Warning: Distressing themes
Answer the questions you *****!
before I take off my boot and smash your head with it!
What you’re hearing took place in a Moscow police station.
This police station.
I am the master here. I'm the judge. You get that?
No, there is a law...
There are no laws here!
Only one law: my law!
No to war!
There, ten days after Russia invaded Ukraine
29 anti-war protesters were detained, threatened
and in some cases
tortured.
Why are you beating me?
Because I want to!
Some officers in that police station wouldn’t give their names,
and watched, as young women were brutalised
by a man wearing black.
We thought a criminal case would be opened against this person.
What happened? Nothing.
Just nothing.
Those audio recordings were made public,
prompting a Russian politician to request the incident be investigated.
In response, Russia's anti-corruption agency said
there was insufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.
But in place of one,
those women have done the digging themselves.
If we just kept on living like it didn't happen,
they would think they could do it again.
Now, BBC Eye Investigations can take you inside that interrogation room.
To show you a kind of police violence that's often reported but rarely witnessed.
And to reveal, not only the identity of the man in black,
but also the commander who failed to stop him.
Moscow. March 6th, 2022.
No to war!
Thousands of anti-war protesters hit the streets.
As they arrive at meeting points
riot police are already waiting.
By 2PM, over one thousand people have been arrested.
But the demonstrators keep coming.
By 3PM, one March is underway near Komsomolskaya Station.
No to war!
Anastasia is in the crowd.
I woke up and my friend and I decided that we were going to a rally today.
There weren’t many people.
They were young, mostly girls.
Sometimes they would shout “no to war.” That's it.
Just after 3:30PM, Anastasia spots something coming toward them.
Riot police ran at us from the square and stopped us.
Seconds later, she and the others
are bundled into a police van.
Anastasia and her 28 companions
are being driven across the capital.
Spirits are high at first.
But for Anastasia,
the gravity of the situation soon sets in.
It was very hot inside the riot van.
There wasn't enough air.
As we travelled, we decided to create a group chat.
Marina is another protester piled in with Anastasia.
After about 15 to 20 minutes,
we were told that we were going to Brateyevo.
Brateyevo Police Station is in the city’s South East.
From the outside, it looks like any other.
Inside the building itself,
we were led along a series of corridors to a waiting hall.
Several officers were in uniform
and one man was wearing beige.
One of the detainees records this video
while they wait to be sent for questioning.
As they do, Marina’s taken to interrogation Room 103.
A man in black came out.
He was wearing a holster with a gun,
and shouted "Morozova, come here."
What the officers don't know is Marina still has her phone in her pocket.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm coming.
And it's recording.
I went into the room.
I was told to sit in a chair.
Two uniformed women were sitting in front of me.
I wasn't so scared of the women.
I was only afraid of all the men.
Among them was a man wearing black,
he was the main interrogator.
Listen here, you, ******* four-eyed freak, ******* ugly thing.
Will you ******* talk? Or will you keep pretending you’re ******* innocent?
I think I won't talk.
He took out his gun and started waving it in front of my face.
I will smash your head right now, that will make you understand.
Ouch!
Yeah ******* ouch!
I’ll just ******* shoot you right now and that’s it for you!
Why are you beating me?
Because I want to!
What the **** are you looking at?
Sit down, immediately.
You are not a man, you realise that?
Yeah I am. I'm a ******* beast.
And after that, when I mentioned some laws and regulations again…
I am the master here. I’m the judge. You get that?
No, you’re not a master.
I am, I tell you. ******* stand to the wall.
I’ll pick you up, you understand? **** I’ll use force on you.
You want that?
No I don't want that.
Stand up then.
No, there is a law...
There are no laws here. Only one law: my law.
Marina's interrogation lasted 14 minutes.
After her, it was Anastasia's turn.
They took a plastic bag
and put it over my head.
The man in black held the bag behind my neck so that it was tight at the back.
I was suffocated by two people.
They held it there several times for 30 or 40 seconds,
then let me breathe for five.
Emotionally, this was very hard for me.
On the one hand, adrenaline dulls the pain so you don’t feel it as much.
But I didn’t know how long I could hold on for,
or what they might be capable of.
Alexandra, who asked us to hide her face, was next.
Like Marina, she also managed to record her interrogation.
OK, you hit me.
You hit my head and my face with a bottle of water.
And?
As soon as the man in black struck me,
I had an instant flashback to my childhood.
******* hell. But to be honest, my dad hit me harder.
The man in black also grabbed my hair and pulled it in different directions.
You ******* loser. Do you think we’re going to get in trouble for this?
