‘He had no chance’

Ilya Bakharev thought joining the Russian army would be a ticket to exoneration. His unit mates tortured him to death.

Like countless other Russian men, Ilya Bakharev thought joining the war against Ukraine was a path to redemption. Though he wasn’t recruited directly from prison, Ilya had a criminal record, and he spoke openly to his wife about his hope that going to war would keep their son from seeing him as just an ex-con. His desire to restore his reputation through military service only grew after a botched attempt to join the Kremlin-controlled mercenary group Redut — so he signed a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry. But Ilya’s efforts to curb his fellow soldiers’ drinking quickly made him enemies within his own unit, and according to multiple eyewitness accounts, he was brutally tortured to death within a few months of deploying to Ukraine. Journalist Lilia Yapparova looked into Ilya’s story for the independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg. Meduza shares an abridged English-language translation of her reporting.

Warning: The following story contains graphic descriptions of violence.

Ilya Bakharev considered his first attempt to join the war in Ukraine a failure. In April 2023, the 36-year-old Novosibirsk native signed up to join the private military company Redut, a mercenary recruitment proxy for the Russian Defense Ministry, and was sent to Bakhmut, which Russian forces had effectively surrounded at the time. The commander who came to meet the new recruits “took some Promedol [an opioid painkiller] from their first aid kits and shot up,” Ilya’s common-law wife, Svetlana Bulavina, told Bereg.

Once the drug kicked in and the commander was “out of it,” Svetlana says, he instructed the new recruits to “set up a howitzer in an open field.” When they objected, telling him they’d be “immediately wiped out” by Ukrainian forces, he didn’t blink. “Dying is what you came here for! Orders aren’t up for debate,” he told them. After return fire “shattered” the first artillery squad, Ilya promptly left for Donetsk, where he submitted his resignation.

Soon after, though, Ilya began searching for a way to return to the front. “The summer’s coming to an end, so let’s baptize our kid, finish up our renovations, and then I’m doing it: I’m signing a contract with the Defense Ministry,” Svetlana recalls him saying.

According to Svetlana, Ilya had previously served an 8.5-year prison sentence for alleged drug trafficking and hoped joining the military would “wipe the stain from his record.” His loved ones are certain the police planted marijuana on him, but Svetlana says Ilya’s official complaints to the authorities fell on deaf ears: “Everybody thought, ‘They don’t throw people in jail for nothing.’”

“Ilya always talked about not wanting his children to see him as a convict,” Svetlana says. The couple’s son, Lev, was born soon after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “He’d say, ‘I’ll serve in the army, and when I return with the Order of Courage, I’ll be able to go to any court I choose and get compensation for my eight years in prison.’”

On September 22, 2023, Ilya signed a contract with the Russian military, joining a motorized infantry brigade. With almost no training, he was assigned to the repair company of Unit 11740 and sent to the village of Hrechyshkyne in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, where he and his fellow soldiers found themselves living in the forest. Their accommodations consisted of a single tent surrounded by sleeping bags.

The platoon’s commander, Rasulzhon Makhmudov, appointed Ilya chief watchman, tasking him with equipping the soldiers’ living quarters for winter. Ilya dug bunkers, set up guard posts, and banned his fellow soldiers from drinking alcohol. “He’d already seen what that leads to [during his time in Redut],” Svetlana explains. Ilya’s new platoon, she says, “had some rowdy, unruly, ex-con types: they would chase each other with axes and throw knives around. He quickly found a solution: he dug a pit to serve as a ‘drunk tank,’ and he’d put the drunk guys in there until they sobered up.”

‘I won’t be getting the Order of Courage here’

In mid-October, Ilya and Makhmudov traveled to the Russian city of Rostov to purchase supplies for the winter. Left unsupervised, the soldiers back in Hrechyshkyne went on a drunken bender. When Ilya returned, he found the base camp he’d worked hard to establish “in shambles.” “Everything was soiled with vomit, shit, and instant noodles. The furniture was broken. The tactical headsets and boots had been eaten by rats,” Svetlana recounts.

