The military from the 1st Slavic brigade of the “DPR” escaped from an illegal torture chamber on the territory of the former mine automation plant in Makeyevka.
ASTRA talked to the escapees and their relatives.”You see, we don’t have a single healthy person in the “DPR” anymore — we now have only two options: either to serve or to be imprisoned, but I haven’t seen anyone in prison for a long time, they send them to fight anyway,” said military serviceman 41680 (1st Slavyanskaya brigade) Ivan (name changed). Ivan, along with his colleagues, fled the war because he was “tired of the attitude of the command,” for which he and other men were forcibly closed for several months on the territory of the mine automation plant in Makeyevka.
“To go to the toilet at this factory, every time they tied a huge weight to our legs so that they would not escape. They only feed canned meat there, no bread, no porridge, it was already starting to make me sick there,” Ivan recalls.
“I was let to bathe once a week. But under strict control. We were constantly followed there. When trying to escape, they threatened that they would shoot at the legs,” says Ivan’s colleague Oleg (name changed).
He volunteered back in February 2022. A resident of the Donetsk region, who worked as a salesman, loader and miner until 2022, was issued for the war absolutely without documents — Oleg had neither a Ukrainian nor a Russian passport, nor a military ticket. At some point, the man recalls, they stopped paying his salary, so he decided to run away. When the military man was detained, he got to the factory together with Ivan.
“We decided to escape from the factory at 3 a.m., opened the lock, unscrewed it with improvised means and ran around this factory for a while, then got to the second floor. There was an antenna wire, we quickly went down it, over the fence and that’s it, ran away. It also helped us that the military personnel who guard us — they drink constantly at night,” says Oleg to ASTRA.
“There is no light or water in this factory,” Natalia (name changed), the mother of another soldier who escaped from the factory, tells ASTRA. Her son was recruited for the war from the colony, where he was imprisoned for theft, promising to “make him a Russian passport.” However, the former prisoner still does not have a passport.
“They power the light nearby, from several rented workshops, they produce dumplings, there is definitely no water there, because how many times I came to my son, I always went to the store for water,” says Natalia. The woman claims that her son was beaten and tortured on the territory of the plant.
“They beat me, they put moral pressure on me, as he told me, they force me to sign a contract,” Natalia says. “Imagine, my son just had a child, and now they will immediately throw him somewhere to storm, he said: I’d rather serve time if I’m caught, let me serve 8-10 years, but I’ll go out and see my child,” the woman adds.
Now all three of those who escaped from the torture chamber on the territory of the former mine automation plant in Makeyevka are hiding so as not to catch the eye of the army or the police. “I only received a Russian passport this year. And I’m asking Russia for help: let us go already! Our people in the “DPR” are running out already, we want to live. Why did I just get a passport, and among 150 million Russians, I was the first to die in this mobilization? Why? I haven’t bought a single ticket with this passport yet, I haven’t even gone anywhere. And I have to go die!” — Ivan is indignant.
Previously, those mobilized from the Irkutsk region complained that in the 1st Slavic Brigade they were being used as “expendable material” for assaults. For complaining about beatings by the military, military unit 41680 was handcuffed to the railing for several days, and one of them was sent to storm. The soldiers’ families call this brigade the “Bermuda Triangle” because of the large number of missing.
The torture chamber at the former mine automation plant in Makeyevka is already the 18th place for the military to be held in the occupied territories, which ASTRA has found. Another torture chamber we found is located in Mulino, Russia.
