Surviving military man, the author of a video about 102 prisoners who disappeared in the war, went through torture in the basement and told about the fate of his colleagues. He deserted from the Russian Armed Forces and is in hiding. The military police came to his registered address and pepper-sprayed the door.
In October 2024, ASTRA reported 102 missing out of 108 prisoners who had signed a contract with military unit 40463 in the Volgograd region. They were all sent to the Luhansk region of Ukraine. On the way, a prisoner with the call sign “Simon” (Aram Simonyan) recorded a video with the military. A year later, he contacted the editorial office, telling details about the disappearance of colleagues, torture in the basement and escape from the front.
“I saw your video. How are they missing? They are dead, specifically dead after the shelling. They can’t be missing in any way, as we pointed out to the commanders that one and the other had died there. But the management didn’t care, and because we talked a lot, we were tortured and beaten,” says Simonyan.
According to 39-year-old Simonyan, he was sent to a penal colony for driving cars for hire, in one of which drugs were found. The man received 9 years in prison. He contracted hepatitis while still in jail, and in 2023 he was admitted to IK-24 in the Volgograd region. There, on April 22, 2024, Simonyan signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and on April 24, along with about 110 other prisoners, he was sent to Volgograd. They took away all their bank cards, phones, passports, and gave them only a copy of their military ID. So on May 5, he found himself in a position in a cave on the border of Luhansk and Donetsk regions. From there, two groups of 8 people on two infantry fighting vehicles went on a combat mission to Berestovoe.
“They [the Ukrainian Armed Forces] stopped infantry fighting vehicles with artillery, and the infantry were hit with FPV drones. The battalion commander told us: “Fuck you, f***ing meat, f***ing prisoners, you’re all going to die here.” I got up in response and replied that I wasn’t going to die here. For this, they immediately sent me to the assault. I said that I would not be able to navigate, my eyesight was bad, I was not a military man, the task was impossible. They knocked out a tooth, broke two ribs and threw me into a pit, there are living eyewitnesses to all this. They fired a burst at my feet,” Simonyan says.
The man was held in a pit at the “poultry house” near Berestov, where a commander from the Rostov region with the call sign “Kasper” “discharged stun guns on me.” Then Simonyan was imprisoned for 10 days in the basement of a dilapidated three-story house near Kamyshevakha. According to him, the battalion commander of the first penal division, Alexei Korchagin, with the call sign “Cap,” shot people. He is suspected in the killing of Russian soldiers and torture. In the summer of 2024, Simonyan was wounded twice in the leg and arm. After being discharged from the hospital, his leave was extended for 45 days, but the commanders of “Zhadny” and “Zolotoy” did not believe this, began threatening to kill hin and declared Simonyan in the SOCH (unauthorized abandonment of the unit, — ed.).
After that, the military police came to Simonyan’s apartment in Pyatigorsk, trying to get him out of there. The apartment itself belongs to Simonyan’s sister, who has been living in the United States for several years and rents a place to her friend. As a result, surveillance cameras caught the moment when poliean sprays liquid from a pepper spray bottle on the door. Simonyan says that the tenant who came home from work after that suffered burns to her hands and face when she tried to enter the house.
