“They discovered him, beat him, and threw him in a cage”. Relatives of Russian fighters recount tales of a torture prison in a Donetsk suburb

“Now, comrade documentarians, I’ll show you how it’s done: popcorn, coffee, TV, and a mavic,” a stooped, short-haired man with a sly squint laughs on camera. Cut to a close-up of him saying on the radio: “Balyk, don’t distract me for now! Let me kill this group of six! I’ll kill them—and that’s it, we’ll get back to business.”

This is Vladimir Novikov, callsign Bely, commander of the Storm detachment of the 110th Brigade of the DPR battalion and the main character of several films by propagandist Klim Poplavsky. Novikov is 37, and in the 2000s he was tried for theft. In 2014, he joined the pro-Russian militants.

According to a leak from a Russian police database, in 2015 Novikov and “five DPR servicemen” in a Toyota Tundra with a mounted machine gun threatened to shoot a civilian, fired several shots at his car, “and also shot his dog, after which they fled.” The Ukrainian Myrotvorets database, which lists individuals deemed to be “enemies of Ukraine”, claims that Novikov “before the war was the chief client of the Kirovskiy pawnshop [in Donetsk], where he brought his loot.”

“On a junkie’s denunciation.” The arrest of Bely

Klim Poplavsky, the son of Russian actress Yana Poplavskaya, dedicated three films to Bely: two parts titled “Bely’s Orchestra” and “Bely. Terrikon-114”. Apparently, Poplavskaya herself is also fond of the Donetsk serviceman: in September 2024, she was the first to report his arrest.

“Bely has been arrested,” Poplavskaya wrote on her Telegram channel on September 17. “Three times awarded the Order of Courage, his fighters participated in the liberation of Avdiivka and Krasnohorivka.”

According to Poplavskaya, Novikov “stepped on the toes of drug dealers” who “were pushing junk to the fighters,” after which the “bearded dealers” attacked the man and his wife and, having written a denunciation against him, “put him under arrest.” The actress was outraged that the command “does not intervene and does not stand up” for the “successful commander, having beheaded his detachment,” while “Bely is needed in battle.” At the end of her post, Poplavskaya appealed to the Investigative Committee, asking them to send “impartial and incorruptible investigators” to Donetsk.

RT employee Andrey Filatov, who made films about Bely together with Poplavsky, also calls Vladimir Novikov’s arrest “unjustified detention”. Mentioning the man in his posts, Filatov emphasises that he had a “desire to preserve personnel,” calls him a Commander and Warrior with a capital letter, and laments that “there is no Stalin” for the security forces who arrested Novikov, otherwise he would “restore order.”

On November 8, a Donetsk court, at the request of the investigation, extended the arrest of Novikov for four months, Filatov reported on his Telegram channel. On the same day, actress Poplavskaya published a video in which several people in uniform introduce themselves as fighters of the 110th Brigade and ask to “release the commander” from the pre-trial detention centre. “So that we can move forward normally, because we love him, we want to work with him further,” a man in camouflage with his face covered by a bandage says. Poplavskaya insists that Novikov was arrested “on a junkie’s denunciation”, and reproaches the court for bias.

Blogger Yuri Podolyaka, known for his pro-war stance, wrote on his Telegram channel that the fighter “is being tried only because the ‘Donetsk prosecutors’ were offended by Bely,” but did not go into details.

“Beaten, humiliated, stolen millions from their cards.” Hostages in enclosures

On November 11, the anonymous Telegram channel VCHK-OGPU, associated with security forces, published its version of the reason for Novikov-Bely’s arrest.

“On the first weekend of September, servicemen from unit 46200, including the ‘legendary’ commander of the stormtroopers Vladimir Novikov, about whom propagandists made more than one film, got into a fight with employees of the military prosecutor’s office in one of the bars in Donetsk,” the post says. “The latter were beaten, and on Monday morning, the offenders’ location was raided. Unit 46200 was literally stormed, as the servicemen refused to let the auditors onto the territory.”

The unit “had real hostages,” who were “beaten, humiliated” by the commanders who “received millions of rubles from their cards for months,” claims VCHK-OGPU.

“At the time of the inspection, 17 servicemen aged 19 to 40 were found in dog enclosures. All of them were tortured and testified against the commanders,” the post says.

In addition to Novikov, the second accused is “a certain A.A. Gvozdev” with the callsign Gvozd, the authors of the message continue. According to their information, a criminal case was initiated against Novikov and Gvozdev under articles on robbery, extortion, and kidnapping.

“Those rescued stated that they were lucky, as the hostages before them were zeroed out,” writes VCHK-OGPU, publishing a list of the names of the released servicemen. “This was partly confirmed by the fact that one of the unit’s privates was caught trying to find medics who could send the skeletonised remains under the names of fallen fighters—to write off those killed back home.”

Filatov called the VCHK-OGPU post “one-sided information full of inappropriate analogies,” and also suggested that “one of the prosecutors decided to shell out to publish such a crude text” about Novikov.

“Beaten with sticks.” From colonies to the front

Mediazona has identified three servicemen from the list published by VCHK-OGPU. At the time of signing the contract with the Ministry of Defense, all of them, according to their mothers, were in prisons in different regions.

According to the Russian court database, six more men, except for one, were convicted in the last two years. Their surnames, initials, and years of birth fully match those of the servicemen on the list.

“Yes, he was in captivity, by his own people,” the elderly mother of 23-year-old Aslan Agachev from Karachay-Cherkessia, who refused to give her name, tells Mediazona. “Beaten, beaten with sticks ... When he ended up in the hospital, we found out.”

