A Wagner Mercenary Who Crossed US-Mexican Border Was Honored In Russia Weeks Before Arrest

By Carl Schreck, Mark Krutov, Mike Eckel and Ramazan Alpaut

(RFE/RL) — A self-confessed veteran of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group arrested for crossing into the United States from Mexico appears to have been honored as a combat veteran weeks earlier by an organization established by Russian President Valdimir Putin, RFE/RL has found.

Timur Praliev, 31, was detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents on January 4 near the border town of Roma, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States and told the agents he was a citizen of Kazakhstan, U.S. federal court records show.

At a January 7 court appearance before a federal judge in McAllen, Texas, a federal prosecutor said Praliev was in possession of both Russian and Kazakh passports, cash, and a drone he carried in his backpack, a local television channel reported.

Praliev also admitted to being a member of Wagner, the channel’s website, Valley Central, cited Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda McColgan as saying.

Wagner has fought among Russian ranks in the Kremlin’s all-out war on Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. The paramilitary group has been designated a “transnational criminal organization” by the U.S. Treasury Department.

After pleading guilty to unlawful entry into the United States, Praliev was convicted and sentenced to time served. His current whereabouts are unclear.

Online records reviewed by RFE/RL show that less than a month before his detention, a man of the same name had been honored at an event held by an official government veterans’ organization in Russia’s Bashkortostan region.

An account of the December 12, 2024, event was published on Russian social media by the Bashkortostan branch of Defenders Of The Fatherland Foundation. The group was established by Putin in April 2023 to support combat veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Attempts to reach the foundation for comment were unsuccessful.

Photographs from the event show a man identified as Timur Praliev receiving his certification as a combat veteran. The post identified the Timur Praliev shown in the photograph as a “former employee” of Wagner who has ties to Iglinsky, a municipality east of the regional capital, Ufa.

RFE/RL located a profile for a user named Timur Praliev on the Russian social-networking site Vkontakte with a listed birth year — 1993 — matching that listed for Praliev in U.S. court records.

A Kazakhstan-based acquaintance of the man who received the combat-veteran certification in Bashkortostan confirmed to RFE/RL that the Vkontakte account was that of the man shown being honored at the event. An RFE/RL inquiry sent via direct message to the account went unanswered.

During Praliev’s court appearance, McColgan said the U.S. government “is concerned about [the] safety of the community when this defendant is released” because of his affiliation with Wagner, “a group associated with political violence,” Valley Central quoted the prosecutor as saying.

A U.S. magistrate judge ordered Praliev to remain in federal custody, Valley Central said.

Neither the U.S. attorney office for southern Texas nor the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol regional office overseeing that section of the U.S.-Mexican border immediately responded to e-mails or voicemails from RFE/RL seeking further details.

Founded by St. Petersburg chef Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin confidant, Wagner grew to be one of Russia’s most notorious private military companies. Its soldiers were deployed in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and more recently Ukraine, where Wagner fighters played a key role in the capture of the city of Bakhmut.

In August 2023, two months after staging a brief, but serious coup attempt, Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash north of Moscow. U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe Prigozhin was assassinated.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir and Kazakh services

• Carl Schreck is an award-winning investigative journalist who serves as RFE/RL’s enterprise editor. He has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for more than 20 years, including a decade in Moscow. He has led investigations into corruption, cronyism, and disinformation campaigns in Russia and Central Asia, as well as on poisoning attacks against Kremlin opponents and assassinations of Iranian exiles in the West. Schreck joined RFE/RL in 2014.
• Mark Krutov is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Russian Service and one of the leading investigative journalists in Russia. He has been instrumental in the production of dozens of in-depth reports, exposing corruption among Russia’s political elite and revealing the murky operations behind Kremlin-led secret services. Krutov joined RFE/RL in 2003 and has extensive experience as both a correspondent and a TV host.
• Mike Eckel is a senior correspondent reporting on political and economic developments in Russia, Ukraine, and around the former Soviet Union, as well as news involving cybercrime and espionage. He’s reported on the ground on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the wars in Chechnya and Georgia, and the 2004 Beslan hostage crisis, as well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
• Ramazan Alpaut is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service.