Dossier Center translation: "Hail Petrovich"
The story of Dmitry Utkin - the man who gave the name to the Wagner group
Finally, finally, finally a deep investigation is done into GRU operative and founder of the Wagner mercenary group….
Dossier Center: April 10, 2023
The Wagner group, which is controlled by businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, appeared more than eight years ago and still exists outside the legal field in Russia. It is the Wagnerites who are credited with the rare successes of Russia during the war in Ukraine, including attempts to encircle Bakhmut. They are called "Wagnerites" in honor of their first commander - Dmitry Utkin with the call sign "Wagner". Officially, Russia is fighting in Ukraine against the "Nazis". But photographs of a man who looks like Dmitry Utkin are circulating on the Internet, in which Nazi tattoos are visible. Even his call sign can also be associated with an interest in Nazism. From the internal documents of the Wagner group, it turns out that the matter is not limited to tattoos alone - Utkin signs with the runes "zig" and uses the appeal "Heil Petrovich", referring to the owner of the Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The Dossier Center explores who Dmitry Utkin is, what he does at Wagner, and whether he really is a Nazi (spoiler: yes).
Childhood, adolescence, youth
Dmitry Utkin was born on June 11, 1970. The place of birth is called different - either Asbest of the Sverdlovsk region of the RSFSR, or the village of Smolino in the Kirovograd region of Ukraine.
"Dossier" removes the intrigue. Here is a Russian passport issued to Utkin in 2003, first published by Fontanka.ru in 2017, but with banknotes. We show it without retouching, which covered the place of birth: the city of Asbest, Sverdlovsk region.
As a child, Utkin, according to the Ukrainian publication Censor.net, lived and studied in Ukraine, in the same village of Smolino in the Kirovohrad region. Apparently, he and his mother ended up there at an early age, from which the error arose with his place of birth. Utkin's mother, a civil engineer, according to Censor, divorced her husband when Dmitry was very young, and raised her son alone. In Smolino, Utkin studied at school. Journalists found fellow countrymen who knew him, but they didn’t remember anything special about him: “he was an arrogant guy”, he studied well, but he definitely wasn’t a local legend.
Back in 2017, Utkin's mother lived in Smolino - in an ordinary apartment of a typical Soviet five-story building.
After graduating from the Smolin school, Dima Utkin left the village for Leningrad, where he entered a military school. The educational institution itself is not named, but if you remember that after studying Utkin ended up in the GRU special forces, then you can identify him with almost 100% certainty: only one Leningrad school-trained officer for this profile - the Higher Combined Arms Command Double Red Banner named after S. M Kirov, colloquially Lenpekh. Liquidated in 1999.
The interlocutors of Censor.net say that after school Utkin did not live in Smolino, although he sometimes stopped by. According to them, two of his children from different wives live in the village.
The material also says that Utkin visited his mother even in 2016 when the war was in full swing in the southeast of Ukraine, in which he commanded a unit of mercenaries on the side of the LPR and DPR. However, then his name said something only to a few initiates. The Ukrainian special services, if they knew about him, did not react to the visit in any way.
Utkin's personal life turned out to be somewhat confusing. In addition to the children in Smolino (which Censor.net wrote about), it is known about his ex-wife Elena Shcherbinina, whom he met in the mid-1990s and broke up with in the 2000s. In 2015, Shcherbinina even looked for him through the Find Me program. In 2016, Gazeta.ru contacted Elena Shcherbinina and she spoke about Utkin, mentioning his participation in both Chechen wars.
Special forces lieutenant colonel
Shcherbinina's story is the first reliable evidence of Utkin's military service. It is confirmed by the archive data available to the "Dossier" about Utkin's registration at the place of residence in the Pskov region, documents about Utkin's service in the 2nd separate special forces brigade, and even open press materials. So, from the beginning of the 2000s, until he bought an apartment in St. Petersburg in 2018, he was registered at the address “military unit 64044” (number designation of the 2nd brigade of the Special Forces).
