‘I’d never heard of this type of torture before’ Human rights observer says Russia’s first monitoring mission in Ukraine documented the Kremlin’s evolving state terror system

In January 2025, Memorial Human Rights Center members visited Ukraine and conducted the first monitoring mission by Russian observers since the start of the full-scale invasion. They visited the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv regions, along with the cities of Poltava and Odesa. During the trip, Memorial’s team documented violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes committed by the Russian army. The group plans to present its findings later this spring. Meduza spoke with Memorial observer Vladimir Malykhin about what he saw in Ukraine and why the monitoring mission is crucial to improving our understanding of contemporary Russia.

— Can you describe what you saw, witnessing Ukraine in a full-scale war?

— You know, I expected worse. From what was coming through Telegram channels and media reports, everything seemed really bad there. I expected power outages, no hot water, constant shelling, destruction. Of course, there is destruction; there is shelling, and air-raid alerts happen regularly. But overall, life goes on.

We mostly stayed in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv. There were no power outages while we were there. The heating and water supply worked fine. Like I said, life goes on: people go to work, come home from work, take the bus, go to stores. It seems they’ve somehow gotten used to it and adapted to the situation.

— Over these three years, people in Ukraine have had to acclimate to cities getting shelled. Did you experience any attacks during your trip?

— On the first night after we arrived in Kyiv, there was an air-raid alert and, I think, a missile strike relatively close to us — about two kilometers [1.2 miles] away. We heard the explosion. In Kharkiv, there were regular air-raid alerts but no strikes nearby. The night before we arrived in Mykolaiv, there was a drone attack, and several small homes were damaged. There were also air-raid alerts while we were in Mykolaiv, but I didn’t see or hear any nearby strikes. We were in Kherson only during the daytime and could hear explosions, but that’s a frontline city.

I was more scared before I arrived. Because you’re traveling without really understanding where you’re going or what you’ll find there. Your imagination conjures up all kinds of horrors. But when we got there and saw a relatively normal life… I wasn’t really scared anymore. Maybe I just lacked the imagination to picture the consequences if something were to happen.

— What was Memorial’s goal in traveling to Ukraine?

— This was an exploratory trip. We wanted to see whether it was even possible for Russians to work in Ukraine. Our work has always been about monitoring and collecting information on human rights violations. Our colleagues did this in Chechnya and other regions of the North Caucasus. We also did this in Ukraine when we traveled there in 2016 [see below].

[During our trip in January 2025], we were accompanied by representatives of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, including [the organization’s director] Mr. Yevhen Zakharov. They have branches in several cities and conduct field consultations for the public. They notify people in advance that their lawyers will be visiting a particular town so that locals can come for legal advice and support. We attended several of these sessions, listened to conversations, and asked permission for a separate interview if we saw that someone’s issue aligned with our work.

There were other situations, too. For example, during a consultation, I once spoke with a woman who invited us back to her village to talk to others who hadn’t attended the session. So we went there, and she introduced us to one person, then another, then a third. Sometimes, after a consultation, we would drive around town and stop to ask locals what had happened there during the occupation. They might tell us something themselves or point us to someone else worth asking. Sometimes, these conversations turned out to be extremely valuable.

There were also cases where our colleagues at the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group pointed us to people they knew with important information. In those cases, we’d reach out and arrange a meeting.

— How independent were you on this trip?

— Obviously, we’re Russians, and moving around Ukraine with a Russian passport is… well, let’s just say, not easy. We probably wouldn’t have made it past the first checkpoint — if we even made it that far. It’s a country at war, after all.

That’s why we coordinated our visit with the Ukrainian authorities from the start. They accompanied us on this trip. Honestly, I don’t even know which agency they were from. Their job was to ensure our safety and allow us to do our work. If needed, they would explain to the local law enforcement who we were and why we were there. They also used their own channels to check where it was safe and where it wasn’t — so we didn’t end up anywhere too rough.

Of course, we informed them of our route and plans. Sometimes, they would suggest changes — for example, saying, “Mykolaiv is dangerous. Maybe it’s better to stay in Odesa?” We’d look at the map and say, “Odesa is really far. We’d spend half the day just traveling there and back. It’s better to stay in Mykolaiv.” And they would shrug and say: “Well, suit yourselves.”

