Deserter’s great escape across one of world’s toughest borders
A RUSSIAN mercenary commander fled from his homeland into Norway by creeping past border watchtowers, dodging rifle fire and scrambling away from tracker dogs.
Andrei Medvedev claimed that at about 2am on Friday he climbed two barbed wire fences guarding the 123-mile long Russia-norway border in the Arctic, and then ran across the frozen Pasvik river.
The former Wagner unit commander said: “I heard dogs barking behind me, the spotlights came on and shots were fired at me. I just ran towards the forest.”
This frozen wasteland is where Russia and Nato face off and is one of the most heavily guarded areas in the world. Watchtowers equipped with searchlights stud the border. Armed guards with dogs mount regular patrols.
Medvedev said Russian border guards tracked his footprints as far as they could go before setting a dog after him. He said: “I ran towards the first lights of houses that I could see, maybe two or two-and-a-half kilometres away. I just ran and ran and ran. I was afraid to look around and see a dog but, as I understand, it got confused and lost.”
When Medvedev reached the houses, he banged on the first door he came to and begged for help. He added: “I am so grateful to be here, so grateful to all the people who helped me.”
The notorious Wagner group recruits heavily from Russian prisons but Medvedev, a petty criminal and thief, signed up to fight in July when he was out of prison. His contract was only for four months but when it expired he was told that he had to stay on.
Instead, with the help of fighters in his unit, Medvedev escaped. He went into hiding in Russia and released a video in December exposing Wagner’s brutality. But Medvedev also knew his luck would run out. Wagner operates a special unit called Myod, or “honey” in English, whose job it is to track down deserters and then impose Wagnerstyle justice.
“I was in great danger,” he said in the interview with the Gulagu.net human rights group from a migrant detention centre in Oslo. “If they had captured me, they would have killed me, or even worse.”
Medvedev has first-hand knowledge of this. He was the commander of a Wagner unit that fought around Bakhmut in the Donbas region.
One of the fighters under his command was Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former convict who deserted.
In November, Nuzhin was handed back to Wagner in a prisoner exchange. He was then murdered by a Wagner mercenary, who smashed his head with a sledgehammer.
Wagner, which used to operate mainly in Syria and Africa, has gained notoriety this year after it recruited thousands of convicts from prisons and sent them to Ukraine to support the Russian invasion.
Like the regular army, Wagner has suffered major casualties and military bloggers said it will have to launch another prison recruitment drive to plug gaps.
One man who is keen to sign up is Mikhail Popkov, nicknamed the “Angarsk Maniac”. As a policeman and a security guard in Siberia and far-eastern Russia, he raped and killed about 83 women between 1998 and 2010.
“I would not hesitate to join,” he told Russian TV on yesterday. “Even though I have been in prison for 10 years now I think it would be quite easy to pick up.”