‘Just a simple artilleryman, knee-deep in shit’: Prigozhin claims Putin spokesman Peskov’s son served in Wagner Group ‘manning an Uragan’

Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin claims that the son of Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov served in the ranks of his “private military company.”

“Of all my acquaintances,” Prigozhin said,

just one person, Dmitry Peskov, once reputed to be a total liberal, asked me about his son, who had spent some of his life in America, or maybe England… He came to me saying: “Why don’t you take him, just as a simple artilleryman.” And the guy served like anybody else. Just a simple artilleryman, knee-deep in mud and shit, manning an Uragan. Very few people know about this.

Prigozhin did’t name the Kremlin scion who supposedly served as a Wagner mercenary, but his story seems to be alluding to Nikolay Choles, Peskov’s son who bears his stepfather’s name and has lived in the U.K. for 10 years, returning to Russia around 2011–2012 after spending a year in a British prison for assault and robbery.

In September 2022, the Navalny associate Dmitry Nizovtsev was able to reach Choles on the phone. Impersonating a draft officer, he demanded to know whether Choles was prepared to go to war in Ukraine. Choles declined to report to the draft office but assured Nizovtsev: “If I have to defend the motherland, don’t worry, I’ll be there.” When pressed for a more definite answer, Choles said he’d deal with the issue “on a different level.”

Peskov later confirmed that Nizovtsev had been speaking with his son, but claimed that the “recording” had been edited in a way that distorted the conversation. In reality, the call had been live-streamed.

When contacted by Meduza for clarifications about his son’s service in Wagner Group, Dmitry Peskov read the message but didn’t reply.