They didn’t restrict our movements, accommodations, or whom we could meet and talk to. Sometimes, they would actually suggest that we visit a particular village and speak with people there. Because, for example, something was destroyed there or it had been under occupation, and violations of international humanitarian law had been documented there. They were present for some of our conversations, but not all. And they never told people what to say. What people said in their presence was no different from what they said when they weren’t there.

— How did people react to you and your questions?

— Reactions varied. [Memorial Center co-chairman] Mr. Oleg Orlov explained in detail who we were. He told them that he had personally spoken out against the war and had been imprisoned for it. [Orlov was freed in Russia's August 2024 prisoner exchange with the West.] He explained how Natasha [Morozova, another Memorial Center co-chair] and I had emigrated and that we were against the war.

Sometimes, people were surprised to hear we were from Russia. Their eyes would widen: “Wow!” But overall, I didn’t notice any particular hostility. There were cases where people refused to speak Russian. They would say, “I understand Russian, but, sorry, I speak Ukrainian.” In these cases, we asked questions in Russian, and they answered in Ukrainian. Maybe not every single word was clear, but we could understand the general meaning of what they were saying.

There were times when people refused to talk at all. But in my opinion, this was not so much because we were from Russia but rather because it was just too painful for them to revisit those events and relive everything again mentally. I spoke with a man in a small town outside Mykolaiv, and he said, “I don’t have any particular hostility toward Russians — I lived in Moscow myself and studied there. But, sorry, I just can’t talk about this. It’s too painful.” I understand that.

Of course, when they spoke about the [Russian soldiers] who came to their towns, they did so with deep hostility, verging on hatred. Sometimes, they used harsh words, calling them “orcs” or even worse. But quite often, when they used such words, they made it clear that they were not referring to us [Memorial’s staff]. In most cases, they distinguished between us and those who had come as occupiers.

— What types of human rights violations were you able to document?

— We didn’t uncover anything fundamentally new — after all, this horror has been known for three years now. Local human rights organizations operate in Ukraine; international ones like Human Rights Watch do, too. There were a few cases — though not many — where people told us something new.

First, we tried, as much as possible, to document bombings and shellings of civilian targets. For example, in Mykolaiv, we visited a site that had been hit literally the night before we got there. We inspected the area — no military facilities were there, only destroyed residential buildings.

We focused on sites that had been damaged over the past year. Damage from two years ago is sometimes harder to assess. Take Saltivka — it had been shelled since the first days of the war, especially Northern Saltivka. In 2022, the front line was very close — Russian forces were advancing on Kharkiv and had reached the outskirts of Saltivka. So, we can’t say with certainty that there were no Ukrainian troops in that area then. And if, for example, Ukrainian forces were positioned between residential buildings, then the shelling of a civilian area turns into a battlefield engagement — and becomes a legitimate military action, as much as war can ever be “legitimate.”

However, Northern Saltivka was shelled even later — in 2023 and 2024 — when the front line was far away. Any military presence in 2024 would have been difficult to conceal, and we didn’t notice anything indicating that Ukrainian troops had been stationed there.

Other crimes included the abduction or forced disappearance of civilians in occupied territories. People vanished during sweeps, at checkpoints, or were simply grabbed off the street and taken away. The use of torture on detainees. Extrajudicial executions. The existence of secret prisons. We also had several meetings with former Ukrainian prisoners of war — we documented their treatment [at the hands of the Russians].

— Do you have a procedure for verifying the accounts people share with you?

— I’ll put it this way: We didn’t request people’s medical records. We mainly documented their personal accounts — what happened to them directly or what they witnessed. The stories of people who had been in similar circumstances were consistent, and we had no reason to doubt their credibility. Of course, we can’t be certain that every witness or victim was accurate in every detail they recalled. If one person’s testimony mentioned someone else, we also tried to speak with that person and checked whether their accounts aligned. But we were somewhat limited — over the course of two weeks, we traveled across Ukraine, and we simply didn’t have the time or resources to verify every single story.

— Is the situation you observed in Ukraine’s liberated territories different from what Memorial documented in the Donbas between 2014 and 2016, when it was working there with a monitoring mission?

