The village of Melekino, located on the coast of the Sea of Azov, was occupied by the military in 2014. Initially, it was occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and later by Russian soldiers. However, tourists have continued to visit Melekino throughout this time, although their numbers have decreased over the years. “The prices are similar to those in Sochi, but the facilities are lacking.” It is in this small coastal village that the Russian army has established a new facility for detaining conscripts and deserters. Sources that ASTRA discovered claim that in Melekino, right next to the tourists, Russian soldiers who refuse to fight are being held in cramped and unsanitary conditions for months.

Yegor Kharin, a military officer from Buryatia (name changed at the hero’s request), found himself in the village of Melekino during the peak tourist season in June 2025. He was placed in the basement of an abandoned construction site.

“Darkness, gloom, no air, dampness, cardboard boxes, pallets, and bottles. I talked to people who said they’ve been there for eight months or even a year. Refusniks, deserters, and non-deserters — they all end up there. Later, I found out that some of them are listed as missing, but their families are told they’re on a combat mission, even though they’re in a pit. A week later, I realized that I couldn’t just get out of here. Either through the combat mission, or 300, or 200 [wounded or dead], ” says Kharin.

The heat, the stifling air, and the crowds of soldiers in their underwear — this is how Yuri Chiplakov, a soldier from Buryatia with the call sign “Yakut” (name and call sign have been changed), describes the basement in Melekino during the holiday season.

“Once, there were 98 people in the basement at the same time. Of course, we took turns sleeping. One of us, with the call sign ‘Kuzya’, couldn’t handle it and was taken away in an ambulance. The others held on,” Yakut said.

“It always stinks awfully out there. Wash day is once a month. You can’t do anything from the heat and stuffiness. They keep them like cattle or worse. They don’t care at all human rights, they have their own laws and regulations here, ” says military officer Stanislav Kozlovsky (name changed). Many people haven’t even passed the Military Medical commission yet, despite the fact that some of them have been sitting here for six months, some for a year, and one of them has been sitting here for the second year. There are mentally ill people, people with schizophrenia and other disorders. They should be treated in a psychiatric hospital, but they’re here.”

In the basement in Melekino, military personnel from Yakutia and Buryatia are kept. All the interlocutors of the editorial office who passed through this place are military personnel who served in the 37th brigade. In February 2022, the 37th brigade participated in the march on Kiev, then noted participation in assault operations, for example, in the battles for Ugledar. Long before the war, the military unit of the 37th brigade received the nickname “the death ground” — because of the frequent deaths of personnel.

“We were supposed to be sent to a unit in Kyakhta, but we were left in Melekino because it was easier to break us here,” Kozlovsky says.

The basement where the soldiers of the 37th Brigade are being held is located very close to the tourists who are staying in Melekino, just 300 meters from the nearest working sanatorium. Harin and the former prisoners of the basement in Melekino say that they were only allowed to go to the bathroom once a day, but only so that the soldiers would not cross paths with the tourists.

Resort for military personnel

The village of Melekino is located on the coast of the Sea of Azov, 20 kilometers from Mariupol, and has been under the control of the Russian army since 2022. The fighting took place very close to the village, but it was not affected, according to local media reports. According to the only census in the history of independent Ukraine, Melekino had a population of just over 1,300 in 2001.

Local resident Galina says that June was cool this year, but in July and August, the weather was typical of a resort. “There were plenty of people, but it wasn’t as crowded as in 2012-2014. There wasn’t much entertainment or facilities, and the prices were similar to those in Sochi, which were very high,” she said.

Galina says that this summer, her husband’s relatives from Voronezh came to Melekino. A simple room with minimal amenities and a shower in a guest house cost them 3,000 rubles per day.

“For this price, you could go to a more decent place to relax. And there’s nowhere to go in the evening, so [my husband’s relatives] would go to Mariupol or Urzuf in the evenings. At least it’s more or less like a resort. This summer, we had a lot of Donetsk residents and military families based in Melekino, as well as construction workers,” says Galina.

She complains that Melekino has been falling into disrepair for the past ten years, and the village is no longer a resort.

“Many boarding houses belonged to Donetsk residents: factories, state structures, so now they are abandoned: since 2014, they have been banned from entering here ,and [life in the village has stopped]. Neither Donetsk, Makiivka, or Horlivka could travel here, and if they could, it was too difficult to get passes, and men were not allowed to come here,” says Galina.

She claims that the Melekino boarding houses were allegedly “taken over by the military.” Galina is not afraid of Russian military personnel: she says that they mostly walk around without weapons, except for patrols. However, the only way to enter Melekino is through a checkpoint.

