Torture, beatings, rape: The sadism of a Russian artillery brigade

The way Artyom Bykov ended up in the 237th Artillery Brigade of the Russian Army was difficult from the start.

In November 2024, he remembers standing in a police station in the Moscow region, listening to officers threaten to give him drugs if he didn't sign a contract to join the army.

In the past, Bykov had spent time in a drug rehabilitation center.

His mother, with whom he says he had constant conflicts due to his drug use and sexual orientation, called the police after a heated argument.

"I was in trouble with the police; my mother could always testify against me. I chose the lesser evil," the 24-year-old says in an interview with Radio Free Europe.

He reluctantly agreed to sign the contract and was sent to the brigade's training ground.

When superiors discovered he was bisexual, serious beatings began, Bykov says.

For decades, the Soviet and Russian armed forces have faced an institutionalized system of harassment and abuse, called "dedovshchina."

This system – a major source of concern for Russian civil society and the families of young soldiers – is widely tolerated by commanders as a means of imposing discipline on recruits and young soldiers.

Before Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, groups like the "Committee of Soldiers' Mothers" had spent years raising awareness of this problem and pressuring lawmakers and commanders to eliminate this practice.

In August 2020, a senior Defense Ministry official declared that “dedovshchina” had “completely disappeared” from the armed forces.

And, last September, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited and inspected the 237th Brigade, along with other units.

"If Putin knew about this chaos, the brigade would have been disbanded," Bykov says.

"Good cop, bad cop"

In a series of interviews in March and April from Georgia, where he went after deserting the army and fleeing the country, Bykov recounted his harrowing 11-month odyssey to the 273rd brigade's training grounds in Mulino, in the central Nizhny Novgorod region.

Bykov also provided correspondence, photographs, and audio recordings, which Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Russian Service and Systema – REL's investigative unit – used to corroborate many of the details of his account.

For years, his mother was unable to accept that he was bisexual, Bykov says.

He says he also had a drug addiction, which he links to "my repressed traumas... severe psychological problems, including an inferiority complex."

His mother had sent him to a drug rehabilitation program, first in 2022 and then again in 2023.

In November of the following year, when he returned home, he and his mother had an argument and she called the police, telling him that he was gay, used drugs, and was making her life difficult.

Police officers took him to a local station and convinced him to open his phone, where, he says, they found personal photos and videos.

He says the officers threatened to give him drugs if he didn't sign a contract to join the army, and warned him that Russian prison culture was hostile to gay or bisexual men.

"The game of 'good cop, bad cop' began. I got scared and saw that I had no choice," Bykov says.

"It seemed more rational to me to die in war than to go to prison, where I would be tortured and abused to death," he adds.

He received a payment of 2 million rubles (about $18.000) within ten days of signing the contract.

The amount – quite large by the standards of most Russians – reflects the system that Russian recruiters have built to ensure a steady flow of volunteers, while avoiding formal mobilization.

However, many soldiers regularly give large sums of money to their superiors as bribes.

"It looked like hell"

Bykov was enlisted as a private. At the brigade's training grounds in the town of Mulino, he completed basic training.

He says he was an involuntary fighter when recruits practiced martial arts, such as sambo. Later, they learned he was bisexual.

"I was brutally bullied. They put five bulletproof vests on me, it was very difficult to walk... I fainted, I fell. They put a gas mask on me, they forced me to run, crawl, and so on. It seemed like hell... but that was just the beginning," says Bykov.

He recalls being assigned to a sub-unit within the brigade – similar to military police and tasked with maintaining order and discipline, as well as finding soldiers who had deserted or left without permission.

The unit's commander, junior lieutenant Eldar Dadashev, was known for his sadism and violent outbursts when drunk, Bykov says.

"It looked like the Middle Ages. People were beaten with sticks. They were hit with hammers. They were handcuffed to radiators. They were deprived of water. They were thrown naked into pits," he recounts.

Dadashev's whereabouts are unclear and he was not available for comment.

Bykov says soldiers in the unit told him he was being sent to Ukraine.

Bykov's claims of daily beatings and violence are also partially supported by a statement submitted to a regional military prosecutor's office by another member of the brigade: Aidar Gafarov.

In his statement, which was analyzed by REL, Gafarov complains that Dadashev ordered him to put his hands on a table and repeatedly hit his fingers with a meat mallet, then hit him in the forehead, chest, and legs with the butt of a shovel. After a hard blow, he heard a crack and was no longer able to stand. He was then thrown naked into a pit – for an indefinite period.

After Dadashev was transferred, Gafarov was released and defected, and gave the statement a short time later.

Rape and threats of rape

Further evidence of institutionalized sadism in the unit came from a small file of documents and statements collected by a 34-year-old soldier named Yan Nikashkin, who had previously served a prison sentence.

Bykov says that he and Nikashkin were in the same disciplinary unit; Nikashkin regularly refused orders to beat other soldiers and was therefore beaten himself.

He, too, was not against Bykov's sexual orientation.

After deserting the unit last summer, Nikashkin collected testimony from other soldiers attesting to sexual violence in the brigade, which Bykov said he had given to him.

In a recording of a phone conversation between Nikashkin and another soldier, provided to REL, Nikashkin claims that Dadashev – the unit commander – forced another soldier to perform oral sex on an object.

Bykov says that, although he himself did not see any soldiers being raped at that facility, this was known among the soldiers.

Later in the conversation, another soldier, Yegor Ryazantsev, is heard describing another incident involving two of Dadashev's subordinate officers: a senior soldier, returning to the unit after being absent without leave, was forced to lie face down on the ground, his trousers were removed, and his hands and feet were tied to the ground. The two officers then inserted a pyrotechnic device into his anus and set it on fire.

According to Ryazantsev, the incident was recorded on video and shown to soldiers in the unit.

Neither Ryazantsev nor Nikashkin were available for comment.

“Go to hell”

Sometime early last fall, Bykov says his tense confrontation with Dadashev reached a climax, and the latter ordered him to be raped.

Bykov says he was lucky: the other soldiers refused to carry out the order, although they "degraded" him, isolating him and subjecting him to minor punishments, such as not shaking hands with others.

Bykov himself filed an official complaint with Dadashev's superiors and, according to him, was transferred to a unit that was not under his command.

Later, Bykov says he learned that Dadashev had also ordered the beating of a colonel – a much higher rank than him.

Military police investigators opened an investigation and, after finding a soldier with broken hands being held naked in a pit, arrested Dadashev in September and disbanded the disciplinary unit.

Bykov says he deserted the brigade the following month and left the country.

On February 16, while in Georgia, Bykov spoke to Nikashkin again on the phone and recorded the conversation.

Nikashkin said that the former commanders of the unit, responsible for the beatings and abuse, can “go to hell.” But, according to him, Putin cannot be reprimanded.

"Don't you dare touch the Supreme Commander and everyone else," he was heard saying in the recording.

"Whatever it is, this man has taken Russia to a new level, he has changed so much for the country."

"Putin has built a brilliant system: governance through fear," Bykov tells Radio Free Europe.

"His whole system is built on fear. But Russia will wither and people will see that he has no power. He never has," he concludes.