It’s been a busy few days for a formerly obscure Russian blogger and veteran of Moscow’s war on Ukraine who calls himself Aleksandr Lunin.
On June 25, he posted a video in Instagram in which he described what he called widespread torture of soldiers in the war zone by their own officers and demanded a live, on-air meeting with President Vladimir Putin and warned that if it did not take place soon, “the army will turn its weapons against the Kremlin.”
He said he was merely a messenger relaying the position of unnamed military and security officials who had met with him a day earlier -- though he provided no evidence of this claim. The post quickly received millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
A day later, he changed his tune.
In a video posted early on June 26 -- in which virtually every other word is a crude expletive and in which at one point he spits to punctuate his derisive remarks -- Lunin asserted that his statements had been twisted.
Clearly contradicting his previous statements, he claimed he had not threatened a military mutiny, saying that if officers or soldiers wanted to stage a rebellion, they would do so quietly and not come to him and ask him to issue a warning.
He also appeared to withdraw his demand for an on-air meeting with Putin, but said he would try to make the Russian leader aware of the alleged abuse of soldiers who resist “suicidal” orders or refuse to pay their superiors bribes to avoid being sent into battle.
Signs Of Fatigue
The episode came amid growing signs of fatigue among Russians over the war, which Western intelligence agencies estimate has killed more than half a million Russian soldiers.
In the fifth year of a full-scale invasion that Putin expected would bring Ukraine to its knees within weeks, there is increasingly public debate among rival camps in the elite about whether to halt the fighting or escalate. Tension over the war is compounded by deepening economic troubles, and recent polls have shown a decline in Putin's approval ratings.
The posts came almost exactly three years after Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin led an abortive mutiny in which Russian troops marched toward Moscow in what was seen as the biggest challenge to Putin over a quarter-century in power. Two months after he abruptly called off the advance, Prigozhin was killed in a plane explosion that is widely believed to have been an assassination.
Ill-treatment of ordinary troops and disregard for their lives among commanders and top brass who send them into bloody “meat-grinder” offensives in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region were central to the complaints aired by Prigozhin, who stressed that he was challenging senior military figures such as then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, not Putin himself.
'Idiotic, Suicidal Orders'
In the video posted on social media on June 25, Lunin asserted that “dozens, hundreds, thousands of our soldiers are rotting in [pits], thrown there by their own commanders. Just sitting, rotting, being tortured and abused by what their own ranks call the Gestapo. Why? For refusing to follow idiotic, suicidal orders. For refusing to hand over their own money. And in the end they are zeroed out, listed as missing in action.”
In the June 26 post he said that he has received “thousands of messages, with video confirmation” of abuse.
He did not provide any evidence, but there have been previous reports and allegations of soldiers being punished and abused -- sometimes held in cellars, pits, or crude lockups -- for refusing to fight at the front line. There have also been reports of officers demanding money from soldiers, in some cases in exchange for being held back from dangerous offensives or being handed relatively safe roles.
Asked about Lunin’s remarks at a regular conference call with reporters, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin was aware “that such an appeal exists” but did not want to comment before seeing it. Peskov said it sounded like it was formulated in a “strange” way, and he did not make it clear whether the Kremlin was aware of the June 26 post.
It was not the first time a Russian has made what seem to be threats or criticism of Putin on social media and then sought to clarify that they were merely trying to help him get accurate information, suggesting that those around him are misleading him.
Lunin, who lives in the Voronezh region in western Russia, could not be reached for comment.
According to the Russian-language outlet Agentstvo, he joined a Russian volunteer battalion in a Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine in 2023, serving as sniper and then a commander, and his last name until that year was Pustovalov. He told Agentstvo he had not been fighting since he was “kicked off” the front in 2025.
Agentstvo also quoted him as saying three people had come to him in a black SUV on June 24 -- one from the Interior Ministry and one, or possibly two, from the Defense Ministry. He also said he met with an official from the Voronezh regional administration on June 25, the agency reported.
