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The founder of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has announced that the son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov fought in Ukraine as part of the Wagner Group. Prigozhin made the claim during an interview published by war correspondent Alexander Simonov. According to Prigozhin, Peskov himself offered to send his son to the front line in Ukraine.
“Of all my acquaintances, one man – Dmitry Sergeevich Peskov, who at one time was lauded as a complete liberal – his son, who lived part of his life in America, I think, if I am not mistaken, or in England ... Came and said: 'Take him as a simple artilleryman.' By the way, he worked absolutely fine. A simple gunner, knee-deep in mud, shit, on the ‘Uragan’ [the BM-27 ‘Uragan’ multiple rocket launcher – The Insider]. Few people know about it,” Prigozhin said. He did not specify the name of the son sent to the front line.
Peskov's eldest son, Nikolai Choles [Nikolai Peskov sometimes uses his stepfather’s surname – The Insider], who lived in the UK for ten years, returned to Russia in 2011-2012.
In September 2022, Dmitry Nizovtsev, host of the YouTube show Popular Politics (“Populyarnaya Politika”), created by Alexei Navalny's supporters, called Peskov's son live on the air pretending to be a military officer, and told him that he had been called up to the army and must now report for a medical examination.
“You must understand, if you know that I am Mr. Peskov, how wrong it is for me to be there. In short, I’ll deal with it on another level,” Peskov's son answered at the time, adding that he had no plans to go to the military registration and enlistment office.
In the same conversation, Peskov requested that he shouldn’t be registered as a volunteer, claiming that he would act “as instructed by Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin].”