Social media that in Russia are actually blocked, within a few days they made known a veteran from the village of Lisinowka in the southwestern region of Voronezh, but also announced that he would be raided and arrested. Last Thursday, 39-year-old video blogger Alexandr Lunin, who had donned his jacket decorated with medals for the occasion despite the summer heat, called on the Russian ruler to meet him.
If Vladimir Putin If he doesn’t grant him an “audience” in the Kremlin “in the near future” where he can tell “the whole truth about what’s going on in our country now” on direct television, that will have “very serious consequences,” said Lunin. In this case, “the army will turn its weapons against the Kremlin.”
In the clip, which only lasts a good one and a half minutes, Lunin describes the problem as the widely reported practice of Russian soldiers being blackmailed for money and tormented by their own commanders if they refuse to follow “stupid, suicidal orders” or are even killed, “cancelled” in war jargon. This currently affects “hundreds, thousands of soldiers”.
Memories of Prigozhin
Lunin’s appeal spread like wildfire and was viewed millions of times on the Instagram network, which can only be accessed via VPN in Russia. Journalists checked Lunin’s vita. Accordingly, soon after the 2022 attack on Ukraine, he fought with a volunteer battalion in southern Ukraine, first as a rifleman, then as head of a scout troop. Lunin told journalists that he later fought as a soldier in the western Russian region of Kursk, was wounded and was discharged in 2025 for disobedience.
Unlike Prigozhin, Lunin does not have armed forces. He recorded the appeal to Putin in his garden, with a dog barking in the background. He stated that he was only conveying a message that representatives of the Ministry of Defense and other armed structures had instructed him to send the day before.
Lunin told journalists who called him when the appeal was already collecting clicks that he was cycling in Lisinovka last Wednesday when an SUV carrying three officials from the defense and interior ministries drove up. The men did not introduce themselves by name. They became aware of him because of an initial appeal to Putin published a few days earlier, which Putin’s presidential administration also noticed.
Like beauty blogger Bonja, he believes in the “good tsar”
In this first appeal, Lunin, already in the jacket with medals, refers to another Instagram appeal to the ruler that caused a sensation in the spring. What mattered was that Monaco-based beauty blogger Viktorija Bonja highlights some of Russia’s problems. Her clip also quickly spread millions of times, which was seen as a sign of how many Russians are hungry for voices that identify grievances that the censors have ignored. However, Bonja only mentioned the war in passing and was easily discredited by the media apparatus due to her luxurious life in the West. She was also moved to tears by the mere acknowledgment of Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov soon even be used by the propaganda machine.
At first glance, the war-hardened villager Lunin appears very different from the influencer. Despite his flaunted masculinity with a full beard, tattoos and rude curses, both are united by the obvious belief, widespread among Russians, that the ruler as a “good tsar” just needs to be properly informed and everything will get better. “I give you my word as a man that if you invite me to the Kremlin, I will tell you the real truth, which not a single one of your officials, your subordinates, will tell you,” Lunin says in the first appeal.
In it he doesn’t make any threat of rebellion and only cites as an example problem that his house only now gets more electricity because his comrade paid for it, even though he, Lunin, had contacted the regional authorities. “I am the one who achieves justice,” says Lunin, emphasizing that he is a father of two and that no one in his family drinks alcohol.
Raids, arrests and ambiguities
Peskov said on Friday that they had heard about the appeal, but had not yet been able to deal with it; there were probably “pretty strange wordings” in it. On Saturday, Lunin’s wife told of a nighttime raid on the Tiktok platform. The police took “USB sticks, computers, notebooks, nunchucks” – Japanese weapons, so-called strangling sticks. Her husband wasn’t there but went to Moscow. It was later said in Lunin’s Telegram channel that he had been arrested for eleven days in a misdemeanor case. The allegations were not named.
