‘It’s Not A War Crime If It Was Enjoyable.’ Three Years Of Gory Messages By A Russian General

On October 18, 2022, roughly eight months after Russia launched its all-out warfare on Ukraine, a high-ranking Russian officer texted a number of messages to his spouse and a number of other acquaintances again house in Russia.

The officer, then-Colonel Roman Demurchiev, commander of the forty second Guards Motor Rifle Division, bragged about how his troopers had simply stormed a “strongpoint” in Ukraine, and had captured 4 prisoners-of-war.

In a message to his spouse, Aleksandra, he despatched {a photograph} that gave the impression to be a number of human ears, blackened and hanging from a metallic pipe.

“What do you do with them afterward?” Aleksandra wrote.

“I’ll make a garland and give it as a gift,” Demurchiev, who was promoted to main common the next 12 months, responded.

“Like pig ears for beer,” she wrote.

The gory banter, and proof of doable warfare crimes by a senior Russian navy officer, are among the many revelations contained in three years of communications — textual content and audio messages, images, movies — purportedly despatched and obtained by Demurchiev.

Schemes verified the authenticity of the communications, working with forensics laboratories within the United States and information researchers in Germany.

The full Schemes video report, in Ukrainian, may be considered here.

RFE/RL reporters additionally corroborated lots of the dates and occasions listed within the information utilizing particulars supplied by troopers from Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, whose items fought, and proceed to struggle, towards troopers beneath Demurchiev’s command.

Contacted by RFE/RL by cellphone, Demurchiev, 49, hung up upon being requested concerning the remedy of prisoners of warfare.

The Russian Defense Ministry didn’t reply to RFE/RL’s emails relating to its insurance policies on the remedy of prisoners of warfare.

Throughout Russia’s warfare on Ukraine, which hits its fourth anniversary on February 24, there have been widespread allegations of, and ample proof pointing to, warfare crimes being dedicated by Russian items.

Among the best-known examples was from Bucha, a city north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, that was occupied by Russian forces for simply over a month.

After the Russian troops withdrew, residents found dozens of lifeless our bodies, overwhelmingly civilians that appeared to have been summarily executed or tortured, with corpses mendacity on streets or piled in basements.

With the assistance of navy data left behind in Bucha and cross-referenced with social media profiles, RFE/RL recognized a number of members of 1 explicit unit — the 234th Pskov Regiment — that was straight concerned within the killings of civilians.

In the correspondence obtained by RFE/RL, the dialog concerning the mutilated ears started when Demurchiev wrote to a different military officer who was a longtime acquaintance: Major General Igor Timofeev, the primary deputy commander of the thirty sixth Army.

“You didn’t touch the ears? Like when we were kids?” Timofeev replied in response.

It’s unclear precisely what Timofeev was referring to.

However, each he and Demurchiev fought in Chechnya within the 2000s, through the battle that ravaged the Russian area.

Demurchiev then began a separate chat on the identical topic together with his spouse, Aleksandra. In one in all her responses, she additionally appeared to check with Chechnya when reacting to the ear picture:

“I thought those were tales from Chechnya times,” she wrote. “Turns out it is true.”

Aleksandra couldn’t be reached for remark.

Russian forces have been accused of amputating the ears of prisoners prior to now.

During the First Chechen War, within the Nineteen Nineties, journalists and human rights activists documented a number of reviews of mutilations by Russian troops. In 2000-2001, through the second battle within the area, Human Rights Watch and the Russian rights group Memorial described our bodies with extreme mutilations, together with scalping, damaged limbs, and cut-off fingers and ears.

Russian media have described related practices by Chechen fighters.

In 2022, Schemes obtained one other sequence of recordings of calls from Russian troopers, intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence. In one, a soldier might be heard saying of a prisoner: “He would not discuss. They reduce off his ear.”

Demurchiev talked about amputating ears once more in late 2024 in a voice message despatched to a contact recognized as Valery Nepop.