Ilya reprimanded the soldiers — but to his surprise, the unit’s deputy commander, Vladislav Iselkov, defended them. “Why treat the guys like this?” Iselkov said, according to Svetlana. “Okay, they got drunk — so what? Everyone needs to relax sometimes.”

After this clash, Iselkov sent Ilya to the nearby city of Rubizhne, which was about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from an intense combat zone at the time, to guard an ammunition depot and load shells into vehicles heading closer to the front. Ilya saw this as a punishment, according to Svetlana. “I won’t be getting the Order of Courage here,” she recalls him saying.

As Ilya settled in to his new assignment, he continued to butt heads with superiors — including with the commander of his company, 57-year-old Konstantin Barilenko. According to Svetlana, Barilenko would shout “impossible” tasks at Ilya “without explaining anything.” One time, he gave Ilya just a few hours to cut an enormous amount of wood. “Ilya had to quickly call a taxi and buy a chainsaw from some store, all at his own expense,” Svetlana says.

Svetlana learned more about this conflict in late November 2023, when she went to Sievierodonetsk to spend Ilya’s leave period with him. The two spent almost the entire time in a rented apartment, hardly ever setting foot outside due to the frequent shelling and early curfew. “Besides, the local population wasn’t happy to see us,” she recounts. “They don’t like soldiers and they don’t like Russians.”

According to Svetlana, her husband, usually cheerful and energetic, was nearly unrecognizable after his time at the front. “He was anxious. He had a broken arm and a thrown-out back from loading ammunition. [...] He mentioned that he’d had a ‘misunderstanding with Barilenko,’ who ‘didn’t like the way he spoke to him,’” she recalls. When she asked Ilya what he meant, he told her: “I speak to [Barilenko] as his equal. Because he’s not in a state to give me orders: he’s always drunk.”

Before he returned to the front, Ilya said something that made Svetlana uneasy. “He told me to take a picture of [platoon commander] Rasulzhon Makhmudov’s [contact] information,” she recounts. “Then he said, ‘If something happens to me, all questions go to him.’ I asked him, what do you mean, ‘if something happens?’ And he said, ‘Just take it, just in case.’”

When he returned from leave, Ilya asked his commanders to send another person to help him load ammunition. According to Svetlana, Barilenko “sent two thugs [to Rubizhne] to ‘have a talk’ and ‘sort things out’”: platoon deputy commander Dmitry Semenikhin and soldier Nikolai Sazhin, who had been named chief watchman in Ilya’s place.

Sazhin and Semenikhin left Rubizhne “empty-handed,” according to Svetlana: “Ilya didn’t let them boss him around.” Later that day, Barilenko ordered Ilya to return to Hrechyshkyne, sending a car to pick him up. “They’re pulling me back — they don’t like something about how I’m behaving,” Ilya told Svetlana in one of their last conversations. “Barilenko said they’re sending me ‘there’ — I don’t know exactly where — and that I’ll have to prove myself.”

The last time Svetlana and Ilya spoke was on November 29, right after Ilya returned to his former camp. He told Svetlana that “shit had hit the fan” in Hrechyshkyne.

‘They came to kill him while he was sleeping’

Court documents obtained by Meduza, eyewitness accounts from Ilya’s fellow soldiers, and statements from Ilya’s family members all indicate that in the fall of 2023, a group of prisoners formed a violent extortion ring at Unit 11740’s camp in Hrechyshkyne.

The group included Sazhin and Semenekhin as well as other soldiers with the call signs Dzhamal, Azar, Sokol, and Afonya. According to other soldiers, the six men shared one of the bunkers Ilya built and would “go on the attack” every night, seeking out soldiers who had already gotten drunk and beating them before demanding they pay a “fine.”

