‘This injustice has scorched us’

Kirill Radchenko was killed in Central African Republic while making a film about Wagner Group. Five years later, his father speaks about the struggle to bring the Russian justice system into motion.

Five years ago, Kirill Radchenko, a cameraman specializing in military documentaries, traveled to Central African Republic, together with filmmaker Alexander Rastorguev and journalist Orkhan Jemal. The three of them were planning to make a documentary about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and what Russian mercenaries were doing in the region. Just three days into their trip, the entire crew was killed, having never made it to the gold mining site linked to Prigozhin. Five years later, their murder remains unsolved. Radchenko’s bereaved parents believe this is due to Prigozhin’s powerful connections, which prevent law enforcement from prosecuting the case. Lilia Yapparova spoke with the cinematographer’s father, Alexander Radchenko, for the independent media cooperative Bereg. With Bereg’s permission, Meduza has translated Radchenko’s recollections of his son, his professional choices, and the two surviving parents’ disillusionment with the Russian justice system following Kirill’s death. In our translation, Radchenko’s remarks have been edited lightly for clarity.

‘We gave him lots of freedom’

Kirill was a bookish child, he read a lot. We watched him grow, wondering how it would all turn out, and gave him lots of freedom. In 1987, I was sent to work as an engineer at the Sierra Leone office of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries. Kirill was two years old when we got there and four when we returned. He didn’t remember much of our time in Africa, but we’d often go through the pictures with him, rekindling some of the episodes of our life there.

One of my colleagues had to leave Sierra Leone before we did. He asked us to care for his German shepherd pup, Rada. Kirill spent a lot of time with her, teaching her different commands. Once, we heard a cry and ran to see what happened. And there was Kirill with a clump of Rada’s fur in his teeth: he tried to bite her when she did something wrong. Another time we heard loud barking, and it turned out the dog was defending our son from a snake. Later, we’d often show him pictures of him and Rada together. And so, he remained interested in Africa, both the continent and the people.

‘Their idea of rebellion’

My father served in the military, and my mother was, in her final years, in charge of a garrison recreation center in Astrakhan. They hosted poetry and prose readings, and sometimes screened films. My mom would find out about upcoming screenings and tell Kirill and his older brother Roman, so bit by bit they got into those films. They were all carefully selected, serious films, and this struck a chord with the boys.

In school, Kirill and Roman would play hooky to go to screenings at the Moscow Film Museum. That was their idea of rebellion. Roman was by then working at the museum, and he’d take his brother to screenings without a ticket. So Kirill could watch anything he liked.

He finished high school at 16. I guess it was hard for him to decide on a profession. He enrolled at MISiS, but dropped out after three years. Then he worked in a bank, and later as courier and a waiter. While at a restaurant, he met a journalism student who was dabbling in filmmaking and invited Kirill to make a film about the Russian borzoi dogs. They even travelled to kennels in Saratov, and it was for that trip that we bought Kirill a video camera. But they never got around to editing that project, because they got busy with something else. At one point they started making a film based on Stefan Zweig’s novella Fear. They filled our summer cottage with painted plywood sets — it was a whole saga.

Kirill often made use of our African souvenirs when shooting something. Masks, an ivory carving of a woman carrying a pitcher on her head, a wooden carving of an evil spirit… All of them stood around our home. For a while, he was obsessed with finding an idea for a film. But we kept our ideas to ourselves. Kirill had to “ripen” on his own.

‘He’d made up his mind’

It was probably unrequited love that made Kirill take off for Syria. He’d been courting a classmate of his, but the relationship didn’t work out. For several years, he kept it all inside, without any outward drama, but it did leave a mark on his worldview. (She’s a nice person. After his death, she organized an exhibition of his photos at their school. We chose 30 photographs, and another classmate of theirs printed them for the show.)

He was also baffled by one of his first close encounters with the Russian reality. After the 2013 mayoral election in Moscow, a rally in support of Navalny took place on Tverskaya Street. The police rounded up Kirill, who’d come just to film it. Later, I read the police report and it was simply dismaying: it said that Kirill had “accosted pedestrians, trying to talk to them about socio-political subjects.” It’s completely out of character for Kirill to “accost” anybody.

It was around that time that he said he wanted to become a war correspondent and go to Ukraine. My wife and I were surprised. I tried to talk him out of it. He first mentioned this idea in 2015–2016, in connection with a possible assignment with ANNA-News. That time, Kirill Romanovsky talked him out of it. They’d met through some mutual friends, and at the time Kirill told me only that he’d “met this guy and he says it’s best not to do it.”

But in the end Kirill did go to Syria, on an ANNA-News assignment. He didn’t yet realize where he was going: that it wasn’t going to be drumrolls and flying banners, but instead death, dirt, blood, wounds, and betrayal. He spent two weeks getting ready, and my wife and I spent those same two weeks trying to talk him out of it. But in the end, we realized that he’d made up his mind and this was going to be his vocation. His work would involve real danger from now on.

