Date profile information last updated: 3 November 2023

Mikhail Vatanin, the Wagner leader with influence and business interests

Mikhail Vatanin is a former head of security for Russian PMC Wagner. He reportedly exercises considerable influence, but verifiable information is limited.

Mikhail Vatanin does not currently occupy a formal position within Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner, but has previously acted as the group’s head of security. He reportedly exercises considerable influence over Pavel Prigozhin, the son and heir of late Wagner owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin. Vatanin may therefore play an important role in shaping the future of the group. However, most open-source information traces back to just a couple of low-quality sources and cannot be independently verified, making it difficult to assess the true extent of his influence or its current status. Much more information is available on Vatanin’s business interests, suggesting opportunities for filling sanctions gaps.

Overview

• Vatanin’s behind the scenes influence within Wagner
• The challenge of limited information in evaluating Vatanin
• Vatanin’s key relationships, inside and outside Wagner
• Vatanin’s biography: The road to Wagner
• Digital Vatanin: Private profiles and posing pictures
• International response: Vatanin not yet on the sanctions radar
• Sources

Vatanin’s behind the scenes influence within Wagner

Vatanin acted as head of security for Wagner between May and October 2023 (Telegram, 2023; Telegram, 2023). According to both Rucriminal.info and the VChk-OGPU Telegram channel, Vatanin exercises considerable influence over Pavel Prigozhin, the son of late Wagner owner Yevgeniy and the man who has assumed ownership of many of the assets of Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s empire (Rucriminal.info, 2023; Telegram, 2023). VChk-OGPU reported that Vatanin stepped down from his formal role as part of purge of Pavel’s efforts to purge the organisation but nevertheless retains his influence over Pavel (Telegram, 2023).

VChk-OGPU alleged that Vatanin’s ongoing influence over Pavel Prigozhin stems in part from his control over shell companies – meaning that Pavel’s wealth is in the form of “shares that are registered to nominal owners, [and] can very easily disappear in an unknown direction” (Telegram, 2023).

Vatanin’s role in the Wagner ‘coup attempt’ and Prigozhin’s death

VChk-OGPU claimed that Vatanin played an important role in organising the failed Wagner ‘coup attempt’ in June 2023 (Telegram, 2023), an event that saw Wagner fighters march across Russia in defiance of the Kremlin.

The Telegram channel also implied that Vatanin was responsible for security issues that led to Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s death. In one post, it alleged that, after he assumed his role as head of Wagner’s security, “Vatanin almost completely replaced all the key representatives of the security service. And this all led as a result to Prigozhin’s explosion on the plane” (Telegram, 2023). The implied accusation appears to be one of incompetence, rather than malice.

The challenge of limited information in evaluating Vatanin

The true extent of Vatanin’s influence, and his relationships within, the Wagner group are difficult to assess. Unlike Andrey Troshev (Sedoy) and Anton Yelizarov (Lotus) – two other key figures in post-Prigozhin Wagner whom I have already profiled – Vatanin has attracted no attention from investigative journalists or experts on Wagner.

Instead, almost every piece of open-source information about Vatanin’s role within Wagner traces to the VChk-OGPU Telegram channel, with the compromat website Rucriminal.info providing some supplementary information. All traditional media coverage of Vatanin’s influence traces back to these sources. The only information that can be independently verified pertains to Vatanin’s business interests, which are detailed below.

Vatanin in many ways illustrates some of the key difficulties in evaluating Wagner. Much of what we know about the internal functioning of the group, and about who has relations with whom, is based on information from Telegram channels that cannot be triangulated. This is often then laundered through media outlets and other supposedly reputable sources that pay little heed to the reliability of the information or the possible agendas of the source. Vatanin has not yet engaged in activity that attracts considerable media attention, nor has he engaged in much self-publicity – which is the only reason this second stage of laundering has not yet happened.

Vatanin’s key relationships, inside and outside Wagner

Family

The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel identifies Nikolay Kemaykin as Vatanin’s deceased brother – although half brother seems more likely given that it refers to Tamara Kemaykina as Nikolay’s mother, rather than Vatanin’s. Nikolay was reportedly a drug dealer; one post on the channel claims that he was killed in Thailand (Telegram, 2023), another in Vietnam (Telegram, 2023).

