Responding to questions about the video showing the brutal murder of a defector from Wagner’s group by the mercenaries of Putin’s “cook”, the Kremlin replied that such a topic “is not the business” of the president’s administration, Interfax reports.

“There are no comments. We don’t know what it is, how true it is,” Dmytro Peskov answered on Monday when asked by journalists about the shocking footage showing the alleged defector being beaten to death with a sledgehammer by his former comrades.

“It’s not our business,” the Kremlin spokesman added during the daily press conference.

An ex-convict who joined Yevhen Prigozhin-funded mercenaries before smashing his head in with a sledgehammer says he was “kidnapped in Kyiv” and then returned to Russia as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange.

Mercenary boss Wagner talks about the killed “dog”.

Prigozhin, who admitted for the first time at the end of September that he is the founder of Wagner’s mercenary group, after being questioned on this topic a day earlier, admitted the veracity of the video with the murdered man.

“As for the man killed with a sledgehammer, this performance shows that he did not find happiness in Ukraine, but met unfriendly but fair people. I think this movie is called “A Dog Deserves a Dog’s Death,” he declared.

Since the beginning of July, Russian investigative journalists wrote about the fact that the mercenaries of the “Wagner” PMC began to recruit in Russian prisons, later they included video recordings in which Prigozhin personally participates in the recruitment of criminals from Russia.

One of the Russian state news agencies, Interfax, also recalls that in November 2019, Dmitry Peskov was asked to comment on a video showing the brutal execution of a Syrian soldier by Wagner fighters.

He initially said he had not seen the footage, but later came back and said he was shocked after watching the footage.

“I don’t know how justified the conclusions are, any attempts to identify people. In any case, I can say that we have no information and no connection with these people,” said Putin’s spokesman three years ago.

The Kremlin refuses to comment on Zelenskyi’s visit to Kherson

Responding to a question about the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi to liberated Kherson, Peskov again refused to comment.

“We leave no comments. You know that this is the territory of the Russian Federation,” he said. Last Friday, Peskov stated that Kherson Oblast remains Russian territory, shortly after the Russian Defense Ministry announced the completion of withdrawal from the western bank of the Dnieper.

“This is a subject of the Russian Federation. It is legally established and defined. There are no changes and there cannot be,” said Dmytro Peskov.

However, he used this Monday’s press conference to denounce the “Russophobic consensus” among the American political class.

“Unfortunately for Russia, the general consensus within the American establishment to continue the illogical, rabidly Russophobic line is sad. This trend is really sad,” he said.

His comment came in response to reporters’ questions about whether the victory of Democratic President Joe Biden in the election is bad news for Russia.

Follow the latest events of the 264th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.