Later, he didn’t talk much about Syria, maybe because my wife and I had been so opposed to that trip. He’d bring back lots of photos, but they were mostly the peaceful kind: children, sometimes Syrian fighters, but it was all about the civilian population’s hardships from the war. But sometimes they got into real trouble. In our home archive, there’s a video that looks like amateur footage: the backs of people running, the camera jumping, explosions blasting somewhere behind. And his voice says: “Good thing we got out of there.”

If Kirill told us something, it wasn’t in many words. I guess, he got used to communicating wordlessly through the camera. He couldn’t stand voiceover in documentaries.

Once, he came back from Syria with a bandaged arm. He’d been cut up by some shrapnel, but he just waved us off saying it was nothing. Each time he came back, we hoped that he wouldn’t go there again. And every time he’d just pack up and go.

But in late 2017 or early 2018, he returned from Syria looking tired. He had seen a young kid die before his eyes. An ISIS fighter, maybe 15 years old, was critically wounded, and they just abandoned him to die on his own. My son witnessed the death of this near-child, who’d seen nothing in his life apart from a machine gun.

‘Prigozhin seemed a repulsive figure’

In March 2018, he got an opportunity to go to Chechnya, to work as a monitor in the presidential election. I think that’s when he met Alexander Rastorguev, whose films he’d earlier found interesting. Sometimes he’d bring them home. My wife and I once tried to watch one of them, but it didn’t grip us.

Their monitoring group was able to detect a “carousel voting” scheme and to stop it. They spotted some groups of women who would be entered into a separate voter list at the Grozny polling stations. So the guys asked them to show their IDs and explain where they were from. And those women were all picked up and driven off-site. Around 10 of the guys who traveled with Kirill to Chechnya later came to his funeral. That’s when we learned about this episode.

Kirill first told us about going to Central Africa with Rastorguev and Jemal in April 2018. At first, they talked about going to Syria, but then their plans changed. Someone said, “How about CAR?” It was all pretty vague at first, so we didn’t even take it seriously, especially since Kirill had told us that Rastorguev was considering several candidates for the cameraman’s job.

But we started to google what sort of country this was and what was happening there. We found out there had been a bloody civil war there in 2013, and that there had been several regimes since. And also that there was rampant crime. We read that things were a bit calmer in the capital, and Kirill himself tried to reassure us. “We’ll just stay at the hotel and wait till we have an interview appointment. We’ll take some pictures. Nothing’s gonna happen to us.”

At some point, he started getting vaccinated, and we realized we wouldn’t be able to talk him out of it. So we decided to help him in his preparations and asked him to get in touch with my sister, an infectious diseases specialist. “Can you call your Aunt Tanya? She’ll tell you what medications to bring, just in case.”

I guess he wanted to revive his childhood memories of Africa and those early emotions.

I knew about the aims of that project, but had little idea of how they were going to do it. We also knew who Prigozhin was. My colleagues, my older son Roman, and Kirill himself all told me about him. They described him as a restauranteur running a troll farm. We read Novaya Gazeta at home, and Prigozhin seemed a repulsive figure, but we knew more about his troll farm than his private military company (PMC). I was also skeptical about a restauranteur’s ability to pack several hundred “waiters” off to Africa. Something about it seemed unusual. And we had no idea that behind it all was the state itself. All we had were vague inklings.

His last days before the trip were hectic, and in between errands we’d talk about things in spurts and starts. I asked him why he had picked such a dangerous subject. “What’s so dangerous about it” he said. “We’re traveling unarmed, to meet with other Russians. How can they be a danger to us, to their fellow Russian citizens?” And since mercenaries are illegal in Russia, he believed the state was also on their side.

A couple days before my son left, he said: “There’s also a guy helping us, the same guy who talked me out of going to Ukraine a while ago. He doesn’t seem a bad person,” Kirill added, “but still, he’s a RIA FAN guy.” He was apprehensive about Romanovsky, since RIA FAN was connected to Prigozhin, just like the PMC.

‘The unthinkable had happened’

I learned about Kirill’s death from my older son Roman. When he called, I just handed the receiver to his mom, as usual, thinking he was calling her. But it turned out that he wanted to talk to me. He said, “Dad, we’re going to need your help.” And I realized that something had happened. Then he said, “Kirill is dead. He was shot. It’s in the news. I saw the same thing being reported on two channels.”

I sensed, somehow, that this information had to be true. My wife and I flipped through the channels. One by one, they were confirming the news. It became clear that this was it. He was beyond return. The unthinkable had happened. My younger son was dead.

Days after this happened, someone gave me Maria Zakharova’s phone number. She spoke curtly, as if fed up with all the phone calls. When I tried to ask her a question, she’d interrupt with a “No, just listen to what I’m going to say.” And she’d recite all the information she had for me in a single breath.

We got the initial information from Zakharova. As for the means by which death had been inflicted — it’s so hard to speak about these things — we had no idea. Afterwards, the forensic report said that signs of torture had been discovered. My son’s knee had been shot through and completely disjointed; he had gunshot wounds in his shin and thigh. His body had strangulation marks and bruises on it. We realized they might have been tortured, and that they didn’t die immediately.

