1/ A Russian schoolteacher mobilised despite ill health has described his time in a notorious Russian army unit. He was told to execute POWs, saw Russian deserters being tortured, and was repeatedly beaten. After he deserted, his lawyer tried to turn him in. ⬇️ 
2/ Ilya Elokhin is now in Armenia, seeking political asylum in the West. He says he was opposed to the war when it began and had hoped that his physical ailments would keep him out of it. However, while on sick leave from his job as a primary school teacher, he was mobilised.
3/ Elokhin was sent to the 9th Separate Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade (military unit 71443), formerly part of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' (DPR) armed forces. The unit is notorious for its mistreatment of its own members.
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1840808717765206058
4/ Over 1,500 people have signed an online petition asking for an investigation into its commanders, including failure to provide medical care, extortion, stealing from the cards of the dead and missing, beating and imprisoning men, and sending the wounded and sick into assaults.
5/ Elokhin's account corroborates many of these accusations. He was put to work in a clerical role, filling out documents and taking identification photographs of the dead – a gruesome task which he says "completely broke my psyche: I became even more afraid."
6/ He was relentlessly pressured by his commanders with threats of being sent to the front line. One day a POW was brought to him. "His eyes were covered with red tape, and his hands were covered, and his feet."
7/ "The commander said: “You haven’t killed anyone yet, you need to kill someone. Here’s an automatic rifle for you.” I said: “I’m not going to kill anyone” — for which I got what I got, of course: they beat me up.
8/ "And then they said: “If you tell your family or anyone else, we’ll reset your account [execute him].” I don’t know what happened to this prisoner next: according to rumors, he was taken to zero [the front line], and at zero they usually reset your account."
9/ Deserters were imprisoned in a pit for a few days before being sent into assaults – "none of them returned". If they didn't want to fight, they were immediately executed. Others were tortured.
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1922273026613096472
10/ "In my presence they brought in two deserters, they began to interrogate them, called them traitors, beat them on the legs with a stick. Then they sat them on a chair, poured water on them. They connected iron wires to their fingers and turned on the current.
11/ "I saw all this, I said: you can’t do that. They said, if you try to tell someone, we will do the same to you."
12/ Elokhin was also threatened, beaten, and assaulted with a stun gun. He was made to dress "in women’s clothes, in some kind of black mask and [they] took pictures" which they threatened to publish if he disobeyed, to depict him as a BDSM participant.
13/ Soldiers were systematically robbed by their commanders. Convicts were immediately sent to the front line as they didn't have anything worth stealing. Contract soldiers and the mobilised were kept back for a week or two to be stripped of their money.
14/ "First, the commanders will take money from them, and then they will go to the front. The commanders have all the data, all the PIN codes for the phones — they have a whole box of phones and bank cards, all of this is given to them before they are sent."
15/ Elokhin faced a worsening kidney disease by the end of 2024. Although he was diagnosed with a kidney stone that needed an urgent operation, his commander refused to allow it and threatened: "We'll send you to the front lines, you'll come home in a black bag."
16/ Elokhin decided to desert and contacted the activist group 'Go to the Forest' for help. He devised an escape plan: to fake a divorce and claim that he needed to travel to Donetsk city to marry a local girl who had been recommended to him by his comrades.
17/ His commanders accepted this story. As Elokhin says, "They marry some of [their men] to local girls they know, and then they send this soldier to the front. He dies, and they divide the [death compensation] payments between themselves."
18/ When he got to Donetsk, he took a taxi to Rostov in Russia and bluffed his way through checkpoints using a falsified leave sheet. At the last checkpoint, "They checked me, a red light came on, and they told me: you need to go to the 'black room'."
19/ "I go in — there are people with rifles and truncheons. And on the right side they have a pit. I immediately realized what it was: there were five or six people sitting in it, they were apparently trying to escape. They sat me down at a table and began to interrogate me."
20/ The checkpoint personnel accepted Elokhin's story and documents, and allowed him to travel on to Rostov. From there he went to Perm via Moscow, and on to his home town. He was able to get an operation for his kidney stone and to hire a lawyer to help him.
21/ However, the lawyer told him that he had to "go back to the unit, but don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. We’ll give you a certificate that you were on the [medical] operation.” I say, “Do you understand what you’re saying?"
22/ "If I go there now, they’ll first make fun of me and then send me on an assault. Or maybe they’ll reset my account right away.” It turns out that she’d already talked to my commander and told him where I was. Apparently, she was paid for it."
23/ Realising he had to leave immediately. Elokkin fled to Armenia via Belarus, Azerbaijan and Tunisia. He is one of a few hundred Russian deserters who have taken refuge there. Like many of the others, he is currently seeking political asylum in the EU. /end
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