially the Kremlin has nothing to do with the Wagners, as paramilitary organizations are officially banned in Russia.

The Wagners also played a pivotal role during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where they played an important role in the fighting for Bakhmut. Utkin no longer took part in the actual fighting, but directed it from afar. In 2023, relations between the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagners escalated. Unlike the regular Russian army, the Wagners were the only ones who managed to advance in the battle, and the Russian public noticed this, of course. The Wagners gained great popularity among the Russian population, while the popularity of the Russian military declined. Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Minister of Defense, ordered a halt to the supply of ammunition to the Wagners in order to stop their advance. Disputes escalated into a rebellion that ignited on June 23, 2023. In a single day, the Wagner family managed to occupy Rostov-on-Don. In Rostov-on-Don, the Wagner family managed to capture Colonel General Yunus-Bek Jevkurov, Deputy Minister of Defense and Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, Deputy Chief of Russian Military Intelligence. Within two days, the Wagners managed to militarily control an area larger than the Russians had managed to occupy up to that time in Ukraine. Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner family, became the face of the rebellion, and Utkin’s role in the rebellion is not yet known, but it is reported that he rode in the first tank during the attack on Moscow. However, the rebellion had a short life, and two days later it was all over, when an agreement was reached that the Wagners would be transferred to Belarus.

Photo: Prominent Nazi Utkin in a joint photo with Russian President Putin | TASS

Here, Prigozhin posted a video of Utkin speaking to his soldiers, which is the only known depiction of Utkin on camera to date, as he mostly tried to stay in the background and not draw attention to himself.

Dmitry Uktin dies together with Yevgeny Prigozhin on August 23, 2023 when Prigozhin’s plane crashes in the Tver region. The mysterious death of two very important Russians has a lot of question marks around it, but the more unlikely scenario seems to be when the plane was deliberately shot down by Russian air defenses, or a hidden explosive was used in the plane.

Utkin was buried on August 31 at the Federal Military Cemetery in the Moscow Region. In April 2024, a monument to the Wagner family was erected in front of the chapel in the town of Gorjachij Ključ, on which there is a statue of Prigozhin and Utkin.

Utkin remains an enigmatic figure in contemporary Russian history to this day. It is also a prime example of the Russian Nazi oxymoron, when, for example, Russian President Putin describes himself as a fighter against Nazism, but on the other hand, he awards Utkin, a great sympathizer of the Nazi regime, who even had the Nazi eagle and SS insignia tattooed on his body, the highest Russian award, Hero Russian Federation. Utkin was not shy about making his admiration for Nazism public, often arguing about the Aryan people in the few interviews he gave. However, Utkin’s sympathies for Nazism are not unusual in Russia, because Russia is the country where support for Nazism is the highest in the world.

Source: Special Ops Magazine, Dialog, Lenta.ru