Image source, RT screenshot Image caption,

Nikolai Peskov also goes by the name Nikolai Choles and was previously an RT journalist

By Laurence Peter

BBC News

The 33-year-old son of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says he served with the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine for nearly six months.

Nikolai Peskov said "it was my duty... I couldn't sit to one side watching as friends and others went off there."

Wagner is called a "private military company" in Russia and now has international notoriety for alleged war crimes and other abuses in Ukraine.

It has recruited thousands of convicts from prisons after taking heavy losses.

It is rare for a member of the Russian elite to choose to join Wagner - many have gone abroad to avoid conscription into the regular army.

Nikolai Peskov is also known as Nikolai Choles, and speaks fluent English, having spent several years as a youth in London. He has worked as a correspondent for Russian state broadcaster RT.

Both he and his father are under US sanctions.

In an interview with the pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, he said it was his own decision to join Wagner, but he did not know how to do it, "so I had to turn to my dad... and he helped me with that".