In August 1999, Utkin (with the rank of captain) got into the press: he was mentioned in an article about repelling an attack by Chechen Wahhabis on Dagestan. A copy of a fragment of a newspaper sheet with a photo of Utkin was published by one of the Telegram channels in January 2021. The name of the newspaper is not given.
During the reorganization of the army, special forces detachments included in the brigade were registered as separate legal entities. Dmitry Valeryevich Utkin has been listed in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities since 2002 as the commander of the 700th separate special forces detachment in Pechory.
Source: Unified State Register of Legal Entities
Utkin's military career is the usual path of an army officer "from the people." You can’t call him a loser: by the age of 40, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel, part not in the remote taiga, but in the Pskov region. On the other hand, the prospects were not visible. There is no data on Utkin's studies at the academy, so the shoulder straps of a lieutenant colonel are a career limit.
War for Hire
Coming to the reserve in 2012, Lieutenant Colonel Utkin made the logical decision to make a living doing what he can and was able to get a job in the Russian private military company (PMC) Moran Security Group. At that time, PMCs still existed in Russia, which operated within the framework of international law and the legislation of the countries in which they worked. These PMCs did not violate Russian law, since all weapons were located abroad and were used in accordance with local regulations and international standards.
As former employees of Moran Security told us, Dmitry Utkin even starred in a commercial for a military company, but the Dossier Center was unable to find these shots.
But the adventure started by some managers of the Moran Security Group in 2013 in Syria was no longer similar to the usual activities of PMCs. As the St. Petersburg Fontanka.ru found, the company created a gasket in Hong Kong in the form of Slavonic Corps and formed a detachment of 270 people under an agreement with the Syrian oligarch or field commander Yusef Jaber. The detachment was supposed to almost capture the large transport hub of Deir ez-Zur. The formation consisted of two companies - one of them was commanded by Dmitry Utkin. Then not Wagner yet. Although, as the participants in the adventure say, his interest in the Third Reich was already openly manifested.
The “Slavic Corps” (that was the name of the group of mercenaries, which included Utkin) got into a clash with the ISIS group, while still advancing into the area of alleged hostilities, and after that in October 2013 was withdrawn to Russia. According to the participants in the events, disagreements arose between the commander of Slavcorp and the customer due to the untimely transfer of payment. In addition, in violation of the agreements, the detachment was not provided with serviceable armored vehicles. The evacuation was carried out by two charter aircraft to Moscow. At the airport, the mercenaries were met by special forces and the FSB. Utkin and most of the mercenaries escaped with a fright: the fighters and even unit commanders, having previously searched, seized electronic media, and intimidated them with non-disclosure agreements, were driven home, and only two leaders were arrested - Vadim Gusev and Yevgeny Sidorov.
Gusev and Sidorov became the first in the history of the new Russia convicted under the article for organizing mercenaries. They agreed to a special order of legal proceedings, received three years each, and left after one and a half on parole.
The emergence of Wagner
The end of 2013 - the beginning of 2014 - is another failure in Utkin's biography. We do not know who, where, and when introduced Dmitry Utkin and Yevgeny Prigozhin.
But already at the very beginning of the summer of 2014, something appeared that today is officially called Wagner PMC. Prigozhin organized his own armed team, which did not yet have a name, but was referred to by the call sign of commander Dmitry Utkin - "Wagner". In various documents, it is first mentioned as an RTG - a company tactical group - numbering 150-200 fighters, then a battalion. By 2022, the organizational structure will grow to the brigade level, and the Wagner staff will reach 7,000 people.
The career of a lieutenant colonel in the reserve went uphill. Before meeting Prigozhin, according to Dossier's interlocutors, Utkin had a maximum of one award - the Order of Courage. By the end of 2016, he had four Orders of Courage on his chest, and Vladimir Putin received him in the Kremlin. Soon Utkin also became a Hero of Russia.
