A mercenary who took part in the attempted mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin says he and his fellow fighters “didn’t have a clue” what was going on.
In the space of just 24 hours, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, staged an insurrection, sending troops into the southern city of Rostov, then further on towards Moscow.
Wagner fighters rarely talk to the media, but BBC Russian spoke to a junior commander who found himself in the middle of the action.
Gleb – not his real name – had previously been involved in the fighting for the symbolic town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. As the mutiny began, he was resting with his unit in barracks in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region.
Early in the morning on 23 June, they got the call to join a column of Wagner fighters leaving Ukraine. The order came from a Wagner commander who Gleb is reluctant to name for security reasons, but who was acting on orders from Prigozhin and the Wagner Command Council.
“It’s a full deployment,” he was told. “We’re forming a column, let’s move out.”
Gleb says no one was told where the column was heading, but he was surprised when he realised they were moving away from the frontline.
The Wagner fighters encountered absolutely no resistance, he says, as they crossed the Russian border into the Rostov region.
“I didn’t see any border guards,” he recalls. “But the traffic police saluted us along the way.”
Channels closely associated with Wagner on the messaging app Telegram later claimed that border guards at the Bugayevka checkpoint had laid down their weapons as the Wagner fighters arrived.
These channels shared a photo purportedly from the scene showing two dozen unarmed individuals in camouflage.
As they approached Rostov-on-Don, the fighters were given orders to surround all the law enforcement agency buildings in the city and to occupy the military airport. Gleb’s unit was told to take control of the regional offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
As they approached the building it appeared to be completely locked and empty. They flew a drone overhead to check for any signs of life.
Eventually, after half an hour, a door opened and two people came out onto the street.
“They said, ‘Guys, let’s make a deal’,” Gleb recounts. “I said, ‘What’s there to make a deal about? This is our city’.
“So we just agreed that we would leave each other alone. They came out to smoke from time to time.”
Rostov journalists have reported a similar situation with many government buildings in and around the city. The Wagner fighters would first fly drones over them and then surround them. No one was allowed to leave, but delivery couriers were allowed in with food.
No explanation
While all this was going on Wagner leader Prigozhin was at the Russian army’s Southern Military District headquarters meeting Russia’s Deputy Defence Minister, Lt Gen Yunus-bek Yevkurov, and the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lt Gen Vladimir Alexeyev.
Prigozhin demanded that they hand over the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.
At the same time as Prigozhin was in his meeting, there was another column of Wagner fighters on the move.
Gleb confirms media reports that this column was led by Wagner founder Dmitry Utkin, a former special forces officer who is rarely seen in public.
This column was on the main highway towards Voronezh, and apparently bound for Moscow, he says.
So did Gleb know the plan – what Prigozhin was intending or planning to do?
He swears as he bluntly says he didn’t have a clue. “We learned what was happening from Telegram, just like you did.”
As the day went on, pictures of what was happening in Rostov were beamed around the world. People were surprised to see local residents and even local journalists apparently smiling and chatting to some of the normally tight-lipped Wagner fighters occupying their city.
“It was the ex-cons,” says Gleb, referring to the many serving prisoners or convicts conscripted into Wagner last year. “Nobody told them not to, nobody cares about them.”
For established fighters like Gleb, who were hired long before the war in Ukraine, the rules are much more clearly understood.
He told the BBC that back in the spring, they had been told by the senior command that anyone who spoke to the media would be “nullified”, ie killed. Several former Wagner fighters have told us the same thing.
On the evening of 24 June, Gleb was contacted by one of his superiors and told, without any explanation, that he and his unit should now return to base in Luhansk.
As they made their way back to the barracks, they were following the news on Telegram.
They read that criminal charges had been initiated against Prigozhin, then dropped, and that he was to move to Belarus.
They then read that Wаgner fighters would not be held accountable for their role in the mutiny because of their “combat merits”, according to President Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
For Gleb and his unit, their future is now unclear. They’ve been told to stay in their barracks in Luhansk and await further orders.
Their hosts, authorities of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, pro-Russian separatist militants in eastern Ukraine, are keen to find out more about their future plans and what will happen to their equipment and ammunition, he says.
When asked why he doesn’t leave Wagner, Gleb has a simple answer: “My contract hasn’t expired yet.”
