The son of the press secretary of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in an interview published on Saturday, said that he fought in Ukraine under the pseudonym of an artilleryman in the Wagner mercenary group, Komsomolska Pravda reports, Reuters reports.

Mykola Peskov, the 33-year-old son of Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov, told a private newspaper that he served in Ukraine, a rare example of the son of a high-ranking Russian official fighting in a war.

“It was on my initiative. I considered it my duty,” Peskov, whose father has been Putin’s press secretary since 2008, said in an interview.

“He’s proud of me, I think”

He stated that for almost six months he performed the contract under a fictitious name in order to hide his real identity.

He received the medal “For bravery”, writes the publication.

When asked how his father feels about his service, Mykola answered: “I think he is proud of me. My father told me that I made the right decision.”

His confirmation came after Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said the other day that Dmitry Peskov approached him and asked him to take his son as a shooter.

“Of all my acquaintances, only one person, Dmytro Peskov, who at one time had a reputation as an absolute liberal, sent his son. He came up to me and said: “Take him as a simple gunner,” Prigozhin said in a video posted on Telegram.

Mykola Peskov lived in Great Britain in the 1990s

Mykola Peskov was born in 1990 and lived in Great Britain for a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kommersant newspaper reports.

Then he returned to Russia and served in the Strategic Missile Forces from 2010 to 2012.

In 2022, an associate of imprisoned oppositionist Oleksii Navalny, who called himself a Russian military man, called Peskov Jr. and asked him to appear in the editorial office.

Peskov told him that he was not going anywhere and would resolve the situation at another level, according to a recording of the conversation published online.

Dmytro Peskov, who worked for the Foreign Ministry in Moscow and abroad before climbing the Kremlin’s career ladder, was sanctioned by the United States shortly after the war, along with his wife and two grown children, Mykola and Elizaveta, according to U.S. data. Treasury.

A total of 354,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the war in Ukraine, which is leading to a protracted conflict that could continue beyond 2023, according to a trove of US intelligence documents released online.