“It’s sad for the young people, there are no clubs. There used to be a cultural center and sports sections, but now there’s nowhere to go. It seems like something is being done, but it’s not visible, the chairman has created a picture, but if you dig deeper, it’s a nightmare. The village is overgrown with grass, there are potholes everywhere, and there’s a lot of abandoned property,” continues Galina.

The nearby villages are also in a similar state of neglect. “The landlady had ten rooms, and my parents were the only tenants during the peak season in August,” says a Ukrainian man whose parents spent the summer in the nearby occupied village of Belosarayskaya Kosa. According to him, the Kosa is also occupied by Russian military forces.

Another resident of Melekino, Ekaterina, laments that in the past, local tourist spots were open, and it was possible to visit the cinema at the sanatorium and meet other vacationers. However, according to Ekaterina, “nowadays, you should avoid these places, as they are inhabited by military personnel who tend to get drunk or even use drugs.”

“They have weapons and what they think is power,” says Ekaterina.

In a conversation with ASTRA journalist, Ekaterina recalls the murder of local writer and journalist Yevgeny Bal. The 78-year-old man died after being tortured — Russian military beat the elderly writer because of a photo with the AFU.

According to Ekaterina, several boarding houses “where the owners were associated with Yanukovych” have been abandoned since 2014. Other recreation centers began to be revived on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2020-2021, they were “bought out for reconstruction and thoroughly taken over, with renovations underway, but now only dogs run around and the military lives there,” Ekaterina says.

Despite this, Melekian boarding houses and recreation centers continue to accept tourists and post mass advertisements on the Internet.

Galina and Ekaterina say that before the big war, tourists couldn’t get into Melekino. In the summer, the village was “like an anthill.”

“We started the season in early May, and buses from all over Ukraine came all day long. Tourists from Kherson, Izyum, and Luhansk paid for a place in the yard to set up their tents. After the first occupations, it became more difficult, but by 2021, things had improved. People have become accustomed to this way of life. It has always been our main source of income, as everyone has rooms for tourists in their homes,” says Ekaterina. Despite the fact that Ukrainian military personnel have been stationed in Melekino since 2014, according to both women.

“They [the Armed Forces of Ukraine] were drunk, they felt like kings, and they forced us to speak Ukrainian. And you know, there was a time when I was about 19 years old, when everything started. We were waiting for some school graduates to come to us from a cafe to continue celebrating. We were sitting at a bus stop in the center of the village, and four or five masked men with machine guns came running out of the bushes and lined us up, the children. The girls were standing, and the boys were facing the ground. It’s unclear why and for what purpose. They walked around, laughed, spoke to us in Ukrainian, and pointed their guns at us, as if they were under the influence of something [drugs]. It was very scary,” Galina claims. She does not provide any evidence to support her claims. The woman says that the village has been dying since 2014. Galina is happy about the capture of her village and supports the Russian occupation.

Ekaterina, on the other hand, believes that the situation in the village has worsened since the occupation:

“We used to live a good life with our family and friends. Then the Russian occupiers came and destroyed everything. My relatives died in Mariupol when the Russians bombed the city, where everyone was happy before the war. Now these monsters are here, thinking that they rule the world. They’ve appointed drug addicts to high-ranking positions, and I don’t even want to greet them, because normal people don’t want to work for this new government, which only knows how to fight and kill. There are few vacationers, and when they do come, they’re so scary that you don’t want to go outside. We’re waiting and hoping that everything will return to normal one day. We’re waiting for the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian government to come back so that we can live a happy and peaceful life again, just like we did before 2022.”

Abandoned building with a prison  

On the northwestern outskirts of Melekino, there is an unfinished complex of two four-story buildings. This is the prison for Russian refuseniks, which the military commonly refers to as the “basement.” According to satellite images, the building has been standing since at least 2009. Local residents cannot recall when construction was abandoned, but they say it was “a long time ago.” Next to the unfinished buildings is an abandoned boarding house with the almost ironic name “Mirny”(Peaceful).

The basement is located on the second slope. In the Melekino chat, a local resident complains that the area is “unpaved and lacks infrastructure, as if it were in the middle of the taiga.” She expresses her frustration that buses have not been running on the second slope since 2014, and locals rely on hitchhiking instead.

The unfinished building where Russian soldiers are being held does not have an exact address. Its owners are also unknown, as Russia and Ukraine have closed information about landowners in the context of the war.

Military officer Yegor Kharin says that he went to Melekino voluntarily — the man thought he was going to a transit center, but ended up in a prison for refuseniks.

“My mother died on June 8 [2025]. I went to the command with a death certificate. They were thinking about how to let me go on the 9th and 10th. I was in a hurry, saying I had to bury her on the 12th. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll sign a paper for you to leave for 10 days.’ They said that Melekino is a transit point, and I’ll spend a day there before continuing my journey. I came without any ulterior motive,” Kharin recalls.

