Russian military, during which the platoon's commander was wounded. Several PMCs were killed during the clashes. The battle for Debaltseve ended in a decisive victory over Ukrainian forces. According to a Wagner PMC, Dmitry Utkin himself was wounded during the deployment to Ukraine, getting a splinter in his liver. Following the end of major combat operations, the PMCs were reportedly given the assignment to kill dissident pro-Russian commanders that were acting in a rebellious manner, according to the Russian nationalist internet media outlet and the SBU. According to Sputnik and Pogrom, in one raid, they killed more than 10 militia fighters. In another operation in early January 2015, the PMCs disarmed without any loss of life the Odessa brigade of the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), after surrounding their base in Krasnodon with the support of tanks and artillery, and demanding the separatists disarm and return to their homes. Killings of Donbas field commanders According to the SBU and the Russian media, Wagner also forced the reorganization and disarmament of Russian Cossack and other formations. The PMCs acted mostly in the LPR, for whose authorities they reportedly conducted four political killings of separatist commanders such as Alexey Mozgovoy, Pavel Dremov, Alexander Bednov and others. The killed commanders were in a conflict with the LPR's president, Igor Plotnitsky. The LPR accused Ukraine of committing the assassinations, while unit members of the commanders believed it was the LPR authorities who were behind the killings. In late November 2017, the Ukrainian SBU published what they said were intercepted audio recordings that proved a direct link between Dmitry Utkin and Igor Kornet, the Interior Minister of the LPR, who was said to have personally led the initiative of eliminating dissident commanders. In early June 2018, the SBU also published telephone conversations between Utkin and Igor Plotnitsky from January 2015, as well as conversations between Utkin and Russian GRU officer Oleg Ivannikov, who was using the pseudonym Andrei Ivanovich. Ivannikov, according to a Wagner PMC, supervised both their forces, as well as that of the LPR separatists, during the fighting in 2014 and 2015. Wagner left Ukraine and returned to Russia in autumn of 2015, with the start of the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War. LPR power struggle (2017) In late November 2017, a power struggle erupted in the separatist Luhansk People's Republic in Eastern Ukraine between LPR President Igor Plotnitsky and the