87-year-old man assaulted on Moscow bus for allegedly criticising Wagner Group

Police in Moscow are investigating two men for suspected “hooliganism” after they were filmed attacking an elderly man on a bus who they later claimed had criticised the Wagner mercenary organisation, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported on Friday.

Footage shared by Russian civil liberties organisation OVD-Info showed one man elbowing 87-year-old Dmitry Grinchy in the torso and aggressively twisting his arms while another calls him a “fucking fascist” and pushes aside a woman who attempts to intervene.

The two men can then be seen dragging Grinchy off the bus and taking him to police officers on Moscow’s central Lubyanka Square, where all three were detained. Grinchy was subsequently released without charge and filed a complaint against his two assailants, OVD-Info said.

Grinchy’s lawyer Oscar Cherdzhiev told Moscow news website MSK1 that his client had been taking the bus to hospital when he was assaulted and had lost a hearing aid worth 100,000 rubles (€1,000) in the attack.

One of the men was filmed telling police on the square that Grinchy had called Wagner Group members “murderers of women and children” as the bus passed a wall used to commemorate mercenaries who died in combat while fighting for Wagner.

Grinchy later denied that he had criticised the group, telling Novaya Europe journalist Ilya Azar that he had “not shamed anyone” while passing the memorial and that he had simply been recalling how all of his relatives had been shot in 1937.

When Grinchy was a child, his father Pavel was convicted of espionage, labelled an “enemy of the people” by the Soviet authorities and shot during Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938. He wasn’t rehabilitated until 1966.

“I just regret that I was born in a country where people are not considered people”, Grinchy told Azar, adding that he was still in pain and having difficulty breathing following the assault by the two men, whom he described as a father and son.