Mercenary group said to have been named after commander whose call sign was ‘Wagner’ but who stayed out of the spotlight
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Among those presumed dead alongside Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash near Moscow was Dmitry Utkin, who was often described as the founder or co-founder of the mercenary group although his exact role was disputed.
His own call sign was “Wagner”, after Hitler’s favourite composer. The investigative website Bellingcat wrote in 2020 that Utkin had “an obsessive fascination with the history of the Third Reich” while another recent report described him as “festooned with numerous Nazi tattoos, including a swastika, a Nazi eagle, and an SS lightning bolts”. The Wagner group was apparently named after him.
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