Former military psychologist Rudenko detained on criminal charges

Former military psychologist Timofey Rudenko has been detained on criminal charges, his mother Yulia Kiselyova has told Mediazona.

She says her son was charged with terrorism, although it is unclear on what article of the Criminal Code. Rudenko was detained on 9 July and arrested for the fifth time in a row on 12 July.

Rudenko was detained on 9 July — the day he was supposed to be released from a detention centre following his fourth stint in it, however unidentified masked people brought him to a car and then took in an unknown direction. For three days, his relatives did not know where he was. It was then when his mother said that her son had been tortured with electric shocks during his arrest.

“My son isn’t giving up. He was tortured with a stun gun in the car, he kept losing consciousness. [Subjected to] threats of all kinds,” she said.

Rudenko is a former military psychologist; he quit service several years ago.

In May 2022, law enforcement officers stormed his apartment. The man said that they demanded he confess to being involved in terrorist activities and preparing to commit terrorist acts in Moscow and other places in Russia, all while torturing him. He was not formally charged with any kind of terrorism. Rudenko himself said that in 2022 he had published a post on social media in which he had condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and had written several anti-war comments on Telegram.

According to his mother Yulia, the law enforcement officers found a black marker and used it to leave marks on her son’s body. “He had swastikas on his chest, on his face, and arms,” she previously told Kholod. That was the appearance he had when he was brought to a police station for the first time, after which he was arrested under the petty hooliganism article three times in a row.

After being released, the man departed Moscow for the Tver region and began saving money for a trip to Kyrgyzstan. On 18 May 2023, he was going to fly to Bishkek but he was detained at the entry to the airport and taken to a police station.

According to Rudenko, in the car, the officers used an stun gun against him and started going through his phone, threatened to rape him and his girlfriend, whose photos they found on his phones. Then Rudenko was arrested on five more occasions.