"We will kill you"

35-year-old Artem Filin from the Moscow region was declared to have left the unit without permission since August 1, 2025 - from the date when he was in the hospital after surgery with a shrapnel wound to the chest and abdomen. Filin himself told ASTRA about this.

Since 2018, Filin was serving a sentence for drug distribution; in November 2024, he signed a contract and ended up as a rifleman-assistant grenade launcher in the assault company of the 19th Tank Regiment in the Kremennaya area in the “LPR.” In December, he blew himself up in a forest belt and, according to him, lay wounded for a week until he was taken away. The machine remained in place.

On April 1, 2025, military investigator in Lugansk Guram Masmaliev opened a case against Filin for the loss of weapons (Part 2 of Article 348 of the Criminal Code). Filin says that the machine gun with the number that appears in the case was never given to him at all.

Filin was interrogated on April 9, without a lawyer. He claims that physical force was used against him during interrogation. Lawyer Yuri Rudenko, whose signature appears in the protocol (the document is in the possession of ASTRA), according to Filin, did not meet with him at all. The protocol is dated April 10 - and when the defense attorney Alexander Sidorov hired by Filin showed the investigator that his 10th client could not be there, Masmaliev transferred “10” to “01” in the protocol.

On May 30, the case was suspended with the wording that the suspect could not participate in the investigation. Five months later, the deputy head of the same department, Nikolai Puchkovsky, confirmed in writing that Filin regularly attended calls from the investigator. Later he was sent to the front again.

On July 29, 2025, Filin received a shrapnel wound to the chest and abdomen; he underwent surgery to remove the shrapnel from the abdominal cavity. According to him, he was sent to the 442nd military hospital, then to a branch of the hospital named after. Burdenko, then to the Voronovskoye medical center in Moscow. On August 20, he left there on his own: his stomach was never stitched up, his facial pain was not treated, they offered to simply pull out the tooth on the spot, and instead of treatment they promised to discharge him to a unit. The next day I returned - they didn’t accept me, they issued an extract “in violation”. Without a referral, Filin could not get into any military hospital; he went to a civilian hospital and came to the investigator himself to confess. He was given a referral for a medical examination, and for six months he checked in at the Moscow commandant’s office.

This did not prevent the commander of military unit 11744 - the 11th Tank Brigade - with an order dated October 11, to retroactively declare him to have left the unit without permission from August 1, that is, from the date when he was undergoing rehabilitation. In November, a second case was opened against him - about AWOL (Part 5 of Article 337 of the Criminal Code). The confession, according to Filin, disappeared from the materials. The second case from Moscow was also transferred to Lugansk - where the first one was already being investigated.

Since August, Filin has not been paid a salary. He was given category “B” (limited fitness) in February 2026, but was not approved in April: they required a follow-up examination at the hospital named after. Burdenko. There he was refused, citing the need for a referral from an investigator. Filin is afraid to go to the investigator again: from there, he believes, he will be transferred to Lugansk.

According to his registration, he no longer lives in Dzerzhinsky near Moscow. According to him, after each of his complaints, unknown people come to the house - they introduce themselves as “operators from Petrovka, 38”, and knock on the door with threats: “We will kill you.” Filin also says that unknown people tell the mother that her son will be imprisoned for 25 years and that “if he ends up in Ukraine, you will never see him again.” They entered the apartment without permission and intimidated the neighbor. In Petrovka, according to Filin, they know nothing about such employees, and neither do the police’s own security departments.

The 11th Tank Brigade (military unit 11744) has already appeared in similar stories. The telegram channel “Prisoners of the North Military District” wrote that in the assault companies of the brigade, the living are recorded as missing in action, “people are declared deserters, even if the latest data is from the front line.”