Since the fall of 2024, several local residents have disappeared in the Ivanovo region. All of them were eventually found in the same military unit in the Leningrad region.
Local residents began writing about cases of men disappearing in the region on social networks in early 2025. On January 13, blogger and volunteer Evgeny Shmantsar (“Zheka Kohomsky”) posted a video on his Telegram channel in which he and activist Alyona Tikhomirova interviewed two residents of the village of Nikonikha.
One of them, Tatiana Malkova, said that in December, three unknown men took her partner away while he was clearing snow on the street.
“I asked: “Who are you?”, and they answered me: “You should not care.” I say, “What about the documents?” and they say, “No documents.” They just showed me a small list,” the woman shared.
On the same day, the heroines of the video say, the son of Malkova’s neighbor Antonina Savelyeva, 39-year-old Alexander, was also abducted. At the same time, local residents, according to Tikhomirova, are confident that lists like the one shown by one of Malkova’s abductors could only have been compiled by the administration of the Parsky settlement, which includes the village of Nikonikha.
“The poor, the drinkers, and the unemployed. These are mostly people on these lists,” the activist explains.
After the video was published, Shmantsar says, he began receiving complaints about similar situations from other districts of the Ivanovo region.
“There are a lot of such cases. We have already received personal messages from Shuisky district, Furamanovsky district, and Lezhnevo… People of an “antisocial” lifestyle are disappearing,” says the blogger.
At the end of January, another video was posted on the channel about the disappearance of Evgeny and Vladimir Dodonov.
“Dad went to work and didn’t come home. My uncle left to work, but he managed to call. He said that he was being taken by someone to an unknown destination,” says local resident Victoria about her father and uncle.
On February 20, Vkontakte began deleting Schmantzar’s videos related to this topic.
“I assume that our administrative resources had a hand in this to cover their asses,” the activist commented.
In total, at least 6 men are currently known to have been abducted. Some were identified from videos of military personnel, they were forced to sign a contract. The scenarios of their disappearance are similar: they either go to work part-time and disappear without a trace, or they are forcibly taken away by unknown people. According to relatives, most of the abductees did not have a steady income, often abused alcohol, and some did not even have their own phone or bank account.
Nevertheless, according to relatives, after signing the contract with the Ministry of Defense, bank accounts in Promsvyazbank were somehow opened in their names. The relatives have not been able to find out whether the payments for the service of the abducted remain or are appropriated by the kidnappers.
The newspaper “Verstka” found out that all the abducted were taken to the same military unit 29760 in the city of Luga, Leningrad region.
On January 21, the military came to Antonina Savelyeva’s home and informed her that her abducted son had died on January 10 from blood loss in the Kharkiv region. A few days later, his body was delivered in a coffin. The funeral took place on January 29.
