Two battalion commanders in Russia’s 5th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade “disappeared” after formally complaining unit leadership orders mass assaults with no chance of success, traffics drugs and looted property, steals state funds, and tortures soldiers unenthusiastic about attacking, the independent Russian news agency Astra reported on Friday.
The report said Maj. Yuriy Burakov, call sign “Sedoi,” commander of 2nd Battalion, 95th Regiment, 5th Brigade, was summoned to brigade headquarters in the Russian-occupied city Donetsk on July 27 to discuss a complaint letter he sent to army high command in Moscow alleging criminal activity in the brigade.
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Burakov’s spouse contacted the unit the next day because he didn’t answer her calls. Unit leadership told her Burakov deserted, Donetsk news reports said.
In Sept. 2024 four members of 5th Brigade were charged with the murder of US citizen and Texas resident Russell Bentley in Donetsk.
He had been working as a “war correspondent” for the Moscow-controlled Sputnik news agency but 5th Brigade soldiers mistook him as a spy. Bentley, 63, was tortured for more than 24 hours before he died under electroshock interrogation, on April 8.
Petr Lundstrem, Deputy Chair of the Public Chamber Commission on Culture in the Kremlin-sponsored Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), in a July 30 comment on his Telegram channel confirmed the Astra report about Burakov’s disappearance.
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According to Lundstrem, Burakov had sent a detailed report to “the highest military command and the prosecutor’s office” alleging criminal activity and gross negligence in the unit.
“I have received information that requires a thorough investigation: drug trafficking, robberies, looting, extortion, salary theft, trade in fuel and humanitarian aid, stolen vehicles and other details that would make your hair stand on end,” Lundstrem wrote. He said Burakov was “the second battalion commander (in the 5th Brigade) who has disappeared in this way.”
Lundstrem called on brigade leadership not to “zero” – a slang expression for murder by reason of convenience – Burakov and the second officer. “It is not too late to fix things,” Lundstrem pleaded.
Sviatoslav Golikov, a Donetsk-based military blogger and Ukrainian supporting Russian troops, in a July 31 comment on the two officers’ disappearance and leadership quality within the 5th Brigade, said that criminality was among the worst of all Russian units deployed to Ukraine, and that corruption and a culture of violence was so deeply embedded in the unit that “investigators come down [to Donetsk] from Moscow [to look into the 5th Brigade problems] and they never return.”
Russia’s 5th Motor Rifle Brigade was formed from militia in the city Donetsk fighting on the anti-Kyiv side following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The Kremlin inducted the unit into the Russian army in 2018. Russian leader Vladimir Putin awarded the 5th the elite “Guards” status in December 2024.
According to Ukrainian military reports, the last publicly-known commander of the 5th Brigade, Maj. Gen. Pavel Klimenko, died in an FPV drone strike on Nov. 6, 2025.
Kyiv Post was unable to verify claims of criminality within the 5th Brigade independently, but evidence of negligent and possibly inhumane leadership in the unit is well-established.
One of the most reliable accounts is that of Pvt. Roman Okuntsov, a Russian felon volunteering to fight in a combat unit in exchange for commutation of his prison sentence, who was assigned to the 5th Brigade in Oct. 2023 as a sniper.
Surrendering to Ukrainian forces in early June 2025, Okuntsov told Ukrainian journalist Yury Butusov extortion of money from soldiers was common practice in the unit.
“It’s scary, especially when commanders send hundreds of soldiers into the wilderness, and no one comes back,” Okuntsov said. “People are torn apart, that smell… It’s not been war there for a long time, but just business.”
Okuntsov accused brigade leadership of concealing his status as a prisoner of war to avoid paying mandatory assistance payments to his family.
A bribe to avoid military service costs 50,000 rubles ($622), he said.
The independent Russian media outlet Govorit Nemoskva in April 2024 published an investigative article tracking seven individual soldiers assigned to the 5th Brigade and missing for months.
Soldiers’ wives and mothers complained that their husbands and sons stopped communicating with them and that brigade leadership was doing nothing to determine whether the men were dead or alive.
5th Brigade’s top officers have according to Astra operated a torture site on the premises of Petrovskaya coal mine number 4-21, near Donetsk, since the mid-2010s. The most common tortures are holding a man in a dirt pit open to the elements, shocks with electricity, beatings and mock executions, a Nov. 2024 article about the site said.
Reportedly, brigade leadership tortures soldiers and civilians at the Petrovskaya mine, as well as at a former secret police office in downtown Donetsk, to extort money from detainees, to change the minds of men unwilling to attack Ukrainian positions, as punishment for failed attacks or lost military equipment, and to eliminate witnesses.
One wife identifying herself as a resident of Vladikavkaz told Govorit Memoskva unit commanders do not attempt to evacuated wounded soldiers: “We understand what’s going on in that unit, it’s complete chaos.”
Interviews of 5th Brigade service member relatives published by Radio Liberty in Nov. 2024 detailed charges of soldiers sent into combat while still wounded, failure by brigade leadership to recover the remains of soldiers killed in action, concealment by unit leadership of evidence of entire units having been wiped out in attacks, and diversion to unit leadership of dead soldiers’ salaries.
The independent group voenchast.ru, an NGO helping soldier relatives find missing service personnel, listed 150+ men still assigned to 5th Brigade and no longer in contact with their families, a Friday Kyiv Post check of the group’s site found. The most recent lost soldiers – Aleksei Bodhinin and Oleg Loginov – were reported missing by relatives on Wednesday.
Russian state television on its most popular news talk show Solovyev Live in a May 27 broadcast told Russian viewers content and reports regarding criminality and crushing casualties in 5th Brigade were fake news, and that news agencies and platforms alleging problems in the unit were guilty of Russophobia.
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