In Melekino, near Russian-occupied Mariupol, Russian soldiers who refuse to fight (refusniks) have reportedly been held for months in a basement.
The independent Russian outlet Astra, citing sources, reports that a soldier from Buryatia – identified under the assumed name “Yegor Kharin” for safety – arrived in Melekino in June 2025 and was immediately taken to the basement of an abandoned construction site.
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Melekino, a resort village on the Sea of Azov about 20 kilometers from Mariupol, has been under Russian control since 2022. Astra says the unfinished building is the 24th such detention site it has identified since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion.
“Darkness, gloom, no air, damp, cardboard boxes, pallets, bottles,” is how Kharin described the basement.
According to him, soldiers there said they had been held for eight months, sometimes a year.
“Those who left their unit without leave (AWOL), deserters, and non-deserters – they put all them there,” he said.
Some detainees were even listed as missing in action while their relatives were told they were on combat missions.
Another Buryat soldier, “Yuri Chiplakov” (call sign “Yakut”), told Astra that at one point 98 people were crammed into the basement, sleeping in shifts.
A third soldier, “Stanislav Kozlovsky,” added: “It always stinks terribly there… They keep you like cattle, or worse.” He said some detainees had never passed a military medical exam and included mentally ill or disabled soldiers.
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Those held in Melekino were mostly servicemen from Yakutia, Trans-Baikal Territory, and Buryatia, many of them from the 37th Brigade, which fought near Kyiv in 2022 and later in assaults such as the battle for Vuhledar.
The basement sits just 300 meters from a functioning sanatorium; soldiers were reportedly allowed to use the restroom only once a day, and only when tourists could not see them.
Kharin said he went to Melekino voluntarily, believing it was a transit point where he would be held briefly after requesting leave for his mother’s funeral.
He had signed his contract in April 2024 and served as a sapper in the 147th Engineer Regiment. After being accused of AWOL and sent to build fortifications, he again requested time off and was instead diverted to Melekino. There, he was allowed to contact family once a week for only a few minutes under supervision – until even that was banned.
“Every time, they would come to us and say, ‘Write a report!’ In the spirit of, figuratively speaking, wanting to atone for my mistake with blood. Many signed,” Kharin said. “But I understood that this was a one-way street.”
After Astra published a story about the basement on Aug. 11, still anonymizing him, military police identified Kharin by his sapper specialty – he was the only one. He says he was “beaten for about an hour and a half,” forced to demand Astra delete the post. Military police claimed it would make the site a target for Ukrainian strikes.
Instead, Russians launched an inspection raid in Melekino the very next day. Kharin was taken to a pit in the nearby village of Zlatoustivka and later moved with other detainees back into Russian territory. When he spoke to Astra, they were being held in Kyakhta.
According to Astra, the abandoned building in Melekino is regularly repaired, with military police allegedly extorting money directly from detainees – about half a million rubles – to install washbasins ahead of inspections.
Those who agreed to work on renovations received slightly better treatment. “Those who agreed to work have slightly more privileges – they can wash every day, they always have their phones… but they work like horses, from morning until night,” said “Yakut.”
Kozlovsky said he performed cleaning and construction tasks despite health problems: “They told me straight out that they only needed me for this one time,” he said, referring to an assault.
Kozlovsky estimates that during his time in the basement, around 70-80 detainees eventually agreed to take part in assault operations. He and others held there had been in touch with most of them – which is why, he said, they are certain that none of the stormtroopers taken from the Melekino basement survived.
Astra reports the Melekino basement was still operating as of Oct. 29, 2025. Kharin remains held in Kyakhta. “Yakut” is now receiving treatment in a hospital, while Kozlovsky underwent surgery, was re-evaluated, and classified as temporarily unfit for service.
Reports of the Russian command mistreating its own soldiers continue to surface.
In late January 2025, Russian propagandists circulated a video online claiming it showed Ukrainian troops being taken to combat missions in handcuffs.
However, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation said the footage actually depicts Russian servicemen, not Ukrainians.
Kyiv Post reviewed the video and confirmed the soldiers were not wearing Ukrainian uniforms and spoke with Russian accents. The clip first appeared on the Russian Telegram channel Russia Against Mobilization, captioned as troops from the 108th Airborne Assault Regiment being transported to an assault “in handcuffs.”
It was later reposted on TikTok by user Zaliv_Rodnoy, who wrote that soldiers of Russia’s 155th Marine Brigade were being chained together to prevent desertion. After the video went viral, the uploader confirmed in the comments that the men were Russian.
Despite this, Russian propaganda channels quickly republished the footage with false captions claiming the “Kyiv regime” was sending Ukrainian soldiers to the front “in shackles.”
The precise unit in the video remained disputed. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation attributed the footage to the 15th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, while other accounts referenced Russia’s 108th Airborne Assault Regiment or the 155th Marine Brigade.
In the summer of 2024, Russian milblogger Yegor Guzenko published footage from a basement in the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic,” where Russian soldiers accused of disobedience were being held. Many of the men shown were seriously wounded, with some missing limbs.
“This is how [the soldiers] live, [expletive] in the Russian army. Those who are no longer needed are hidden from everyone in pigsties,” Guzenko said.
In another case, the independent outlet Astra released video from a basement in Rozsipne, inside the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic,” depicting Russian troops who refused to fight.
The soldiers were seen sitting or lying on wooden boards or directly on concrete, relying on flashlights for light and plastic bottles as improvised toilets.
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