Sitting in a cafe in an upmarket Moscow suburb, the former mercenary Marat Gabidullin looked a long way from the battlefields of Syria where he fought half a decade ago.
Gripping his recently finished memoir, In the Same River Twice, the first published account of fighting for the secretive Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, Gabidullin said: “I wrote this because I realised it’s time for our country to face the truth: mercenaries exist.”
At 55, he’s an imposing figure, with his face and muscular arms covered in scars. “We, in Russia, prefer not to discuss our mercenaries,” he added. “It doesn’t fit the official narrative.”