In 2023, garbage truck driver Agachev signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense because “he wanted to fight, to try his fate,” his mother continues. After his leave, the man did not return to his unit on time, after which in January 2024 the Crimean Garrison Military Court sentenced him to 3.5 years in a colony for leaving his place of service without permission.

“He came home, didn’t return on time, and that’s it,” she sighs. “Then he signed [a contract with the Ministry of Defense] in the colony and went back.”
Agachev’s mother saw the post on the VCHK-OGPU Telegram channel and says that “everything there is true,” except for the mixed-up number of the military unit her son was assigned to—42600.

According to the woman, her son spent “about ten days” in “captivity” from the end of August; after a long break, her son called her on September 11. The son was in detention with injuries that “festered”—the man is still undergoing treatment in “either a hospital or an infirmary” in Donetsk, says Agacheva. The woman does not know where and how her son was injured, whether in battle or by fellow servicemen. Her son did not tell her the details of what happened in “captivity,” she says.

“Novikov, their commander, practiced all this ... abusively. And Gvozdev, yes. No, I didn’t hear anything about Gvozdev [from my son], but ... as I said, I didn’t really ask. He doesn’t tell me anything. Sometimes I ask, and he says, ‘Mom, I want to forget all this’.”

The mother of Alexander Kundirov, another serviceman whose data matches that of the people on the list, told Mediazona that her son is in the Donetsk region, in Makiivka. According to her, in August, her 40-year-old son “was in Krasnodar, and then went back to the Donetsk region.”

“He didn’t say anything about captivity,” said Lyudmila Kundirova.

Kundirov signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense in February 2024, while “he was in prison in Stavropol,” the woman says. In October 2023, the Korenovsk District Court of the Krasnodar krai sentenced Kundirov to 3 years and 9 months in a high-security colony under articles on robbery as part of a group, attempted robbery with the use of violence, and attempted insult of an authority representative.

“He was given four years there, but he decided it was better to sign a contract and go,” says the convicted man’s mother.

At the front, her son received a “severe injury,” ended up in the hospital, “and then went back there again,” says the pensioner.

“In October, probably,” the woman says, specifying that she doesn’t exactly remember when her son returned to the war.

“Gvozd said he would kill him.” Drugs and stolen salaries

37-year-old Viktor Mishagin from Zelenokumsk, Stavropol krai, convicted of robbery, is another serviceman of the Storm detachment, says his mother Natalia Kotelevskikh. According to the man, the room where the commanders kept “about 19 people” was the size of a “dog house.”

“Vitya always told me that ‘they were sitting in a cage’,” Natalia recalls. “I even said, ‘What, like a dog kennel or something?’”

Natalia found out in September that her son was held captive by fellow servicemen.

“He called: ‘Mum, Mum, we were freed by the police,’ he said with such joy,” she recalls. “I started asking him, he said that they bullied them, beat them, demanded money. I said, ‘And you gave it to them?’ Well, yes, he says. I know that they beat him very badly. He told me, ‘Mum, they broke a shovel handle over us’.”

According to Kotelevskikh, even before being put in the cage, her son told her that Novikov’s “deputy” Alexander Gvozdev was bullying him.

“I knew this Gvozd and talked to him on the phone more than once,” the woman claims. “He kept him there with him, made him look for drugs. He got my son hooked on drugs, on some kind of “salts”. Then, when I called him and said I would complain, this Gvozd insulted me, offended me.”

The conflicts started as soon as Mishagin arrived at the front in August 2024 from colony #2 in the Stavropol krai, Natalia continues: “Gvozd told him that he would kill him and write him off just like the others. And he kept telling me, ‘Mum, don’t call him, don’t say anything, he will kill me’.”

Her son told her that they took away his bank card and demanded money for the opportunity not to be sent to the front line. “When he received his signing bonus, 800,000 [upon signing the contract with the Ministry of Defense], Gvozd took, I think, 300,000 from him,” says Kotelevskikh.

She says that she knows a woman from Krasnodar whose husband served in the same battalion. “The commanders told his wife to bring her car from Krasnodar or give them money, and they wouldn’t send her husband to the front,” Natalia explains, adding that the woman’s husband died in battle anyway.

“There’s another guy in unit 42600, a bandit named Adam,” she continues. “He took three million from my son, who gave him his bank card out of fear. Adam says he ‘sold him a car.’ My son is supposed to get 200,000 rubles on the 20th, but a 40,000 ruble advance already came and he hasn’t seen it. They have him on this ‘salt’ drug and he’s out of it, not hearing or seeing anyone.”

In August, unable to take her son’s complaints, Kotelevskikh went to see him in Donetsk. “I came before Bely and Gvozd were arrested. My son was hiding, scared of Gvozd. I found him, but then they discovered him, beat him, and threw him in a cage.”

Her son is now renting a place in Donetsk. While the case against Gvozd and Bely is investigated, Mishagin is a witness. Kotelevskikh says the man who replaced them, Adam, threatened her son and the others who spoke about the torture, saying “They will all be killed for what they did to the commander.”

“Two days ago my son texted me: ‘Mom, forgive me, I’m so tired, I can’t live like this.’ Now I can’t reach him. I called the Donetsk police but they said ’We’re busy, goodbye.’”

Mediazona contacted Alexander Gvozdev’s wife Darya, who shares a VK page with him showing their wedding photo. “I won’t comment at all,” she said. “My husband is fine, it’s all lies.” She claims he isn’t charged or under arrest, stating “My husband is home” before hanging up abruptly.

Editor: Dmitry Treschanin