The “drinking fine” was set at 100,000 rubles (about $1,070). The attackers charged the same amount for leaving the camp to “set up payroll cards or SIM cards” in Rostov, while their “fee” for going to the hospital was 150,000 rubles (about $1,615). Soldiers could also pay bribes to avoid getting sent to the front line.

Svetlana is certain that company commander Konstantin Barilenko was protecting the extortionists and treating its members as his own henchmen. “I have no doubt that Barilenko ordered Sazhin and Semenizhin to summon Ilya from Rubizhne back to Hrechyshkyne, where they ‘ambushed’ him,” she says.

Court documents don’t mention Barilenko’s role, but Sazhin and Semenikhin’s actions are described in detail. Late at night on November 29, the men went into the bunker where Ilya was sleeping, threw him off his bed, and started beating him with “a wooden stool with a log tied to it.” “They came to kill him while he was sleeping,” Svetlana says. “He didn’t even have a chance to say anything.”

Ilya never got back up. “It wasn’t two or three men who killed him, it was six,” Svetlana claims, though only Sazhin and Semenizhin are being charged in the criminal case over Ilya’s death. “He had no chance of surviving,” Svetlana tells Bereg. “The main strikes were to his head. They hit him with a stool and an axe: blunt, chopping blows. Sazhin and Semenizhin started it, with the others circling around them, joining in and filming them. They also jumped on his head. They jumped all over him.”

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By dawn, Ilya’s ribs were “literally shattered,” Svetlana says. When one of the fragments pierced his left lung, causing him to wheeze, the soldiers simply covered him with a towel. They continued drinking in the trench until it was time for roll-call; according to one witness, Semenikhin and Sazhin “poured vodka on Ilya’s head and mocked him.”

At around 2:00 p.m., “when Ilya stopped wheezing,” the soldiers “pronounced him dead,” Svetlana says. According to forensic examiners, Ilya Bakharev died from traumatic shock, a brain hemorrhage, and fractures of the ribs, hyoid bone, and larynx.

In the nearly 14 hours that Ilya was tortured, only one person tried to stand up for him: a soldier with the call sign “Gucci.” As punishment, Semenikhin and Sazhin beat him and forced him to dig Ilya’s grave.

Blood and dirt

On November 30, the soldiers in Hrechyshkyne set about destroying the evidence. The wooden floor in the bunker where Ilya had been killed was soaked in blood, so the men replaced the boards and even dug up some of the dirt below. Ilya’s clothing, ID, and social security card were all burned. Soldiers who hadn’t witnessed his murdered were told that “drunk Bakharev fled his unit and has been declared missing.”

Semenikhin and “Dzhamal” threatened the company’s doctor, Stanislav Podkosov, demanding he corroborate their claims that Ilya “fled the unit under the influence of alcohol and drugs.” “‘Dzhamal’ jabbed me in the forehead and said, ‘Look, if you tell anybody [the truth], I’ll kill you myself,’” Podkosov recalls.

These details came to light not from the official investigation but thanks to the initiative of mercenaries who knew Ilya during his stint in Redut. The fighters were stationed not far from Hrechyshkyne and the news that “Ilya had been seen badly beaten” reached them on November 30. They then contacted the authorities and spent three days seeking permission to visit the repair company camp along with military police.

Ilya’s family spent those three days reaching out to law enforcement “at all possible levels: the military police, the prosecutor's office, the Interior Ministry, to all of the senior officials we could think of,” according to the family’s statement to the Investigative Committee. Ultimately, however, “no assistance was provided until December 3,” when an Investigative Committee division launched a criminal case.

Meanwhile, Sazhin and Semenikhin fled the camp, taking machine guns and at least eight grenades with them. On December 2, they made a stop in the town of Novoaidar, where they gave their local girlfriends flowers and bid them goodbye.

Ilya’s fellow soldiers showed the authorities the spot where he’d been buried. Svetlana later learned from the men tasked with digging up his body that his grave was “very small.” “He was about two meters [about six feet, six inches] tall, but they’d fractured his body so much that they’d managed to fold it into his own sleeping bag and fit it into the hole,” Svetlana says.

