A Siberian Single Mother Decides to Rehabilitate a Criminal from the Wagner Mercenary Group

In August of 2023, drivers on the Siberia section of the Trans-Siberian Highway who were going from Krasnoyarsk toward the river Yesaulovka, a tributary of the Yenisey, could have seen an older man in camouflage standing by the side of the road. The only luggage he had was a small backpack. His camouflage bore a black and red Soldier of Fortune patch. 

At some point a white Nissan stopped next to the man. The driver was a woman with short blond hair, Olga Antipina, a resident of the town of Sosnovoborsk. They were seeing each other for the first time, although they’d spoken by phone the day before. 

Several months earlier, 48-year-old Antipina had decided she wanted to help ex-convicts who fought in Ukraine as mercenaries with the private military company Wagner Group adapt to civilian life. 

At first she spoke sternly to the man on the phone, Antipina recalls: “I needed to know whether he was ready to go change his life. He answered the questions I asked him, he was to the point. I said, okay, then I’m offering to take responsibility for you. I’ll be your mentor.”  

Antipina was out doing an errand, bringing a present of fresh watermelons to an orphanage, and she offered to pick the Wagner mercenary up, if he wanted; he could wait for her on the highway and she’d get him on the way back. He’d been sleeping rough literally right there, on the bank of the Yesaulovka River, ever since he got out. But that didn’t bother him, Antipina recalls: “He goes, what difference does it make? I got used to field conditions in the war.”

She describes their meeting: “And I look and see there’s actually a man standing there with a backpack, just like I told him to. Okay then, I took him and brought him back to my territory.”

I want to live up to my potential, I want you all to see me as a good, kind person

Sosnovoborsk is a city of 40,000 on the right bank of the Yenisey River. It’s about a half hour drive from downtown Krasnoyarsk. It was founded in the 1970s to house workers in the tractor hitch factory and didn’t attain city status until Antipina was already living there. “It’s clean, the people get what they need. We have good sports facilities, a nice wooded city park, it was named Belkin’s house [literally, “squirrel house” – Trans.] and it’s just really super nice to go for a walk there,” she says, praising the city. 

Recent news stories from Sosnovoborsk include the man who, after a fight with his wife, “decided to act up” and stole a taxi complete with a passenger in the back seat; there was also the time that concerned citizens rescued a kitten that fell from the tenth floor into a ventilation shaft. “When we asked emergency services for the key to the basement, the dispatcher was surprised, she said, ‘What are you getting all worked up about, it’ll die and we’ll cover it up with sand,’” an article says, quoting one of the rescuers.

The news about drunken debauches and rescued kittens alternates with funeral notices. When asked if there are a lot of men who’ve come back from the war, Antipina answers, “There’ve been a whole lot these days. First there was a flood, when anybody from the Wagner Group that was still alive came back. But there are only a handful of them here, the rest arrive as two hundreds. Now there’s only the ministry ones who come back every once in a while as three hundreds” (The dead are called “two hundreds,” while “three hundreds” are wounded, and “ministry ones” refers to prisoners recruited by the Russian Ministry of Defense – BBC).

One of those “two hundreds” was her common-law husband, Anatoly Kolocharov, who was also a Wagner Group mercenary. Olga met him by letter. She tells the story: “I lived alone for five years, and my neighbor lady friend goes, let’s post an ad. So we posted an ad, and Tolya just happened to be in prison right then. We started writing each other letters. Then he got out and lived with me for 13 years.” She no longer remembers what crime Kolocharov was serving his sentence for when they met. His last two court sentences are on the website of a Krasnoyarsk Krai regional court: for organizing and operating a drug house, and for unlawful sales of potent substances. The man drank heavily in his last years of life and would beat her and the children. She adds, “Basically we weren’t living anymore, we were existing. Unbelievable what that was. It was so hard for me, I didn’t want to be with him.” 

In 2015 she was left a single mother of three young children when Kolocharov was put in prison yet again, this time serving a long sentence. She no longer wrote him and had nothing more to do with him. 

The news that her former common-law husband had joined the Wagner Group was, according to Antipina, unexpected. On March 5, 2023, she received a letter with no return address. Inside it was a picture of her with some phone numbers taped onto the back, and a scrap of paper on which her ex informed her that he’d left prison to be a mercenary in Ukraine. “I want to live up to my potential, I want you all to see me as a good, kind person,” says Antipina, quoting from memory how the father of her children explained why he’d gone to war. 