‘Serious people’

When the detective first called, he spoke to me very brusquely. “You’re being summoned to the Investigative Committee.” I went there, and it gave me the impression that serious people were working on the case, and they were going to show and tell us everything. We trusted our law enforcement too. Naive of me.

We suspected right away that the PMC had to be involved in the murder. My son’s project, after all, was about Wagner Group, and done in consultation with Prigozhin employee Kirill Romanovsky. This possibility was widely discussed, and I was expecting that at any moment raids would begin at Prigozhin-linked organizations, and that the detectives would take energetic measures! But none of it materialized.

Prosecuting a misdemeanor case can sometimes involve 20 searches. Not one search was conducted in our case. They were clearly protecting the PMC. That’s how we realized that some higher interests were involved, and that certain mechanisms were keeping the investigation from moving forward, to the point that the detectives didn’t mind looking like incompetents in our eyes.

It became clear there would be no investigation. Instead, the Investigative Committee took to turning down our requests to question this or that particular witness, including several Russian nationals connected to Prigozhin’s enterprises, who were in Central African Republic at the time of the murder.

We’ve had no contact with the Investigative Committee for the past two years, and they’re avoiding us too. Especially the new detective, assigned some 18 months ago. I sent him a letter requesting a personal meeting, and he replied to me that such “measures” were “out of scope.”

When Dossier Center released its investigation, we immediately requested that the investigators review the billing records mentioned in the Dossier report. But we still don’t know whether anyone is pursuing it. Probably not.

We made it our goal to verify the Dossier report to the greatest extent possible. We’ve tried to talk to all the producers who worked on the film, and to read all the correspondence they were willing to share with us. And everything we learned confirmed Dossier’s earlier findings.

‘Our own investigation’

In effect, we were conducting our own investigation. We looked for witnesses. We scrupulously monitored the Central African press, printing and collating articles. I analyzed the film producers’ correspondence with “Martin,” the fixer who was supposedly going to help the film crew.

By fall, it became apparent we were dealing with a treacherous murder involving Romanovsky and the people who stood behind him. We couldn’t grasp Romanovsky’s exact role and wanted to clarify it, so we talked about him and the nuances of his behavior with every person we could reach. And we developed an impression that he wasn’t just a journalist. His hubris and aplomb singled him out as someone acting like a proxy for someone much more powerful. He appeared to be an agent performing secret functions for Prigozhin’s structures.

We regretted Romanovsky’s death in January 2023 for two reasons. First, we felt sorry for his family and even for the young man, who had been drawn into this unsavory game, this provocation to lure our guys to CAR. We also regretted the loss of such an important witness. Romanovsky took secrets with him to his grave. But not all of them. There are still other witnesses and documents that may lead towards his accomplices, who are still at large.

During his funeral, Romanovsky’s coffin was draped in the Wagner flag, and decorations he’d received from the PMC were also on display. And do you remember what Prigozhin said when Romanovsky died? “Kirill was an outstanding man who walked with Wagner Group practically from the start. He knew a great deal.” When I heard those words about his “knowing a great deal,” I mentally marked them in italics.

When Prigozhin launched his “march of justice” on Moscow, I had a feeble hope that this development might turn the tables and the investigation would reconsider the evidence pointing to Prigozhin and his Wagner Group. And that the crime would finally be solved. But even that feeble hope is now gone. Whatever the president’s motives, he’s already pardoned Prigozhin, whose charges have been cleared, and even the road back to Russia is open to him. He’s still very much afloat.

I heard that the Investigative Committee had recently queried the Central African Prosecutor General about the status of the investigation there. But it seems to have been for the sake of publicity ahead of the Russia–Africa summit, so that our leader wouldn’t have to face awkward questions from journalists.

Recent events have exposed the extent of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s connections among the highest officials and top generals in the country. And of course, with such connections, there’s nothing the Investigative Committee will do without explicit orders from the head of state.

‘The injustice thrust upon us’

Kirill’s murder was a monstrous blow to us, and we cannot recover from it. My wife Tatyana has been diagnosed with cancer. She had surgery a year ago, and it was a matter of life and death. That my wife became ill is definitely one of the consequences. Both me and my wife are retired, but we continue our investigation. And we will definitely use this information, absolutely definitely. We’re just waiting for the right circumstances. Because it’s impossible to forgive something like this.

As for this injustice that has been thrust on us, it’s very difficult to cope with. It has simply crushed us, bent us down low to the ground. It has scorched us. I don’t know how much more we can bear.

Interview by Lilia Yapparova for Bereg. Translated by Anna Razumnaya.

Photos: Radchenko family papers, Dominique Derda / AFP / Scanpix / LETA, Zohra Bensemra/ Reuters / Scanpix / LETA, George Ourfalian / AFP / Scanpix / LETA, Corbeau News Centrafrique / Wikimedia Commons, Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA, Barbara Debout / AFP / Scanpix / LETA, Maxim Shemetov / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA, Dossier Center, Kirill Romanovsky’s Facebook page, Sergey Ilnitsky / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA, Sergey Bobylyov / TASS Host Photo Agency / AP / Scanpix / LETA