RFE/RL was capable of decide that Nepop was probably an officer with the Federal Security Service, Russia’s fundamental home intelligence company.

“You’re the boss of a super organization, that’s my dream,” Demurchiev may be heard saying. “Damn, and you even cut off the ears. But at our age they don’t do that anymore; we just give out the orders.”

Some of the supplies despatched or obtained by Demurchiev showcased darkish, juvenile, and sometimes sadistic humor amongst his colleagues or acquaintances, a lot of whom are Russian officers.

In one obtained by Demurchiev in December 2023, a stay mouse is proven tied up by its legs — spread-eagled, as if it have been being crucified — as a Russian voice pretends to interrogate the mouse, providing it a cigarette.

Demurchiev replied with a smiley-face emoji to the video, despatched by Lieutenant General Mikhail Kosobokov, commander of the forty ninth Combined Arms Army.

In a separate message despatched to Kosobokov, Demurchiev despatched a Russian-language meme that stated: “It’s not a warfare crime if it was enjoyable.”

In one other sequence of messages with an individual who gave the impression to be a navy intelligence officer connected to the FSB named Roman, Demurchiev requested Roman what to do a couple of Ukrainian prisoner in his custody.

“I’ve got one prisoner… I can gift him to you,” he wrote within the October 2023 messages. “He’s sitting in a pit… What should I do with him — dispose of him or give him to you?”

“We didn’t have time to torture him, so the info was friendly,” Demurchiev wrote. “But you’ve got plenty of time — you can use tools that make people tell the truth.”

RFE/RL recognized the prisoner in query: a 42-year-old man from the southern metropolis of Zaporizhzhya who spent almost two years in Russian captivity, together with a facility in Altai, a Russian area removed from Ukraine.

In the summer time 2025, the person was returned to Ukraine, as a part of a prisoner change.

RFE/RL reporters contacted the soldier by way of kin. The man declined to talk intimately, saying he was in poor bodily and psychological well being. He solely stated that he had been severely overwhelmed and subjected to electrical shock.

Other messages exchanged by Demurchiev level to his doable complicity not solely in blatant warfare crimes — but in addition presumably outright homicide.

In December 2024, Demurchiev obtained a video message that seems to have been taken by drone, utilizing a thermal imaging digital camera. A voice talking in Russian off-camera asks: “Are they dismembering them?”

Yeah, with a shovel,” another voice responds.

“Are they ours?” the first voice says, asking if the people wielding the shovels are Russian soldiers.

Yeah,” the second voice replies.

Holy shit!” the first exclaims.

Other messages sent by Demurchiev explain that the soldiers shown in the video were former prison inmates and that they had hacked three surrendering Ukrainians to death using sapper shovels.

“Well, I reported this to you. Two of the cons made it into the stronghold. There have been three Ukrainians,” he wrote to his commanding officer, General Oleg Mityaev, using a derisive insult to describe them. “They took them prisoner after which chopped them up with shovels. Shit. Beasts. But look, shit, they executed them with sapper shovels. Shit.”

RFE/RL identified the Ukrainian military unit whose soldiers were taken prisoner and then killed by Russian troops. The unit said the incident occurred in eastern Ukraine. The unit also asked RFE/RL not to disclose its identity or the names of the deceased, saying that could traumatize relatives or survivors.

Intelligence data provided by the unit identified the former prison inmates who were mentioned by Demurchiev in the video: members of the “Black Mamba” unit of the 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiment, part of the Third Division of Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army.

In later correspondence, Demurchiev reported the details of the incident to Mityaev, who commanded Russia’s 20th Army. Mityaev responded with praise.

“The ‘cons’ who took that location and chopped them up with shovels, God keen, they will survive,” he said. “They ought to positively be nominated for an award. Keep pushing, little by little. Well achieved…Good job, maintain pushing, maintain pushing, crush the bastards, shit.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2026 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.