For twenty more days Antipina, as she says, “walked around deciding whether it was true or another one of his tricks to try and get us back together.” At the end of March, she got a phone call telling her that the man had died on February 23rd and she’d gotten the letter posthumously. “So that means he was lying around on the field somewhere for a month,” the woman says. “Or however long it was. And again, nobody’s giving us those details. They asked if I was going to bury him. I said yes.” 

Antipina says that her ex dying is maybe the one useful thing he ever did for the family. She used his death payment from the Wagner Group to buy an apartment for her oldest son. 

This whole story is how she explains why she was even interested in the subject of Wagner mercenaries in the first place.

At the beginning of May, a month after her common-law husband’s burial, Antipina and her friend Gulbana Chuakbayeva spent an entire night driving back and forth between two Krasnoyarsk airports. The women were meeting Andrey Plyakin, a Wagner mercenary they knew. “Nobody told us where the guys’ flight was going to land, it was all kept secret,” Antipina recalls. “But since we already had experience meeting cargo two hundred flights, we knew what to look for. They tell you the airport is closed, but there’s military vehicles there. So we just settle in behind them and start waiting. They’ll get the command sometime, and wherever they go, we follow.”

Not one, but several regional media outlets all reported on Andrey Plyakin, who came back to Sosnovoborsk from the Wagner Group in May. In an interview, he said that back when he was still fighting as a member of the Wagner Group in Ukraine, he’d decided to transfer his wages to Chuakbayeva so she could spend the money on charity: she had turned several apartments into homeless shelters in town. 

Later, Plyakin featured in the Novaya Gazeta film “Nobody’s Boys.” “Why rot in prison? I went gladly,” Plyakin told a Novaya Gazeta correspondent about being recruited into the Wagner Group. “I didn’t understand what it was to kill a man, I’d never killed, but I for some reason I was willing to do it.” 

In summer of 2023, Antipina, Chuakbayeva, and Plyakin formally registered a charitable foundation, but Antipina soon withdrew from it. In interviews, both parties explained vaguely that they just didn’t agree on how exactly to develop their pet project. 

Olga Antipina went on to take care of the next Wagner mercenary, that same Valery Molokov she picked up on the bank of the Yesaulovka, all by herself. In conversation, she mentions that before his recruitment he was doing time for the crime named in article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation—murder—but declines to give details. 

“They’re all really good guys, they can see what’s up, they’re deeply traumatized,” Antipina says about the Wagner mercenaries. “And, you know—never say never, prison and poverty come for all men. If you listen carefully to each of them, then yes, there was some involuntary manslaughter, but there was also really just the [bad] people they hung out with, the crude social environment.”

She smoothed the situation over so it wouldn’t ruin the party

In July 2022, Valery Molokov was sentenced to 11 years of prison for the murder of his own sister. The court case was open and the editorial staff have a copy of the sentence. 

Molokov was celebrating New Year’s Eve 2022 with his two sisters. They were drinking Khortytsa vodka and Abakanskoye beer. 

Molokov was 52 at the time and living at his older sister’s place. In court, his relatives explained that she had essentially raised him, that she was “like a second mother” to him and that she loved him “like her own son”—he was born the same year as her daughter. The relatives also said that when he was sober, Molokov’s behavior was normal, he was reasonable. When he was drinking, he became aggressive, caused trouble, and beat his wives. (According to what was stated in the sentencing document, he was married three times.) 

Before prison, Molokov worked as a guard at the gold mines in the town of Bodaybo in Irkutsk oblast. A Russian travel blogger who made it out to that area mentioned the “enraged residents who couldn’t understand the disconnect between the gold they walked around on and the utter shambles they lived in.” In conversation, Molokov describes his life as twelve or eighteen months on guard duty, then home for a month or two, and then back out on duty. He had a firearms license. 

Sometime after 9 p.m. on that New Year’s Eve, Molokov testified in court, “a conflict regarding how to raise children” developed between him and his older sister. Molokov hit his older sister in the face. A bruise quickly appeared, but the woman “smoothed the situation over so it wouldn’t ruin the party”. After midnight the conflict broke out again. The younger sister saw Molokov hit the older one in the head with his fist, and then hit her several more times after she had fallen.