— In 2016, I was in territories controlled by the Ukrainian authorities. The fighting was still ongoing at the time, but its intensity had dropped sharply compared to 2014–2015, and the front line had stabilized.

Back then, we met both with those who had stayed behind when separatists took over their town — people who had waited for the return of the legitimate government — and with those who had left areas that ended up under the control of the [Luhansk People’s Republic] and [Donetsk People’s Republic] following the Minsk Agreements. They shared many different stories, including some quite horrifying ones — about looting, pillaging, abductions, unlawful detentions, torture, and even murders. There were complaints not only about the actions of the separatist authorities and their forces but also about soldiers from various Ukrainian military units, particularly the volunteer battalions, the dobrobats.

One important difference, in my view, is that there was much less systemic, centralized organization back then. The Russian security forces’ involvement on the side of the separatists was much more limited, and efforts were made to conceal it, claiming that it was all just local “miners and tractor drivers” rising up against the “Kiev junta.” It was clear, of course, that Russian security forces were there — both active-duty soldiers and retired volunteers, including veterans of the Chechen wars. And they brought to the Donbas the same methods they had used in the North Caucasus: kidnappings, basement prisons, torture… 

But I think there was a significant element of local excesses and lawlessness on the ground — it was more chaos and less of a centralized organization of terror. Evidently, Russia wasn’t preparing then for a serious full-scale invasion and a total crackdown on all resistance. Local initiative drove much of what happened in the Donbas, with field commanders and militia fighters making the key decisions. This included all kinds of people, many with criminal backgrounds or tendencies.

Something similar, by the way, happened on the Ukrainian side in the first months of the war. No one expected the attacks in 2014; the army was unprepared, and to a large extent, the first blows from the Russians were taken by the dobrobats. And they, too, were formed from all kinds of people, including those with criminal leanings or men who became intoxicated by holding a gun — people who saw every Donbas resident as a traitor and a “separatist.” Discipline varied greatly in these units, depending on their commanders, and it took time for the Ukrainian authorities to bring them under control and ensure they followed the law. But these were excesses, not state policy. At least, I have no evidence that the Ukrainian government and security forces at that time pursued a policy of terrorizing the population.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the behavior of Russian troops in the territories they occupied after invading Ukraine in 2022.

— At Memorial’s conference in Berlin in late February, you and your colleagues also said that Russian soldiers’ policy of mass crimes in Ukraine is a direct continuation of what happened in Chechnya and Syria. What evidence supports this?

— Their modus operandi speaks volumes. Let’s start with the level of organization: When Russian troops take over a Ukrainian village, within two or three days, they conduct checks on the civilian population. They verify documents, inspect homes, and so on. Nearly all the people we interviewed told us that by the time these checks began, Russian security forces already had lists of the local residents who fell into categories of interest to them: current or former Donbas combat participants, former and active military personnel, government officials, police officers and security service employees, and volunteers.

Hunters who owned weapons were also checked, but only superficially. For example, one former hunter told me that he still had a gun safe. When the Russians came to search his home, he explained that he had surrendered his gun since he no longer hunted, and they left him alone. But he was also told that on the next street, when a Donbas War veteran was detained, the Russians said, “He’s a dead man.” And indeed, sometime later, the hunter told me, they turned over a body to the veteran’s relatives.

What I’m saying is that these lists were compiled [by Russian forces] in advance somehow. Maybe they got part of the information from their agents. They also managed to capture some documents. For example, a man from a small town in the Mykolaiv region told us that papers from his local military enlistment office had been moved to a nearby technical school. They were supposed to be either evacuated or destroyed, but there wasn’t enough time. The Russians seized the building, and the documents fell into their hands.

The process of gathering, organizing, and distributing such information to soldiers on the ground — on the scale of Ukraine’s occupied southern regions — demands high-level coordination. This isn’t just rogue soldiers.

Afterward, Donbas War veterans, sometimes their relatives, and former or active military personnel were taken to detention facilities, where they were subjected to various cruelties. It’s important to note that locals don’t refer to these places as “filtration camps.” In Ukraine, as Mr. Zakharov [from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group] explains, filtration refers to the process that occurs when Ukrainians travel from occupied territories into Russian-controlled areas. This happened frequently in the early stages of the war, for example, when people fled Mariupol. It still happens now, but what I’m talking about is what happened to people inside the occupied territories, regardless of whether they were trying to leave or not.