The first time Svetlana saw her late husband’s corpse was in a Novosibirsk crematorium. “When I saw his body in person, it was all withered, and his head had become sort of round and turned blackish purple. [His face was] unrecognizable,” she says. “When we’d talked to the Rostov morgue, we’d asked them to embalm him and to put him in his uniform. But there he was, unwashed and undressed. They’d brought him there just as they’d dug him up: covered in dirt and blood.”

‘Well see each other in the next life’

Sazhin and Semenikhin haven’t been arrested to this day. Svetlana is confident that the felony charges against them are not being pursued. The investigator overseeing the case has stopped responding to messages and calls, she says, and the family’s letters to Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, and President Vladimir Putin elicited only formal responses.

To bring attention to the case, the family has started a petition demanding that “Vladimir Putin personally take control of the investigation into I. M. Bakharev’s murder.” “It’s already too late to help us, but maybe we can save other people,” reads the appeal, which has 1,624 signatures.

As the petition suggests, Unit 11740 has had multiple past cases of soldiers disappearing or dying under highly questionable circumstances. In October 2023, for example, Ukrainian journalist Andrey Tsaplienko reported that soldiers Dmitry Korobitsin and Damir Mazitov had been “strangled with a belt by their own fellow servicemen” (and alleged that their commanders had tried to cover up the murder). Then there’s soldier Viktor Kuznetsov, whose relatives have been unable to reach him since September.

Ilya’s family is in contact with relatives of two other soldiers from the unit who disappeared in the fall of 2023. “We found, for instance, a mother who was told in October 2023 that her son had ‘run off for some vodka and ended up staying with a woman of questionable morals,’” Svetlana says. “But the man’s mom says that he wanted to serve, he signed the contract himself, and he wouldn’t have done this.”

There are 36 soldiers who could testify about what was happening in the unit on the night of Ilya Bakharev’s death. According to investigators, however, all of them have been sent into an active combat zone — presumably so they can’t be questioned.

Soon after Ilya’s death, Unit 11740 was fully dissolved. Nonetheless, Sazhin, Semenizhin, and Barilenko, who Svetlana also suspects of being involved in the murder, have continued serving in the army.

Despite the criminal charges against him, Nikolai Sazhin is not in hiding. He told the soldiers who served with Ilya in Redut that he’s currently stationed in Khabarovsk and that he plans to “ship out to the special military operation zone” again soon.

Svetlana Bulavina managed to get ahold of him, as well: he told her that “if those who killed [Ilya] had the opportunity to do it all over again, they would.” In subsequent messages, he refused to speak about specific details, saying: “We’ll see each other in the next life. I’ll tell you everything then.”

Semenikhin, meanwhile, joined the Russian Defense Ministry’s Storm Z unit, a formation made up primarily of former inmates. Svetlana has heard rumors that his squad “may have been wiped out in the Avdiivka area.”

* * *

Svetlana spent February 23, 2024, at the military cemetery in Novosibirsk. She shared a video that shows a helium balloon with a camouflage pattern tied to the cross on Ilya’s grave. Next to it, a Russian flag lies in the snow. “Happy Defenders of the Fatherland Day, family,” Ilya’s mother says from behind the camera. “We love you.”

Svetlana wants to replace the wooden cross on Ilya’s grave with a granite memorial. She plans to find the money for this herself; Russian Defense Ministry employees have told the family they’re not eligible for compensation for Ilya’s death. “Because Ilya didn’t die in battle — it wasn’t the Ukes who killed him.”

The Russian Defense Ministry and the Investigative Committee’s Main Military Investigative Directorate did not respond to Bereg’s requests for comment. Dmitry Semenikhin, Nikolai Sazhin, and Konstantin Barilenko did not respond to calls, text messages, or online messages from the author of this story.

Story by Lilia Yapparova for Bereg. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.