The ambulance wasn’t called until 7:30 a.m. on January 1. In court, the younger sister said that Molokov kept her from doing so, suggesting that they drink vodka instead and finally grabbing her cell phone and throwing it far away somewhere. A week later, the battered woman died in the hospital from a closed-head injury.

In court, Molokov insisted that killing wasn’t his intention and asked for his action to be classified under a less severe article of the Criminal Code: intentional infliction of severe bodily harm resulting in the injured person’s negligent death. The court did not agree.

The man had only served several months of his eleven-year prison sentence when he was recruited by the Wagner Group. “We didn’t go from prison to this war for money; we went for freedom,” he declared in conversation with a BBC correspondent. 

Who are they trying to make heroes out of?

Mass recruitment of prisoners to fight the war in Ukraine began in the summer of 2022. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, did it at first, but later, starting in February 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defense joined in.  

A presidential pardon, six months on the front line in an assault infantry unit, and then home: those were the conditions Prigozhin used to lure convicts to war. As the Wagner Group founder himself claimed, almost 50,000 Russian men went to the front on this arrangement. Similar figures were given by human rights advocates and journalists of Mediazona (which has been named a “foreign agent” by Russian Federation authorities) who studied Federal Penitentiary Service data. 

Convicts were thrown into the hottest spots of the front. Both military analysts and the fighters themselves often used the term “cannon fodder.” Thousands of Wagner Group recruits died, but many survived and actually did go home. In March 2023, Prigozhin announced the pardons of 5,000 convicts. Among those who returned were dozens who’d been convicted of serious violent crimes. Currently, dozens of families in Russia are trying to get the government to explain why their loved ones’ murderers have gone unpunished. 

It's impossible to determine how many of these returnees there are at the present moment, because the Russian authorities haven’t given any statistics on this. In fact, they probably don’t keep any. There’s also no reflection at the state level of the fact that there are people returning to society who have both committed crimes and seen active military duty. But for the Wagner Group, involvement in extrajudicial killing and disregard of the rules of war can be added to those factors, since Wagner Group mercenaries are presumably responsible for many of the war crimes committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The result of this combination of factors is clearly visible in the constant news about “relapses”—new crimes committed by convicts pardoned by Putin. In December 2023, the publication Vyorstka (included by the Russian authorities in the “foreign agents” registry) counted around 200 court cases of that kind. Reports of more and more “relapses” are showing up in mass media every week. 

It's also very clear from the news that people in Russia can’t make up their minds how to treat this new contingent of the population. In some places, residents are getting pepper spray, don’t leave home any more necessary, and hesitate to let their children go anywhere alone, while in other places, pardoned Wagner mercenaries are invited into schools to speak to the children.

Opinions are divided about dead Wagner mercenaries as well as living ones. In some places, schools display memorial plaques in their honor (such as in Saratov) and museums open special memorial nooks (one of these, in Komi, honors an ex-convict, now a “Hero of the Special Military Operation,” who beat a drinking buddy to death with a stool and had sex with a juvenile under the age of 16).

Elsewhere, like in Yekaterinburg Oblast or a taiga village in the Transbaikal region, residents organized to oppose official, ceremonial funerals of Wagner group mercenaries. “Who are they trying to make heroes out of? Murderers?” a woman resident of one of the villages said indignantly in a conversation with journalists.

People in Russia are essentially forced to cope with the consequences of this social experiment all by themselves. “So let’s just say we start foundations that will do the work, there’ll be psychologists, we’ll pay money,” Olga Antipina explains in an interview. “Do a lot of people who come back from war go to the psychologist? Do they even get as far as trying to go to one? Of course not. I know from statistics, I work with social workers, with social protection authorities. Nobody goes to them, even though they ask people to come, they know I’m in touch with everyone in the special military operation. You can ask all you want, but they won’t go to them.”

I was stuck

Molokov fought by Bakhmut. Wagner Group mercenaries were involved in the Ukrainian town’s capture, and, subsequently, its complete destruction. “I have really been in hell, to this day it’s all right here, right before my eyes,” says the man, curtly describing his experience to the BBC. 

He returned to Sosnovoborsk on August 1, after getting out of hospitalization in Anapa for a shrapnel wound. The Wagner Group paid 51,000 rubles for a minor injury. The money was enough for him to buy a mobile phone and get a train ticket as far as Krasnoyarsk. 

