A monument to the late co-founders of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin has been unveiled in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region, photos published to Wagner’s official Telegram channel on Friday showed.
The statue depicts Prigozhin in a flak jacket holding a two-way radio and Utkin gripping an automatic rifle behind him.
Engraved on the monument’s base are the words “First” and “Ninth” — Prigozhin and Utkin’s respective call signs — along with their dog tags.
Wagner’s Telegram channel said the statue was erected in front of the mercenary group’s chapel in the spa resort town of Goryachy Klyuch, which is also near its former training base and the largest publicly known burial site for Wagner fighters.
Wagner disbanded late last year and its fighters were transferred to units under the control of the Russian armed forces after Prigozhin launched a failed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. In August, the mercenary chief and his close associates were killed in a plane crash that is widely believed to have been an assassination plot orchestrated by the Kremlin.
Pro-war bloggers first shared photos of the Prigozhin and Utkin monument last month while it was in the process of being transported.
Municipal authorities in Goryachy Klyuch told Russian media at the time that it did not authorize the statue’s installation. They added that no authorization was needed since the monument was located on private property.