A Russian military commander has appealed directly to Vladimir Putin to threaten an armed uprising with help from top military brass if the country isn’t told the “truth” about the war.
In an Instagram video that quickly racked up millions of views Thursday, Alexander Lunin addressed the Russian president to warn of “very serious consequences” if his demands were ignored.
The 39-year-old father of two went on to say he’d been asked to “deliver a message” to Putin by unnamed military officials and members of the security services. They told him to demand a meeting with Putin at the Kremlin that would include a “live-broadcast audience,” he said, so that the country could learn the “truth” about what is going on.
“If in the near future I do not come to the Kremlin and speak live next to you, the army will turn its weapons against the Kremlin,” he said.
Lunin reportedly commanded a Russian volunteer battalion in occupied Ukraine until some time last year, when he said he was forced out for refusing orders. He told the independent media outlet Agentstvo that defense officials had come to his home in the Voronezh region to demand that he film a video appeal to Putin, apparently after seeing that he’d been using his social media platforms to air complaints from troops on the battlefield.
More than four years after Putin launched his war against Ukraine with promises of a quick victory, Kyiv has turned the tables with a string of long-range strikes that up the stakes for Moscow and clue ordinary Russians in on the Kremlin’s battlefield failures.
The Russian president has repeatedly refused peace agreements.
Lunin said military officials were fed-up with the war and the “meat grinder” on the front lines.
“No one wants bloodshed. Just make clear to the president that there will be total chaos here if this continues,” he said the officials had told him when demanding his public appeal to Putin.
“At the moment, dozens, hundreds, thousands of our soldiers are sitting in pits, punished by their commanders. They sit, rot, are tortured and abused by the so-called Gestapo, for the fact that they refused to carry out stupid suicidal orders," Lunin said, according to independent Russian media outlet Meduza.
That video has since garnered over 200,000 likes.
In another video on Telegram, Lunin states that “this is not a bluff.” If something happens to him or his family, he said, it would be a “signal” to launch an uprising.
“I’m sending a message, nothing more. I’m not the leader of the uprising. They came to me for one simple reason: because I can’t be bought, because the president heard me,” he said.