The man had no personal possessions. “Everything was left in my past life, as they say,” explains Molokov. He wrote his younger sister, the same one who had witnessed the murder on that New Year’s Eve and called the ambulance in the morning. She didn’t take him in.

“For a probably a week there I drank, you know, a good deal, a fair amount. And then it faded, I didn’t need it anymore. I began drifting. I was stuck,” he says. 

Molokov’s main emotion after coming back, the one he mentions repeatedly in various ways, was complete disorientation. “You understand: me and this world don’t exactly, let’s say, get along real well. I didn’t understand the people here. I have a certain understanding of life, but when I start talking to people, they see everything differently,” he says.

Molokov didn’t have any civilian clothes. When people at the bus stop saw the Wagner Group patch on his camos, they gave him a wide berth. “I tried not to get into any disagreements with anybody, but I actually really hated what people said, about the Wagner Group, for instance. Some folks basically didn’t even consider us people. ‘You’re all this and that, you’re bad, you should’ve just stayed over there.’”

Molokov unexpectedly found moral support in the asocial elements of the population. “The people who, according to the way we see it, are—I apologize—drunks, people who live like bums. They saw who it was, they accepted me: you’re a soldier. I told them I was Wagner Group and they were all thrilled, they supported me.”  

He “tried to explain that we’re just the same kind of people as you” to others. “Well—all kinds of things happen in life, I was just a regular, normal person, and that’s how my life turned out, it just started going that way and kept on going. Something like that. What I mean is that there’s no guarantees, it could happen to anyone,” the man says defensively. 

For a while Molokov camped under the open sky on the bank of the Yesaulovka River. Then his female relatives took pity on him and let him live in a room in a home in the village for a while. Soon someone gave him Antipina’s number; Molokov no longer remembers whether it was a “curator” from the Wagner Group or someone from the Sosnovoborsk town administration. Literally the next day he was getting into her car. 

They’re not socially adapted, you understand

“I took him. He had nowhere to live. He had no means of supporting himself,” Antipina says in an interview. She put him in a residence supported by the Pentecostal church in the village of Tartat near Sosnovoborsk. 

He lived there for two and half months. “I visited him every day. We provided groceries, other things, all the necessary stuff,” Antipina relates. “He also got some treatment in the hospital, we sent him for rehabilitation.” 

At one point Molokov got a call from the Wagner Group telling him he could go to Novosibirsk to get his payment. Since Antipina had already been through the process of getting payment from the Wagner Group after the death of her former common-law husband, she insisted on going with Molokov: “He and I had an agreement that he’d only go to Novosibirsk with me, because now the number of scams is increasing, and people have started conning the guys out of their money.”

Antipina says “we” about the 54-year-old criminal and ex-mercenary the same way that women often say it about their small children. She bought both of their train tickets with her own money. “We got on the train and started making plans,” she says, recalling their trip to Novosibirsk. “I say, we need to establish our goals. He started like a little kid, of course, I want this and I want that, but I go, no, look, the first thing we’re going to do is, you don’t have a place to live, so we’re going to buy an apartment. What kind of apartment—we figured that out later. And then we’re going to buy, sure, whatever you want: a car? A car. So we started with an amount and we planned it all out. And right away I find an apartment that fits the amount we planned, and I go: we’ll come back from Novosibirsk and take the money over right away and close the deal.”

Right on the spot, in Novosibirsk, Antipina helped Molokov buy a car—a seven-seat Honda Stepwgn—and then she drove it back, because the man was afraid to drive for such a long distance the first time he sat behind the wheel after such a long time not driving. 

And she was the one who helped him “crack the code” of government rewards and apply for combat veteran status (Molokov is still awaiting the results of his application). “They’re not socially adapted, you understand; they don’t know how to move, or how to speak in a normal way, they feel—how do I put this—like they’ve been deprived of their fair share, they’re a little lost because of all these situations that happened to them in their life mission,” the woman muses. 

Antipina insists that she did all this completely selflessly and doesn’t even know the exact amount of money Molokov got. “He never expected anybody to treat him like this in his life. He was upset already. I said, listen, you went to war, you’ve already washed away all your sins there, you passed on through the circles of you own hell,” she says, summing up their conversations. 

“Doesn’t it bother you that these people have experience killing other people?” 

“No. Absolutely not. I’m under God’s protection. Seriously.” 

“I’m not even asking about your own personal fear, but about the ethics of it?” 

