One shot to the rim and one to the barrel. The Kremlin praises Wagner’s mercenaries, protagonists of the Battle of Soledar, after the promotion of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s nemesis Aleksandr Lapin to chief of staff of the ground forces in recent days. The spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, also wanted to deny the tensions between the mercenaries and other volunteers and the regulars, which have been observed for some time and have resurfaced in recent days.
“Everyone is fighting for a common cause, their homeland,” and the conflict between Prigozhin and the Defense Ministry “exists only in the media,” Peskov said, pretending to forget Prigozhin’s statements of last October and a few days ago. “The country needs to know and knows who its heroes are,” he added, citing mercenaries and soldiers, “they will all be remembered forever”.
“Sometimes our friends behave in a way that we don’t need enemies,” the rep added. Prigozhin said a few days ago that others, namely the military, “always try to steal victory from the mercenaries”. The MoD then corrected its course and issued a statement praising the “brave action” of the Wagner fighters at Soledar, where the MoD first mentioned the group. An implicit request from the Kremlin to everyone to wash their dirty clothes at home.
Meanwhile, Andriy Medvedev, a former commander of the Wagner mercenary group, has asked for political asylum in Norway and offered to testify against its founder, oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, close to the Russian president. According to information from the Russian human rights organization Gulagu, Medvedev illegally crossed the Norwegian border in the Murmansk region from Russia before being transferred to the capital Oslo, where he was held in a migrant center.
Medvedev’s intention is to testify against Prigozhin, who is considered one of the Russian president’s closest men, so much so that he is known as “Putin’s chef” due to the large number of restaurants and catering companies that serve the Kremlin’s dinners . In early July 2022, Ukrinform reports, Medvedev had signed a four-month contract with the Wagner group before being sent to the Lugansk region, where he was appointed commander of one of the attack teams.