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Andrei Medvedev, former Wagner Group mercenary and commander of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a convict-turned-soldier brutally murdered with a sledgehammer last November, has crossed Russia's border with Norway and applied for asylum. Medvedev confirmed that he is now in Oslo to The Insider.
Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the Gulagu.net project, earlier reported that Medvedev had managed to cross the Norwegian border.
“Another evacuation has been successfully completed. This wasn’t even an evacuation, but an illegal border crossing and escape from Russia under the barking of guard dogs and shots in the back from FSB border service officers,” Osechkin wrote.
According to Osechkin, Medvedev crossed the border near the settlement of Nickel in Russia's Murmansk region and applied for asylum once he had reached Norway.
On January 13, the Norwegian police confirmed that the Russian citizen had crossed the border with Norway on the night from Thursday to Friday, reported NRK. He was detained near the village of Skrøytnes in the Pasvikdalen Valley.
“The man was detained by a Norwegian Armed Forces border patrol and the police. He has applied for asylum in Norway. We are now working to identify the man and are interviewing him,” Police Chief of Staff Tarjei Sirma-Tellefsen said in a press release.
Medvedev earlier told The Insider that he knows of ten cases when the Wagner Group executed mercenaries who refused to take part in combat. According to him, he was personally present at several of the executions.
To Medvedev’s knowledge, two of the ten executed mercenaries were not former prisoners. Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was killed with a sledgehammer, served in Medvedev's unit.
Medvedev was on the run with the Wagner PMC after him, he told The Insider. Medvedev claims that he has a video of mercenaries being executed in Alchevsk [in the Luhansk region] and if anything happens to him, this video will be published online. The video depicts two prisoners being executed for refusing to fight, Medvedev claims.
According to Osechkin, when Medvedev escaped, all those who fought with him were detained.
Yevgeny Nuzhin was a convicted murderer who signed a contract with the Wagner PMC and went to fight in Ukraine. Soon after he arrived on the front line, Nuzhin surrendered and gave several interviews, where he claimed that he did not support the war and wanted to stay in Ukraine. On November 13, a video of Nuzhin being executed with a sledgehammer was circulated on social media. Reports later revealed that Nuzhin was exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war and handed over to the Wagner Group, who carried out the execution.