“I don’t want anything to get in my way. I am moved by love. I don’t care what my neighbors say about me. My actions bring good. And the people who’ve already had something to do with me, they come back to talk to me, they ask for me. I’m in demand. How am I supposed to stop them?” Antipina says. 

Their single conflict occurred, according to Antipina, when Molokov started drinking. “Sure, of course we hashed out that situation: where will you go? You realize that we won’t keep on [supporting you]? I have my own family, I could laze around at home, but for me you’re basically a chore,” she says, recounting their conversation. “In other words I started being harsh with him. And he asked for forgiveness. He and I have an agreement that he’ll follow my instructions to the letter, so he let me know how he was feeling, what was going on with him.” 

According to Antipina, Molokov was so floored by her care that at one point he even wanted to marry her. “But I go, listen, I’m no wife of yours; you and all your comrades, a lot of you want to do that. But me, I said, I don’t belong to anyone, I promise you that. I have no intention of going and bringing you back from the war. I’ve got my own life,” the woman says with a laugh.

I see God’s concern at work here

During her interviews, Antipina talks a lot about God and quotes the Bible. She is a member of the Pentecostal church in the village of Tartat, the nearest church to her, which also runs a Sunday school and a crisis center for women with children. Muscovite Sergey Ryakhovsky, the head of the Protestant movement in Russia—the Russian United Union of Evangelical Christians (Pentecostals)—was sanctioned by Ukraine in January 2023. In his announcement, Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky explained it by saying that Ryakhovsky and the other Russian religious leaders who were also sanctioned “hide behind their spirituality while supporting terror and genocidal politics.” 

Antipina found God shortly after the death of her first husband who did his compulsory military service as a soldier in the first Chechen War. According to Antipina, her husband and his fellow troops were flying out to collect “cargo two hundred” and came under fire. But he didn’t die of it immediately; he died after the army, which he came back from with an addiction to narcotics he developed after being wounded. He was 21 at the time. After a brief pause, Antipina adds that it’s still painful to think about him, even though so many years have gone by: “Being left with an infant when you’re so young, and losing the man you loved, losing the person you waited for so long while he was in the army, and then when he did come back, he wasn’t the same as the man who left…”

Antipina’s second marital partner was her common-law husband Anatoly Kolocharov; when he was sent to prison in 2015, she and her children were left without any means of support. “He just wiped us out completely. It was hard for us to survive. I was working myself to exhaustion. I had to get out of that situation somehow.” She describes how she worked in the fields and on a combine harvester and dug up potatoes and sorted them in a vegetable storage facility. She ended up getting tuberculosis, and then pneumonia, and then to top it all off she had a stroke and for a time she couldn’t walk. “I was genuinely at death’s door, I’d already been written off, they said I wouldn’t make it. I spent a year and a half in the hospital,” Antipina says. Her three younger children spent those eighteen months at social welfare institutions because there was no one who could look after them for her. 

Antipina ascribes her recovery to God’s help. It was after she got better that she started devoting time and energy to small, spontaneous acts of charity. “I’m someone who’s survived, you could say. That kind of thing’s not by chance. It’s with God’s help. Today my mission, here on Earth, is to extend a helping hand in a hopeless situation. The homeless, addicts, whoever I come across,” Antipina says. “I see God’s concern at work here. He anointed me specifically for working with those kinds of people.” 

One of her new projects is free assistance with basic home repairs for needy residents of Sosnovoborsk. She gives an example: “We fixed the plumbing for an invalid. She couldn’t use her bathroom. She went in a plastic bag and threw it down the trash chute because, you know, the plumbing didn’t work. She just drowned me in thank-you’s, you can’t even imagine how happy she is.” Antipina continues, “Or there was this family with six children, we installed a faucet and sink in their kitchen. They hadn’t had a faucet in the kitchen for a year, they all lived in a three-room apartment and had to go back and forth to the bathroom to wash the dishes in the bathtub. I call a guy who’s on my team now, he goes, oh, I just got some sinks delivered today, and I say, that’s God answering immediately, right away. They installed it the next day. The children started crying. You can’t even imagine. One little boy goes over to the window and just stands there wiping away tears.”

