The Investigative Committee opened a case on the beating of a Kuban farmer by security forces, who was required to confess to stealing cows

The Investigative Committee opened a case due to the beating by security forces of 66-year-old Kuban farmer Nikolai Bondarenko in March 2021. This was reported by the human rights organization «Committee against Torture».

The case was initiated on the fact of abuse of power with the use of violence and weapons (paragraphs «a», «b» of part 3 of article 286 of the Criminal Code), there are no defendants in it yet .

Bondarenko told Mediazone that on the night of March 10, 2021, two acquaintances came to his farm in the village of Kalininskaya with an offer to sell two cows. When the farmer refused to buy without documents for livestock, the National Guards burst into the farm with shooting.

One of Bondarenko's guests, Andrei Popov, a resident of the Kuban village of Rogovskaya, who was trying to escape, was forced by the National Guard to crawl in the mud and shot in the back with blank cartridges. Bondarenko recalled that he was also knocked to the ground and beaten, and that the beatings continued in the police department in the Kalininsky district.

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All three Kuban residents, they said, were required to confess to stealing cows. The lawyer of the victims said that, according to the case file, several stolen cows were from the Tkachev Agrocomplex, owned by the family of ex-governor Alexander Tkachev.

Popov and his friend Sergei Duz were arrested for charge of theft with penetration, and Bondarenko was released on the evening of March 10. Returning to the farm, he saw that strangers were dismantling his animals in the presence of policemen.

In April 2021, the Investigative Committee opened a case of torture of Popov — also under the article on abuse of authority (point «a» of part 3 of article 286 UK). According to one of the episodes, the deputy head of the police department for the Primorsko-Akhtarsky district, Yevgeny Volkov, is passing. “The investigation of this case is now coming to an end,” human rights activists noted.