Who was the Russian war blogger "Beliy" killed in the African desert?

When the leaders of the Wagner Group fell dead from the skies of Russia about a year ago, one of their main spokesmen-propagandists died a few days ago, 5,000 kilometers from home.

At the end of July, probably on July 27, in a battle in northern Mali (Africa) between Wagner's Russian mercenaries and rebel Tuaregs, war blogger Nikita Fedyanin (29 years old), nicknamed "Beliy" ("The White One"), was killed. His rise in the media sphere is of interest to Russian propaganda analysts, as Fedyanin's Telegram channel, called Gray Zone, was long known as one of the main conduits for messages from Wagner Group leaders Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin.

Gray Zone did not turn its back on these men even when they crashed with a plane after their failed mutiny attempt in August 2023. From the point of view of the current Russian authorities, such sympathies, even when expressed for the dead, are of rather dubious value. For example, the masthead of Gray Zone featured a photo gallery of medals and decorations attributed to Utkin.

Because of its prominent pro-Wagner stance and dissemination of information, Grey Zone also came to the attention of the BBC. In the summer of 2023, the BBC reported that the (unnamed) channel leader was known as "Beliy" or "500th" - 500 is military slang in Russia for a deserter, similar to how 200 means a casualty and 300 a wounded soldier.

Grey Zone has been operational since 2019. The channel began attracting more readers after the start of the war in Ukraine, eventually amassing close to half a million subscribers. Since the end of the first summer of the war, Grey Zone also began publishing Wagner recruitment ads. In November 2022, it was this channel that posted the infamous video showing the hacking to death of Yevgeny Nuzhin, declared a traitor by Wagner.

While other channels sympathetic to Wagner or Prigozhin went silent after the June 2023 mutiny attempt, Gray Zone continued to broadcast related material.

The last posting on Fedyanin's channel was a July 23 photo showing a group of armed soldiers dressed in camouflage gathered in front of a tactical armored vehicle in the desert: "Wagner Group attackers in front of Typhoon armored vehicle in one of the African countries of the Sahel," the blogger introduced.

Subsequent posts were likely to include images of battlefields in northern Mali and victories of Russian weapons. Instead, social networks were flooded with videos and photos of corpses of Wagner fighters strewn across the desert, including the recognizable face of Fedyanin himself.

The official Russian media reported the propagandist's death a day later, with TASS devoting some 30 lines to him. According to the agency, Fedyanin was in the conflict zone because he wanted to make a series of reports on the Malian army. However, the Russian channel RT reported that Fedyanin was in Mali to investigate rumors that anti-government rebels from that country were being sent to Ukraine for training, where they were allegedly being taught to operate attack drones.

The website osintbees.com, which covers the Ukrainian information war, indicates that Fedyanin was likely connected to Russian military intelligence, the GRU, as location data extracted from the website links him to the GRU's location at 76B on the Khoroshevskoye highway in Moscow. It is not entirely clear what role Fedyanin intended to play in Mali with the mercenaries; there could have been several.
Fedyanin had an outstanding debt of about 420,000 rubles in Russian enforcement proceedings.

Fedyanin's mother, Nina Ivanovna, visited him there and brought back to Russia bags of trophies and purchases, including crocodile skins.
According to the contract, Fedyanin could not leave Africa. About a week before the battle that led to the propagandist's death, Fedyanin warned his mother that he would be moving with his unit to another location and would be out of contact for some time.

"I didn't like his dangerous activities, but children don't ask," said Nina Ivanovna.