Dossier publishes the original photo of Utkin and other mercenary commanders with Putin, which Fontanka found on social networks in 2017. Standing next to the president (from left to right) are Heroes of Russia Andrei Bogatov and Andrei Troshev, four-time holders of the Order of Courage Alexander Kuznetsov and Dmitry Utkin.
Obviously, the photo was taken on December 9, 2016, on the day when a reception was given in the Georgievsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace in honor of the Heroes of the Fatherland Day. Utkin and Troshev in the same clothes, with the same awards, were included in the official chronicle.
There is another photo taken, apparently, with a difference of several minutes from the first. It allows you to localize the place - this is the Andreevsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. There is no president in the photo, except for four mercenaries, only the shoulder strap of an unidentified major general with a patch of the Western Military District got into the frame. On the other hand, it can be seen that Alexander Kuznetsov, for a meeting with the president, put on a black "trench cross" rosette of the Wagner group - he has it in the buttonhole of his jacket. He and Utkin have some envelopes in their hands, and Troshev has a gift bag: from the president not empty-handed.
Heil Prigogine
Dmitry Utkin, aka "Wagner", aka "Ninth", is not only a brand person. Chief in the brigade of his own name, he makes important personnel and administrative decisions.
In the Wagner Group, decisions, as in any organization, are made in writing. The signature of the "brigade commander", that is, Utkin, looks like this.
The fact that Dmitry Utkin, after his dismissal from the army, began to gravitate towards the history of the Third Reich, the sources of the Dossier, close to Wagner, has been telling since 2014. He took a call sign named after his beloved composer Adolf Hitler, openly clung to himself with either a belt or a cap with a swastika, he liked to talk about the path of a true Aryan - such stories have been heard from eyewitnesses more than once, but only in retelling. The well-known audio recordings of Utkin are only radio communications intercepted by the Ukrainian side in 2015, and there are more and more about combat specifics, and not about ideology.
From the documentary evidence so far - a couple of photographs, one of which shows a naked (at least to the waist) man, very similar to Utkin, with tattoos or drawings on his body in the form of buttonholes of an SS Obersturmbannführer and the Wehrmacht emblem, on the other - someone in profile, reminiscent of Utkin, in a bergmütz (German military cap) with an SS eagle. It seems that he is in the photo, acquaintances will recognize him, but the origin of both shots is not known.
The so-called special department of the hired brigade helped to learn more about Utkin. The love of Lieutenant Colonel Utkin of the Reserve of the Russian Armed Forces for the SS is proved with the help of documents from that very special department received by the German publication Die Welt and the Dossier Center.
How we got the materials for this investigation and why we trust them
Documents are submitted to Utkin, he imposes resolutions on them. He has not used the call sign “Wagner” in internal document management for a long time - he signed it only at the very beginning of the history of the Prigozhin group in 2014-2015.
Later, Utkin, as a rule, signed with two letters - "D" and the letter most similar to "A". The first document with such a signature was published by BBC journalists - the autograph on the document of Prigozhin's Euro Polis LLC was put by a person with the position of "brigade commander" and "9" instead of a name.
In the archives we have received, there are thousands of documents addressed to the “brigade commander” or “Ninth” with resolutions signed by “D. A.". Given the similarity of the handwriting in these documents with the resolution signed by Wagner in 2015, it can be assumed with a fairly high degree of certainty that Utkin is in question.
It can be assumed that the first initial corresponds to the name Dmitry, where the letter “A” or a sign very similar to it came from, we do not know.
On many documents, Utkin signs simply and concisely - with two lightning bolts. They are the rune "zig", the sign of the SS. We have not found any system by which Utkin determines how to sign - with initials or an SS sign. It seems to depend on the mood. There is no doubt that the resolutions were imposed by Utkin. The documents are addressed either to the “brigade commander” or “Ninth”. The handwriting is identical.
In many countries, including Russia and Germany, the use of an image of a double zig rune outside of a scientific or educational context is punishable by law.