Business interests

While much of the information on Vatanin cannot be independently verified, the Unified State Register of Legal Persons does corroborate some of the information about Vatanin’s extensive and complicated business interests, which account for most of the relations mapped above.

Rucriminal.info accused Vatanin of effectively helping to launder money obtained from state contracts by Sergey Amelin. Amelin was a contractor who reportedly died after being questioned over his involvement in the Oboronservis case, a major corruption scandal at the Russian Ministry of Defence (TASS, 2013). According to the Rucriminal.info website, Vatanin and a “group of ‘lawyers’ controlled Stroyimpuls, which acted as an umbrella for several companies used to launder the money. The website also claimed that Vatanin, then an employee of the Interior Ministry, produced forged documents, first for Amelin’s people and later for Prigozhin’s. As a reward for his work, Vatanin acquired control of the Stroyimpuls DSK-3 company in 2008 (Rucriminal.info, 2023).

VChK-OGPU in turn claimed that Vatanin co-manages various business facilities in St Petersburg, together with Aleksandr Vasilyevich Semchenkov, the son of a KGB general. Vatanin allegedly used a near-namsake, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Semchenkov, to register the interests of A.V. Semchenkov. VChK-OGPU also alleged that several of Vatanin’s relatives are in charge of a variety of companies operating from high-value locations in St Petersburg (Telegram, 2023).

The Unified State Register confirms that Vatanin has either current or historical interests in a number of companies. He is listed as the General Director of the defunct Orly company (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), and a participant or founder of six other defunct entities: Alyans-Stroykonstruktsiya (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), Beton-Stroykonstruktsiya (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), Krasivyy Gorod (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), Primaris (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), Stroyimpuls DSK-3 (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated), and Stroymetallkonstruktsiya Severo-Zapad (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated). Vatanin is registered as participant or founder of one company still in operation: Koptos, whose main form of activity is listed as trading automobiles and light transport vehicles (Unified State Register of Legal Persons, undated). Vatanin’s extensive involvement in company registrations adds credence to the claim that he could exercise control over some of the shell companies that form part of the Prigozhin empire.

Vatanin’s biography: The road to Wagner

Professional background

VChK-OGPU reports that Vatanin is a former police officer for the Main Directorate of the Interior Ministry for St Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast. He worked in the criminal investigations department and headed the public security police department for St Petersburg’s Nevskiy Rayon and Leningrad Oblast’s Volkhovskiy Rayon (Telegram, 2023).

Vatanin within Wagner

VChK-OGPU claims Vatanin joined Wagner in early 2023, having been recommended to Yevgeniy Prigozhin by Aleksandr Smirnov, a former head of the St Petersburg criminal police and later deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Vatanin started out as a security advisor to Prigozhin, but was swiftly elevated, in May 2023, to the role of head of security for Wagner (Telegram, 2023).

Digital Vatanin: Private profiles and posing pictures

An Instagram profile with the username “kop_mik” uses a profile picture with tattoos matching widely circulated photos of Vatanin. The profile had 320 posts and 42 followers but is marked private (Telegram, 2023). A “Mikhail Vatanin” profile on VK (https://vk.com/id7808696) is also marked private, but associated photos similarly match Vatanin’s. Posts harvested by social media aggregators mostly consist of photos of a muscular Vatanin posing, but allow for him to be identified by his extensive tattoos on his arms (Botsman, undated).

International response: Vatanin not yet on the sanctions radar

Vatanin has not been sanctioned by Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, or the European Union – despite his seniority within Wagner. This is likely a consequence of the negligible media attention that he has attracted.

However, Vatanin has occupied a formal position within Wagner, meaning there is little reason for him not to be included under sanctions regimes. Moreover, the number of current and historical business interests that he has maintained suggest that he may possess assets that are more vulnerable to sanctions than other Wagner actors – although the extent of this vulnerability and its potential to influence Vatanin’s future activities should not be exaggerated.