We’ve also got a situation here in Russia

Antipina talks about the war in Ukraine using the framework of the Apocalypse. “It’s written in the Bible that the end times will come and brother will turn against brother—that’s what’s happening right now. What great enemy has confounded all our minds? And whose fault is that? Are we supposed to blame just one individual person? Why, no: from the very beginning it was written in the book, in the holy book,” she says. “We pray for peace all over the world. We don’t want what’s happening now.” 

“Of course my attitude towards him has changed,” Antipina says, responding to the question of what she thinks of the fact that her former common-law husband went to fight in Ukraine with the Wagner Group. “In what way? Well, he did a good thing for the kids, because he was buried as a hero, in the “Alley of Glory.” And I’ll say it again, we have to give credit where it’s due—they did take that Bakhmut, and it was a total meat grinder there, they all just marched in there like meat.”

“You mentioned Bakhmut—but what is it they actually even need in Bakhmut? What are they doing there? Did you ever think of that?” 

“For me, politics is a closed subject. I don’t have any kind of opinion, even. Being a pawn in somebody’s game and having an opinion about it? No, I wouldn’t want that. I probably have a higher vision of the situation, we’re all under God’s protection, and he’ll ask something of all of us.” 

Meanwhile, Antipina herself, as she relates, has relatives in Ukraine. Her aunt was able to get to Italy, while her second cousin took shelter from the shelling in Kharkov oblast at first, then was mobilized and fought in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, then was wounded and at present is still recuperating. “That situation’s messed up too. Everyone’s all mad, all messed up,” she complains about her relatives. 

“My aunt and I keep in touch, but it’s, you know, it’s a two-sided situation. She’s [worried] about her son, naturally. But here my husband ends up dying [on the Russian side]. She goes, Olga, what do we do, what do we do? And we need each other, and we decided that, as for ourselves, we’ll cover over every possible situation with love, with God’s love, we’ll treat it with kindhearted understanding.”

“We’re not guilty of what’s happening. It wasn’t us,” Antipina adds.

“Then who is?” 

“If my cousin hadn’t gone to fight in the war, he’d have been shot or put in prison. I don’t know what penalties there are for that [in Ukraine],” she says, her response initially about Ukraine [at the time, Article 336 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code specified three to five years for evading mobilization. – BBC]. “We’ve also got a situation here in Russia.” 

One of Antipina’s sons will turn 18 in the spring of 2024. He hasn’t enrolled in either a college or a university yet and, as she puts it, “he talks sometimes” about whether he should go fight in the war.

“What do you think of that?” 

“I don’t think of it. I don’t like to think about it. I have a different way of thinking. When you live with God, you give space to God for him to think in those situations. And as a person, I’m not about to get up and block his way. No. There are authorities, there’s the law. He’s required to go into the army. And then if the army doesn’t take him, well, then that’s a whole different question. And what if he’s in the army, and then suddenly has a change of heart? Well—we all know that God’s ways are mysterious.”

I’m not exactly burning with desire to go. Although it’s really tempting.  

Molokov explains that now he also attends the Pentecostal church every Sunday, and goes to gatherings in people’s homes as well. Beforehand, he drives around in the car he bought with the money from Wagner Group to pick up women who live far away. “We get together, about ten of us, and sit down at the table, and pour some tea, and talk, we each lay out our problems, share what happened since the last time we met, we testify about how God helped us, and then of course we pray. It all really helps, it lifts us up.” 

As a result, his niece, the daughter of the sister he killed, agreed to help him with groceries and money. “We try not to remember that incident, that’s all; we’re all human,” she told the BBC. The Sosnovoborsk city administration gave four tons of coal for free. Molokov worked at a security guard company for a month and a half, but “due to circumstances” couldn’t keep doing it. He doesn’t talk about his Wagner Group experience with strangers anymore. “I dress like a civilian now and keep things pretty much to myself,” he says. 

Molokov always uses Antipina’s full first name and patronymic, Olga Alexandrovna. “I needed human contact, I needed support. And that contact and support is what Olga Alexandrovna gave me.” 

“What would’ve happened if she hadn’t helped you?” 

“Most likely I wouldn’t have had the patience to get that payment from the Wagner Group, if I hadn’t had any support here, and I’ve have just gone back to the Special Military Operation again.” 

“Have you ever thought of going back?”

“To be honest, I’m not exactly burning with desire to go. Although it’s really tempting.”

“What does that mean?”

“I probably can’t explain it in words. It was easier there. I knew who my enemy was there. But here I don’t.”