Saving Private Alexey

A Russian prisoner joins a private military company to follow his conscripted twin to Ukraine, but his brother dies and now the mercenary is missing

In September, a Russian prisoner named Alexey who had just a few months left on his sentence decided to sign a contract with the Wagner private military company (PMC) after learning that his twin brother, Konstantin, had been drafted to fight in Ukraine. Now Konstantin is dead, and the twins’ family is desperately lobbying the Wagner Group to return Alexey, who has been out of contact since early November. But their pleas are being ignored.

In September 2022, a 24-year-old resident of Russia’s Sverdlovsk region named Konstantin was drafted into the Russian army; soon after, he was sent to Ukraine. Konstantin’s twin brother, Alexey, who was serving a prison sentence in the city of Nizhny Tagil, decided to join the Wagner PMC and deploy to Ukraine after learning of his brother’s conscription, according to the Yekaterinburg-based news outlet E1.ru.

“Alexey was slated to be released from the penal colony in December, but he joined the PMC when he learned that Konstantin had been mobilized. He said, ‘Since my brother’s there, I’ll go, too.’ By the time we learned about it, he was already on his way to the special military operation,” the brothers’ sister, Alyona, told journalists.

According to Alyona, Konstantin stopped responding to her calls in October — less than a month after he was called up. Worried, the family reached out to their local military commissariat. They didn’t receive a response until December, when they were sent Konstantin’s death certificate. According to the document, Konstantin was killed on October 30 in Ukraine’s Luhansk region.

Konstantin was buried on December 16. On the day before his funeral, the family contacted Wagner PMC and requested that Alexey be allowed to travel home to attend his twin’s funeral. The request was denied.

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“Right now, we’re unable to find any information about Alexey. He has no means of communication, and Wagner isn’t telling us anything — we don’t even know if he’s still in one piece. We were told, ‘We can’t help you; he’s already started working. When his service is over, he’ll come home.’ He last called us himself in early November. We can’t lose him, too,” said Alyona.

The family is still lobbying for Alexey’s return. At their request, local authorities in their city contacted the All-Russia People's Front, a pro-Putin organization, and asked its representatives to relay the family’s appeal to the Wagner Group. “The guy is the family’s last [son] left. Purely out of human decency, of course, he needs to be returned, [or] there will be nothing left of this family,” said local official Sergey Tokarev.

According to E1.ru, the Wagner Group has already refused to send Alexey home, citing the fact that his “unit is on a combat mission, and there might not be any communication with him for up to two weeks.”