— So, the terminology gets a bit confused here because, during the Chechen wars, filtration specifically referred to screening residents of occupied settlements, no?

— In the context of the Chechen wars, yes, that’s how I understand it. The difference is that in Chechnya, the Russians didn’t have such detailed information on members of Chechen armed groups. As a result, they detained a lot of people, including many who had nothing to do with the fighting. They were brutal to these people — some were pressured to become secret informants, to report on militants or their accomplices. Others were forced to confess if the authorities suspected them of any involvement.

What happens in Ukraine resembles the events in Chechnya but with some refinements. In Ukraine, they operate more selectively.

For example, a man from a village outside Chernihiv told us that he had three sons. Another villager informed the Russian troops that one of his sons had fought in the Donbas. So, they took away all three sons and held them for several days at an old sawmill, torturing and beating them. Then, they took them to a field and executed them. One of them was lucky — the bullet only grazed him, and he managed to escape and return home.

Or here’s another case: I spoke with a woman whose husband was part of a self-defense unit (these units formed spontaneously in different communities at the start of the war to resist the invasion). Her husband was killed in battle, and she was detained for several days — interrogated and investigated.

Some people who spoke to us said they were pressured for information: “Who is your handler in the Ukrainian Security Service? Who do you report to? Who gives you orders? Who else do you know who served?” There were cases where people were released in exchange for a promise to cooperate in secret [with Russian security forces]. One man said he made such a promise but, after his release, managed to escape to unoccupied territory and informed the authorities.

— Did this kind of thing happen in Syria, too?

— We don’t know of any significant involvement of Russian ground troops in the Syrian Civil War. The regular Russian army was present there with artillery units and radiation, chemical, and biological defense forces, who had little direct interaction with the local population, as well as military intelligence special forces, whose activities remain largely unknown. And, of course, there were mercenaries — the notorious Wagner contractors. Their treatment of captured people is well documented — Novaya Gazeta has written about this.

But when we talk about Syria, we’re referring more to the development of strikes on civilian targets. In Chechnya, such attacks happened regularly. One well-known case is the missile strike on a market in Grozny [on October 21, 1999,] that killed 140 people. And that’s just one of many examples. In Syria, such strikes became a deliberate tactic of the Russian-Assad forces. By creating a humanitarian catastrophe in targeted regions and cities, they made defense as difficult as possible and, in turn, sped up their capture. There is extensive documentation of strikes in Syria against clearly civilian targets, including hospitals, markets, and bakeries.

Moreover, both in Chechnya and Syria, Russia used the so-called “double-tap” tactic. First, a missile would strike a building. Then, as rescuers and doctors rushed to help the wounded, another strike would hit the same location 5–10 minutes later — killing the survivors of the first strike as well as those who came to help. On our trip in Ukraine, we didn’t personally encounter such cases, but they’ve been reported in the news.

— After liberation, people were also subjected to screenings, and there are currently numerous criminal cases in Ukraine on charges of collaboration. How do Ukrainian filtration procedures differ from what Russian troops did?

— I’m afraid I can’t answer that question because I didn’t talk to anyone who went through the Ukrainian filtration system. On our first trip, it would have been inappropriate for us, as Russians, to say, “Let’s check how well you Ukrainians comply with international humanitarian law.”

We would now be ready to work on both sides of the [conflict], but I fear that access to the Russian side is just too dangerous. Of course, it would be good to speak with people who have gone through Ukrainian filtration procedures — with those who lived in territories in Russia’s Kursk region that were occupied by Ukrainian forces — and ask what kind of interactions they had with the Ukrainian military.

— Is anyone conducting that kind of work on the Russian side?

— I know there are independent Telegram channels that report, for example, on shelling of their regions by Ukrainian forces. They can likewise document cases where strikes hit civilian targets where there was no military presence. But I’m afraid there’s no systematic human rights work being conducted there. At least, I’m not aware of any.

— Memorial has said it plans to issue a report based on the results of your trip. Are you doing anything else with the testimonies you collected? Are you sharing this information, for example, with any law enforcement agencies?

