The Bellingcat investigation team and The Insider claim to have identified the Russian soldier who tortured, mutilated and killed a Ukrainian soldier captured in the video. The torturer was a 29-year-old Tuva native of the Akhmat battalion, according to investigations published on Friday, August 5.

In late July, videos circulated on pro-Russian Telegram channels showing men in military uniforms with Russian army symbols torturing a bound Ukrainian prisoner of war, cutting off his genitals and then killing him. Directly the torture and murder were committed by a man in a wide-brimmed hat.

hat and bracelet

Due to the low quality of the videos, investigators from Bellingcat and The Insider were unable to analyze the footage in the originally released videos. They managed to establish their identity thanks to their distinctive features – a hat and a bracelet on their arm. A man wearing this hat and bracelet was found by journalists in several other better quality videos published by Russian media, including footage shot by RT and RIA Novosti of the Azot chemical plant in Severodonetsk.

From these videos, it was concluded that the soldier in the hat most likely serves in the Chechen battalion “Akhmat”, the authors of the investigation point out. With the help of online facial recognition services, journalists found your pages on social media. According to the authors of the investigation, the person in the torture video is Ochur-Suge Mongush, a native of Tuva.

Investigators were able to speak with the military

On one of the pages on social media, journalists found Mongush’s phone number and called him. In a conversation with the authors of the investigation, he confirmed that the man in the hat in the Azot factory video was him, but stated that he was not involved in torture and murder. According to Mongush, the video of his participation in the torture was fabricated.

After the footage surfaced on social media, his journalist friends called him and advised him to go to the FSB, where he “was held for two days, they made sure the video was fabricated,” Mongush says. The FSB reportedly told him that “the video was posted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and fell into the hands of Ukrainians when they found the criminal who raped a 10-year-old child.”

Joint photo with the fighters of the “Akhmat” battalion

At the same time, Mongush told reporters that he had nothing to do with the Akhmat battalion and “never held a weapon in his hands”. However, the authors of the investigation found him in a photo with the fighters of this battalion, including those from the territory of Chechnya, and on his page on the social network VKontakte they found pictures of Mongush with weapons in his hands.

“Mongush’s confessions are very important: before talking to him, it was established with certainty that the person in the video of the “akhmatovites” from the Azot factory is the same person who appears in the torture video, and also that a person very similar to this torturer surname Mongush fought in Akhmat, but there was a hypothetical possibility that two very similar Mongoloid-looking people were fighting in Akhmat, however, Mongush’s admission that the man in the hat in the Azot factory video is him, excludes all hard doubts,” writes The Insider.

The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, after the video was published, opened a criminal case under the article on violation of the laws and customs of war. Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, asked to check the video for a possible war crime, a violation of the Geneva Convention. Lubinets also said that reports were being prepared for the UN, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the International Committee of the Red Cross.