Putin told us to kill all of you stupid *******.
Putin is on our side.
I felt very strongly that
I was not seen as a person.
As if there was an image of some terrible enemy, a criminal.
And not a girl sitting there in front of them.
I’m gonna ******* kill you, OK, and that’s it. Finished.
And then they’ll give me a bonus for it too.
Over the course of six hours, at least 11 of the group
were physically abused in Room 103.
Kicked, slapped, choked, even suffocated.
All at the hands of the man in black.
Minutes after the group's release,
the audio recordings you just heard reached the press.
Despite the outrage they caused,
the Investigative Committee, Russia's anti-corruption agency,
said there wasn't enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.
But the women with little faith in the authorities
had already set out to identify the men in black.
They spent weeks searching with no luck.
But then, a breakthrough.
In early spring of 2022,
a customer database of the delivery service called Yandex Food was leaked,
and data was published on the orders of all its users.
They combed through the data to see if any orders
had been placed to Brateyevo Police Station.
They had.
Nine people had used the service to have food delivered to that address.
We gradually started to check those numbers.
At that point we could only hope he used this service.
And as I remember, there was one phone number listed under the name:
‘Ivan’.
You can't track a name as common as 'Ivan'.
But phone numbers are like digital footprints,
they leave tracks.
We followed those tracks to a website
showing his was used to place six classified adverts.
One from 2019, is selling a desk chair from Brateyevo Police Station
which, when added to the Yandex food order,
is another indication that Ivan works there.
That advert doesn't tell us anything more about him.
But further down the list we see something else.
A car for sale, less than ten minutes drive from Brateyevo Police Station.
And unlike the last one, this one has a full name:
'Ivan Ryabov.'
When I typed 'Ivan Ryabov' into Yandex,
a photo appeared quite quickly.
I had a serious tremor, my hands were shaking.
I sent the picture to the group chat.
They'd found him.
The man in black,
is Ivan Ryabov.
But why wasn't he stopped?
Who had authority over Ryabov that day?
Remember that video we showed you earlier?
We thought the man in beige was somehow in charge.
All communication took place through him.
He wasn't in Room 103,
but I'm 100% sure he knew what was happening in there.
He saw us coming into the waiting hall crying and all wet.
We didn’t know his rank or name.
No name, no rank.
So who is he?
BBC Eye Investigations obtained a police report from March 6th.
It's signed by the Police Station’s acting head:
A. G. Fedorinov.
Searching for that name, takes us to a 2012 article about a town’s criminal investigations department
where it's written in full: ‘Alexander Georgievich Fedorinov’.
There’s a photo of him too,
which looks like it could be the man in beige, only ten years younger.
Facial recognition software leads us to a more recent picture of Fedorinov on VK,
Russia’s equivalent to Facebook.
It was posted by an account that can be linked to user a called:
Alexander Fedorinov.
And that same account is included
in a job vacancies for Brateyevo Police Station.
All our evidence leads us to one conclusion:
the man in beige is the acting head of Brateyevo police station,
Alexander Fedorinov.
Four months after the interrogations,
a published letter from the Prosecutor General's Office
named five officers interviewed about what happened that day.
Among those names is a misspelt Ivan Ryabov.
And after the recordings you've heard in this film were reviewed the Office reiterated:
there isn't enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.
But our findings reveal that at least one of those officers, Ivan Ryabov,
tortured anti-war protesters in Brateyevo Police Station’s Room 103.
And its acting head, Alexander Fedorinov,
failed to stop him.
We put these allegations to Officer Ivan Ryabov, Officer Alexander Fedorinov,
and the Investigative Committee.
They did not respond.
No to war!
The kind of police brutality you've seen in this film is rarely exposed.
But in Russian detention it's not uncommon.
And on March 6th,
more than 5000 demonstrators were detained across Russia.
It all feels like a terrible nightmare.
This is how they treat criminal gangsters,
not young girls.
The power of force reigns in Russia on every level.
A toxically masculine patriarchal power.
We somehow ignore this violence happening around us.
Especially when it's committed in the name of our president.
For Anastasia, Alexandra, Marina and some of the other detainees,
that violence is exactly what they experienced in Room 103.
But instead of silencing them, it's driven them to find their torturer
and to hold him to account.
No one can do this to another person,
especially if he’s a government official.
During the interrogation, the man in black, Ivan Ryabov,
said he was the law there.
“You're nothing here, you’re a second-class citizen.”
I don't consider myself a second-class citizen.
I am the same as him, a citizen of the Russian Federation.
The truth is on my side, I didn't do anything illegal.
That's why I'm talking,
and I'm not afraid.