Serviceman Aleksandr Lunin, who recorded an appeal to Vladimir Putin threatening a military mutiny, has been released after 11 days of administrative arrest. He reported his release on social media, and the information was also confirmed by the outlet Agentstvo.
According to journalists, Lunin left a detention center in the Voronezh region on July 8. On the night of July 9, a video appeared on his accounts in which he said he had “lost a bit of weight, grown some stubble, but everything is fine.” Lunin said he had already arrived in Moscow after his release.
Shortly before that, Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Project for Security and the Fight Against Corruption, posted a photo with the serviceman on his Telegram channel. He said Lunin was alive and well and that people had been by his side “the whole time.”
Lunin is a serviceman from the Voronezh region who took part in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. He had been actively posting appeals to Putin on social media.
In late June, in one of his videos, Lunin demanded that the president summon him to the Kremlin and listen live to “the whole truth” about what was happening in Russia, including problems in the army. If that did not happen, he threatened a mutiny. The video drew millions of views on Instagram.
It later became known that Lunin’s home had been searched and that he himself had been placed under arrest under the article on displaying extremist or Nazi symbols (Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code). It remains unclear what formally triggered the case. Commenting on Lunin’s appeal, the Kremlin said it had not seen the video itself, but considered the wording used in it “rather strange.”