BBC in Russian: former Russian army officer reveals details behind torture of Ukrainian captives

Yefremov served as a senior lieutenant in Chechnya prior to the war. He arrived in Crimea on 10 February for exercise. The officer claims neither he nor his comrades-in-arms were aware that Russia would start a full-scale invasion of Ukraine within two weeks.

Yefremov decided to resign immediately after the war had started, he says. “My HQ commander reprimanded me, called me a traitor, a betrayer, a coward, and said he would shoot me in the leg,” the former officer told BBC.

Then Yefremov attempted to leave for Grozny, Chechnya, but his commander threatened him with prison for desertion, which scared Yefremov and forced him to return. He then filed an application requesting to be released from his position, but the application was not accepted.

“I spent three years clearing up mines in Chechnya, a land that went through two wars. I used to love my job and thought I was doing something useful,” he said.

Yefremov’s unit was ordered to head for Ukraine on 27 February, he says. Then he spent ten days at a military airfield in Melitopol.

“This was where I saw pillaging for the first time. Soldiers and officers would steal everything they could. I saw them going through every plane and every mopping room out there.”

In April, Yefremov’s unit was ordered to guard an HQ in Bilmak, the Zaporizhzhia region. “They brought three Ukrainian captives there one day. One of them admitted he was a sniper. I could see a glint in our colonel’s eyes when he heard that.

Yefremov says.

Once his commander shot a Ukrainian captive in the arm and leg, Yefremov says. When Yefremov told his commander that the man needed to be delivered to a hospital as soon as possible, his boss told him: “He’s gonna be alright, you’ll drive him there in the morning.” Then Yefremov and his associates would dress the Ukrainian captive in a Russian uniform to take him to the hospital secretly at night.

Yefremov says captives were held in a garage and were only allowed to have water and crisp bread. They were tortured and interrogated for a week, the officer says, each day and night, sometimes twice a day.

“[The commander] would stick a pistol to a guy’s head. The guy had a bandage on his eyes. So, the commander would say: “I will now count to three and then I’ll shoot your head off.”

I told him: sir colonel, he cannot hear you, you deafened him. The colonel said to me the guy was lying,” Yefremov says.

After he returned to Crimea sometime later, he tried to resign once again. To do so, he travelled to Grozny. “They wouldn’t allow me to resign at my own will, but rather fired me for inaptitude to the position held,” he says.

The former officer then managed to leave Russia after mobilisation had been declared in September.