The son of the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has claimed he served as an artilleryman with the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine for nearly six months.
In an interview with the pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Nikolai Peskov, 33, said: “It was my duty … I couldn’t sit to one side watching as friends and others went off there.”
He added that though it was his own decision to join Wagner, he did not know how to enlist, “so I had to turn to my dad … and he helped me with that”.
Asked about his father’s views of his service, Nikolai said: “He’s proud of me, I think. My father told me that I made the right decision.” Nikolai said he used a false ID so that other Wagner soldiers would not learn of his Kremlin connection.
In a call with journalists on Monday, Dmitry Peskov, a trusted ally of Vladimir Putin, said his son “took part in the special military operation,” but refused to go into detail.
“I would rather not talk about it any more, it has nothing to do with my work,” Dmitry Peskov added.
The Guardian was unable to verify Nikolai Peskov’s claim about serving with Wagner, whose troops have been engaged in intense fighting for months in Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
Vladimir Soloviev, a prominent state TV host, published a photograph that he said was taken in January in eastern Ukraine and showed a group of masked men, including, according to Soloviev, Nikolai Peskov.
Others have questioned Nikolai’s account. The independent Telegram channel VChK-OGPU said the car belonging to Nikolai Peskov received several speeding tickets in the period when he was supposedly fighting in Ukraine.
The Wagner chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said in a video posted on his telegram account that Peskov’s son underwent a three-week training course with Wagner before enlisting with the group as an artilleryman.
“When he left for Luhansk, it was necessary to expand the combined artillery battalion, and he was sent to join an Uragan [multiple rocket launcher] crew,” Prigozhin said, adding that he “showed courage and heroism, just like all the others”.
According to Prigozhin, Dmitry Peskov had asked him to “take Nikolai on as a simple artilleryman”.
Nikolai Peskov, known as Nikolai Choles, was born in 1990 and moved to Britain with his mother, Peskov’s first wife, during the 1990s and later took the surname of his British stepfather.
According to British court documents, in 2010 Nikolai was charged with robbery and causing actual bodily harm to an 18-year-old man in Milton Keynes. He moved back to Moscow in 2012 and got a job at the Kremlin’s English-language television station, RT.
In September 2022, two associates of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny prank-called Nikolai Peskov pretending to be a Russian military official. When asked to report to the military commissariat at 10am the next day, Nikolai said he would “obviously not” do so.
“You must understand it is not right for me to be there. I have to resolve this on a different level,” Nikolai Peskov is heard saying.
It remains unclear whether Nikolai’s reported decision to join the Wagner ranks was a move aimed to boost the Peskov family’s pro-war credentials or stemmed from a real desire to serve in Ukraine.
Nationalist pro-war commentators quickly welcomed the reports. “This is good news,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst and former Kremlin adviser.
“This will only improve relations between the Russian authorities and the patriotic Russian society,” Markov added.
Since the start of the war, many in the business and political elites have in private criticised the country’s faltering war in Ukraine, resulting in deep suspicion in the FSB about their loyalty.
Some of the discontents came to the surface when Ukrainian media published an alleged recording last month of a conversation between Farkhad Akhmedov, a Russian-Azerbaijani oligarch who is subject to western sanctions, and Iosif Prigozhin, a Kremlin-connected music producer whose wife performed at a pro-war concert alongside Putin last year. Iosif Prigozhin is not related to the warlord Evgeniy Prigozhin.
In the recording, the pair harshly criticised the war in Ukraine as well as Putin personally.
In a sign of growing pressure on the elites, the Financial Times reported that Russia’s security services had started to seize the passports of senior officials and state company executives to prevent overseas travel.