With such an interest in Nazi topics, Dmitry Utkin could not do without the Fuhrer and the corresponding appeal: “Heil Petrovich!”
There can be no doubt here. “Sergei Petrovich” is the semi-secret code name of Yevgeny Prigozhin within his holding, which includes the Wagner group as a power element.
We cannot calculate how many Wagnerians support such views, but this most likely does not matter. Utkin's epistolary heritage confirms the version that ideology is not the main thing in Wagner.
“I don’t care who believes in what. Everyone came to the company to work and earn money!” says one of the resolutions written, apparently, by Utkin.
This approach is slightly at odds with the ideals of the SS, which involved the abandonment of personal interest in the name of devotion to the Fuhrer and the nation, but it is not our task to understand the confusion of meanings in Utkin's head.
petty shopkeeper
As taught in school during the Soviet era, the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany was a party of petty shopkeepers. Dmitry Utkin, it seems, did not forget what he was taught in the Komsomol, and decided to live up to the ideal.
It is difficult to establish how much the war for money brought him - it is difficult for Yevgeny Prigozhin to settle accounts with leaders of this level by even black bookkeeping. Nevertheless, it can be established that Utkin has amassed money, over the years of mercenary work.
He himself is not an entrepreneur, the business is run by a young wife, Anastasia, born in 1993, with whom he married shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014. Anastasia is from Yekaterinburg, in St. Petersburg she defended her bachelor's degree in law. After marriage, as far as one can judge from social networks and ad sites, she did not work in her specialty but devoted herself to small business.
The first project, the Kashulina apart-hotel on Ivanovskaya Street in St. Petersburg, opened in 2016 and worked for two years.
After the hotel, there was a beauty salon in the Aura business center in Lakhta. Its history was also fleeting: the salon opened in 2018, and already in April 2019 it was put up for sale for 2 million rubles - inexpensive for the “business class. Judging by the ads on Avito, over the year the price fell by 2 times to 1.1 million rubles.
To date, the Utkin family is left with Kashulina LLC, which is engaged in the retail sale of food, including tobacco products. Judging by the cash registers, there are two stores, one in St. Petersburg, and the second in the Krasnodar Territory, which is logical: Prigozhin's structures are based there and there. If the cash register is shown honestly, then the average check in these stores is 200-300 rubles, the income in 2020 amounted to 755 thousand rubles, and in 2021 the business lost almost the same amount (766 thousand rubles).
Judging by social networks, such a course of affairs does not upset the spouse of Dmitry Utkin and does not affect the level of well-being.
Officially, the spouses have one apartment in St. Petersburg at 65 on Parashutnaya Street with a total area of 35 sq. m and with a shared bathroom. Of course, there is no point in looking for the Utkin couple. No one answers calls on the intercom in the apartment either in the morning or in the evening, and in the parking lot, it was never possible to find the cars used by Dmitry and Anastasia. Most likely, this is not their family nest and, most likely, not even an investment, but just an address for registration.
Another address associated with Utkin is house 51, building 53, along Novaya Street in Lakhta, Kashulina LLC is registered here. The house belongs to Lakhta Park Premium, its beneficiary is the son of Yevgeny Prigozhin Pavel.
Judging by the announcement of the search for a dog in February 2023, the Utkins are in the village of Podgornoye, Vyborgsky district, Leningrad region.
It has not yet been possible to find out exactly where the mercenary commander, who managed to combine the Hero's star and SS symbols, lives. We will be grateful to our readers for clarification.
A little hint: if you spot a Ford Explorer with license plate T966UV178, Obersturmbannführer is somewhere nearby.
Anastasia Utkina did not answer the Dossier call. An appeal in the messenger asking for a brief interview was read but remained unanswered.
Denis Korotkov
Dossier Center
I had not realized that the Wagner Group name may be an homage to the German composer Richard Wagner (not stated above, but hinted at since the name apparently comes from Utkin's call sign).