— First and foremost, I see our task as documenting and publicizing what is happening. It’s difficult for me to say at this stage whether what we’ve gathered meets the threshold for legal evidence. However, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group works in a much more systematic way, and they do pass information to law enforcement agencies. The information we collected during our trip is already with the Kharkiv group — if necessary, they can share it with investigators.

Memorial has been speaking for many years about the system of state terror [in Russia], including the state-orchestrated system of war crimes. And unfortunately, what we see in Ukraine does not just confirm our previous findings but shows that this system of state terror is evolving and becoming more sophisticated. People in Ukraine, Russia, and around the world need to know about this.

— Do you think it’s possible to break this system?

— Not under the current Russian government, of course. It’s impossible because, even if this system isn’t designed at the very top, the top leadership knows exactly what’s going on.

During the Chechen wars, Memorial repeatedly submitted reports to Russian law enforcement agencies, detailing crimes and naming, if not individuals, then at least the military units where personnel were likely involved in these crimes. Only a handful of perpetrators were ever brought to justice — and even that required enormous efforts from civil society, the media, and human rights organizations. In the vast majority of cases, crimes went unpunished. This fact alone shows that the authorities are perfectly content with this system’s existence.

— Why do you think that is?

— Maybe it’s because, from their perspective, the system works. Like, Chechnya used to be a problem. And through total terror — first by federal forces, then with the help of Kadyrov and his loyalists — Chechnya was pacified, at least on the surface. It’s no longer an unstable, war-torn region seeking independence. For the Russian authorities, the problem has been solved.

It’s possible that those at the top have come to the belief that the end justifies the means — that total terror is an effective way to resolve an issue. 

If the goal is to seize a village and clear it of militants, then, in their logic, just level half the village and gun down the other half. The problem is solved at the battalion or company level. Then, if we apply the same approach to cleansing an entire district, the problem is solved at a higher level. Terrorize an entire republic, and you solve it at the federal level. At every stage of the hierarchy, this brutal mechanism of terror appears to “work” — at least in the eyes of those giving the orders. Yes, at the cost of human lives — but who at the top cares about human lives?

In a certain sense, this approach is also simpler to implement than complex coalition agreements, negotiations, or setting up intricate systems of checks and balances. In Chechnya, considering and balancing the competing interests of numerous factions would have been difficult and time-consuming, with no guarantee of success. But crushing all opposition and terrorizing them so that no one dares even to whisper — that’s simple and straightforward.

The North Caucasus, and Chechnya in particular, has often served as a testing ground for repressive mechanisms that later spread across the rest of Russia. Torture, on the scale and in the form practiced in Chechnya, was initially absent in most of Russia — but over time, it started spreading throughout the country. It’s not universal yet, but at the same time, reports of severe torture in police stations no longer shock people. 

Here’s another example: For years, the Chechen authorities have practiced kidnapping and taking hostage the relatives of those they consider a threat. During the war, these were often relatives of separatist leaders or field commanders — Aslan Maskhadov’s family members, for instance, were kidnapped. Today, it happens to opposition bloggers who criticize Kadyrov. Before long, this practice started appearing in central Russia — with people like [Alexey Navalny’s brother], Oleg Navalny, or Ivan Zhdanov’s father, [Yuri Zhdanov].

— The war in Ukraine has basically unfolded live on television. With so much already available online, was there anything you encountered on this trip that surprised you?

— Strictly speaking, I wasn’t at the front. We were behind Ukrainian lines. It’s true that a lot is already known about this war — there are countless documents, photos, videos, and firsthand accounts from participants and witnesses. Overall, I didn’t come across anything fundamentally new that I hadn’t heard about before. But, of course, reading about something in the news and hearing about it directly from those who lived through it — especially the victims — is an entirely different experience.

One story that struck me particularly hard was from a former Ukrainian prisoner of war who described the torture he endured. At a prison in Mordovia, where he was held, POWs were forced to stand with their hands behind their heads, facing a wall, without moving. From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., with only short breaks — for six months. Later, the conditions were somewhat relaxed. While it’s well documented that a vast number of POWs have been tortured in Russia, I’d never heard of this specific type of torture before.