ASTRA wrote that on June 22, Second Lieutenant Kamil Zainulin and Sergeant Sergei Zozulenko from military unit 72162 were taken from the front line under the pretext of “going to Kursk for an award ceremony” to be sent to an illegal basement for soldiers who refused to storm the Luhansk region (it was initially reported that As for Zaitsevo, both basements are located several kilometers from each other, and often the military does not know exactly where they are being held. Zainulin spent almost a month there, he told ASTRA after his release. Zozulenko’s fate is currently unknown.
According to Kamil, after two ASTRA publications about the situation with the military, the commanders demanded that all our publications be deleted.
“Commanders began to put pressure and threaten to have it all removed. They demanded written statements that we have no complaints,” Zainulin told ASTRA. Zozulenko’s wife actually contacted ASTRA and asked for a rebuttal, “because she made it all up.”
In the very basement in the Rassypnoye, the video from which was previously exclusively published by ASTRA, Kamil stayed until July 18. He told us in detail about the conditions of detention and torture. His story is confirmed by the testimonies of other military personnel who passed through this basement and their relatives, with whom ASTRA spoke. Also, some data, in particular, toilets in the form of plastic bottles next to the pipe, are recorded on the only released video from the basement, published by ASTRA in 2023.
“The attitude is terrible. If they want to bully us, they make us do push-ups, squats for an hour, two, three. And if you say, “What are we doing, that’s enough,” they pick you up and handcuff you to the bars between the doors — you hang there for 7 hours. For lunch we are released and hung back up. The food is terrible. They don’t let you go to the toilet, want it or not, you hang on. The toilet is also inside. On the right — by the large — there’s a bucket, bags. There is a pipe on the left and half of the [plastic bottles] have been cut off. Everything stinks there, the dampness is terrible. Bedbugs, fleas, dust from concrete,” the serviceman told ASTRA.
On July 18, Zainulin was released from the basement and taken to a military training ground in the village of Belovodsk, Luhansk region. There, according to the serviceman, the commanders tried to register him as having “arbitrarily left the unit”, take him to the front line and kill him. Doctors intervened in the situation, sent him for examination — Kamil was diagnosed with hepatitis C — he believes that he became infected while carrying out the wounded.
As a result, the man decided not to return to the unit, but wrote an appeal to the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Novosibirsk garrison and is awaiting an investigation. In a conversation with ASTRA, he stressed that he no longer intends to fight due to his health condition, and also because his brother had already died in the war.
The soldier believes that he became inconvenient to the commanders of the 8th company of the 3rd battalion of the 30th Motorized Rifle Regiment, because he was trying to protect his subordinates. Zainulin was also accused of extortion from his colleagues — but, according to him, we are talking about fees for the purchase of equipment and transport, as well as “extortion” organized by battalion commander Major Artur Mammadov, call sign “Kovalsky”, as well as Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant Ilya Utkin, call sign “Prorok”. “I prevented them from engaging in extortion and lawlessness, so they decided to remove me,” concludes Zainulin.
Earlier, ASTRA recorded the first death of a military man after being in prison.
Zainulin says that soldiers were killed and buried right on the prison grounds, and “everything was dug up there.” There is no confirmation of this information yet.