The illnesses of Kharin’s mother have already become a reason for sanctions against the man for the second time. He signed a contract with the army in April 2024 and joined the 147th Sapper Regiment. His wife Irina (name changed at the request of the heroine), with pride declares that Kharin taught sapper work to more than nine thousand military personnel, for which he received two medals. According to Kharin, in October 2024, he went on vacation due to an injury and stayed at home to take care of his mother, who had suffered a stroke the day before.

In January, Kharin was accused of deserting his unit and was sent to a company that was building fortifications “behind the ribbon.” The man claims that he only received 20,000 rubles for this work, instead of the full soldier’s salary.

He tried to get out of there to attend the funeral, but ended up in Melekino.

In the basement, says Kharin, they were allowed to contact their families only once a week and for only a couple of minutes. The military police monitored their phone calls. When this was also banned, the military man’s wife, Irina, sounded the alarm. In a voice message, an anonymous deputy political officer from the 37th Brigade, using the pseudonym “Ivan Ivanov,” told her: “I sent requests to all those who gave their consent, and their cases were suspended and they were put back in service. However, [FULL NAME] refuses, so he is waiting for a trial. He doesn’t want to go to the “storm,” does he? Let him stay then.”

“Every time they came to us and said, ‘Write a report!’ And the report was in the style of, figuratively speaking, I want to atone for my mistake with my blood. Many people signed it. But I’m not a fool. I understood that this was a one-way trip,” says Kharin.

On August 11, ASTRA published a news story based on Irina and other military wives’ accounts about a basement in Melekino (the unfinished building in the resort village became the 24th place where Russian military personnel were detained that the editorial office found during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine). Kharin’s data was anonymized in the text, but the military police identified him based on his military specialty — he was the only sapper in the entire basement. According to Yegor, he was “beaten for an hour and a half” and forced to contact ASTRA and remove the publication. Military police officers said that the publication would make the unfinished building a target for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

However, instead of an attack by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a check was carried out in Melekino. According to Kharin, this happened the day after the beating. During the check, Kharin was placed in a pit in the village of Zlatoustovka (north of Melekino), and later, along with some of the military personnel held in Melekino, he was returned to Russian territory.

“People have been sitting there for eight months, and nothing has happened. But as soon as you wrote about it, everything started happening,” says Kharin.

At the time of the interview with ASTRA, they were being held captive in Kyakhta.

Repairs for refuseniks

Paradoxically, the Melekino abandoned building is constantly undergoing repairs. Kharin says that the money for the repairs was collected directly from the refuseniks, and the military police used threats to raise half a million rubles, which was used to install washbasins (but not toilets) in the basement.

A soldier with the call sign “Yakut” claims that the soldiers held in the Melekino abandoned building are divided into two categories: those who are in the basement and those who are repairing it. “These are the same prisoners: those who have refused to work and those who are in the Special Operations Center,” explains “Yakut.” “But those who have agreed to work have a few more privileges. They can wash every day, and they always have their phones with them, but they work like horses from morning to night. All you have time for is to sleep, and then you have to go back to work.” Kharin claims that you could get into the “worker” squad by paying a bribe to a man named Sergey with the call sign “Akela.”

Stanislav Kozlovsky, a native of Buryatia, says he has been doing “various jobs” in the abandoned building in Melekino, such as painting walls or collecting garbage, including urine bottles. He complains that “two doctors are sending him to Russia,” but instead he has been “locked up” in Melekino, and the situation has not improved. “They are probably waiting for my leg to fail completely and for me to be forced to use a wheelchair,” he says.

“They told me straight to my face that they only needed me for one time,” Kozlovsky said, referring to his participation in the assault.

The man assumes that during the time he spent in the basement, about 70-80 people agreed to go on the assault. He or other soldiers in the basement kept in touch with most of them, so they all know that the stormtroopers from the Melekine basement are no longer alive.

“Yakut” says that while he was in the basement, an 18-year-old guy with the call sign “Ray” escaped. “When I was taken away [after August 11, 2025], he had not yet been caught,” says “Yakut”.

ASTRA has established that the basement in Melekino was operational at least until October 29, 2025. What is happening there now is unknown.

***

Back in Russia, Egor Kharin has appealed to the military prosecutor’s office and the human rights commissioner with complaints about five months of work without a full salary and the basement in Melekino. As far as ASTRA is aware, Kharin’s appeals have not led to any results. The man claims that his ex-wife was recently stripped of her parental rights, leaving him legally responsible for his young son. However, ASTRA has not been able to independently verify this information. Kharin is still being held in Kyakhta.

Yakut is currently undergoing treatment at a hospital, apparently after returning to the front, according to his wife.

Stanislav Kozlovsky waited for the operation, passed a military medical commission, and received a category “G” (temporarily unfit for service).

Author: Elizaveta Chukharova