As with his boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, it was officially "at the request of his family" that Utkin, 53, was buried in a private ceremony. The man who gave his call sign "Wagner" to the powerful mercenary group was buried near Moscow on Thursday, August 31. Prigozhin was buried in the secrecy and anonymity of a St. Petersburg cemetery while Utkin was buried in the "pantheon of defenders of the fatherland" at Mytishchi, a huge complex opened in 2013 and destined to become Russia's largest military cemetery. Utkin, who was known for his Nazi tattoos and admiration of the 3rd Reich, was buried alongside memorials to the WWII dead.
The mercenary, who maintained a low profile, started his career in the army and eventually reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the GRU military intelligence service. In 2013, he joined the Slavic Corps, an embryonic private military company active in Syria, before founding his own group, Wagner, the control of which he would later transfer to Prigozhin.
Until his death on August 23 in the same plane crash as his boss, Utkin continued to head Wagner military operations. A "Hero of Russia" like Prigozhin, he had been awarded the Order of Courage a record of six times. According to Russian news agencies, he was buried "with military honors."
The difference in treatment between Prigozhin and Utkin appears consistent with remarks by Vladimir Putin the day after the crash. The Russian president said "we will never forget" the Wagner company's employees, and he relegated Prigozhin to the rank of mere "talented businessman" despite the fact that the two had been close friends since the 1990s.
By burying the last victims of the crash, the Russian authorities intend to close the page of the mutiny of June 23 and 24 and, more generally, of the existence of Wagner, a mercenary company with unrivaled autonomy. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the remaining activities of the private military company in Africa were gradually coming under military control.
Also on Thursday, another event showed that the political consequences of the mutiny would prove harder to erase. From the prison where he is being held before being tried for "extremism," the former Russian security service (FSB) member Igor Strelkov, an ex-military leader of the Donbas separatists, said he intended to run in the March 2024 presidential election.
Strelkov, whose real surname is Girkin, has criticized Putin for his softness in waging war and for his links with "billionaires and other businessmen to whom he can refuse nothing."
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