Under Putin, the taboo on torture has disappeared, as appears after the massacre in Moscow

ONo questions were asked in court on Sunday, when the four seriously damaged suspects in the Crocus City Hall massacre were brought to trial. One of them hung semi-conscious on a stretcher with his eyes closed; he reportedly lost an eye during harsh interrogation after his arrest. Another lost an ear. The men were also given electric shocks.

“I never expected something like that from myself, but when I saw how they were brought into the courtroom bent over, and even near that ear, I felt an extraordinary satisfaction,” Margarita Simonjan, the head of the state broadcaster RT, gloated. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin also saw no harm in it: according to him, the suspects ‘deserve no mercy’.

On Telegram, Yevgeny Rasskazov, a member of the paramilitary neo-Nazi group Rusich, proudly reported that the knife used to cut off the suspect’s ear had been sold by auction for thousands of euros. The money will go to the relatives of the victims of the terrorist attack, he promised.

Russian human rights activists reacted with concern, even though they understand the anger among Russians over the massacre, which claimed the lives of 139 people. They see the open showing of the torture videos in particular as a sign that a new boundary is being crossed.

TikTokker tortured

Like most other countries, Russia is bound by the UN convention that prohibits torture, but it is nevertheless common for police or security services to commit torture practices. At the end of 2022, popular TikTokker Nekoglai (Nikolaj Lebedev) was arrested for insulting the army and kicked and beaten in the police station to force him to make a public apology. The officers also tried to rape him with a bottle.

According to Vladimir Osetsjkin of Gulagu.ru, an organization that helps Russian prisoners, such torture practices also regularly occur in Russian prison camps. At the end of 2021, he published video footage from a prison camp in Saratov, showing prisoners being raped with a broom by staff. According to ex-prisoners, some camps even operate special units of detainees tasked with torturing other prisoners.

Some suspects in a 2017 attack on the St. Petersburg metro were also tortured during the preliminary investigation, according to Russian human rights activists. One suspect was even held for a month in a secret detention center of the FSB security service, where day after day they tried to get a confession from him using electric shocks and other torture.

Rarely punishment

In response to the video footage of torture from the Saratov prison camp, the director and several employees were fired, but according to Sergei Babinets of the Russian ‘Team Against Torture’, such torture practices are rarely punished. The authorities often keep a hand over offenders, such as the son of the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. He beat up a suspect in a Koran burning in the cell and then posted the images on Telegram. He received a medal for that.

According to Babinets, the authorities tried to keep such incidents as quiet as possible until recently. “But it seems like they’ve now opened the door to doing it a little more openly,” he told the independent site Mediazona. According to him, the climate has become harsher under the influence of the Russian war against Ukraine.

The demolition hammer with which members of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary army, bludgeoned a defector to death even briefly became the menacing symbol of the Russian operation. It was striking that the man who cut off the ear of the Tajik suspect was part of Rusitsj, the neo-Nazi militia that initially fought with Wagner in Ukraine. Apparently he is now employed by the official Russian security forces.

Cautious criticism

Tatyana Moskaljkova, Russia’s human rights ombudsman, cautiously criticized the treatment of the four suspects on Tuesday. The use of torture is unacceptable, she said. But she immediately added that arrests are ‘often violent’. She also emphasized that the law stipulates that police actions in arrests resulting in bodily harm “will not lead to criminal prosecution.” She thus hinted that there will probably be no punishment for torture practices this time either.