On October 18, 2022, roughly eight months after Russia’s launched its all-out war on Ukraine, a high-ranking Russian officer texted several messages to his wife, and several acquaintances, back home in Russia.
The officer, then-Colonel Roman Demurchiev, commander of the 42nd Guards Motor Rifle Division, bragged about how his soldiers had just stormed a “strongpoint” in Ukraine, and had captured four prisoners-of-war.
In a message to his wife, Aleksandra, he sent a photograph that appeared to be several human ears, blackened and hanging from a metal pipe.
“What do you do with them afterward?” Aleksandra wrote.
“I’ll make a garland and give it as a gift,” Demurchiev, who was promoted to major general the following year, responded.
“Like pig ears for beer,” she wrote.
“Yeah,” he replied
The gory banter, and evidence of possible war crimes by a senior Russian military officer, are among the revelations contained in three years of communications — text and audio messages, photographs, videos — purportedly sent and received by Demurchiev.
The materials — dozens of messages and other related materials — were provided to reporters from Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, by a person serving in the Ukrainian military. RFE/RL agreed not to disclose the person’s identity or how they obtained the files.
Schemes verified the authenticity of the communications, working with forensics laboratories in the United States and data researchers in Germany.
RFE/RL reporters also corroborated many of the dates and events listed in the data using details provided by soldiers from Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, whose units fought, and continue to fight, against soldiers under Demurchiev’s command.
Contacted by RFE/RL by phone, Demurchiev, 49, hung up upon being asked about the treatment of prisoners of war.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to RFE/RL’s emails regarding its policies on treatment of prisoners of war.
‘You Didn’t Touch The Ears?’
Throughout Russia’s war on Ukraine, which hits its fourth anniversary on February 24, there have been widespread allegations of, and ample evidence pointing to, war crimes being committed by Russian units.
Among the best-known examples was from Bucha, a town north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, that was occupied by Russian forces for just over a month.
After the Russian troops withdrew, residents discovered dozens of dead bodies, overwhelmingly civilians that appeared to have been summarily executed, or tortured, with corpses lying on streets or piled in basements.
With the help of military records left behind in Bucha and cross-referenced with social media profiles, RFE/RL identified several members of the one particular unit — the 234th Pskov Regiment — that was directly involved in the killings of civilians.
In the correspondence obtained by RFE/RL, the conversation about the mutilated ears began when Demurchiev wrote to another army officer who was a longtime acquaintance: Major General Igor Timofeev, the first deputy commander of the 36th Army.
“You didn’t touch the ears? Like when we were kids?” Timofeev replied in response.
It’s unclear exactly what Timofeev was referring to.
However, both he and Demurchiev fought in Chechnya in the 2000s, during the conflict that ravaged the Russian region.
Demurchiev then started a separate chat on the same subject with his wife, Aleksandra. In one of her responses, she also appeared to refer to Chechnya when reacting to the ear photo:
“I thought those were tales from Chechnya times,” she wrote. “Turns out it’s true.”
Aleksandra could not be reached for comment.
Russian forces have been accused of amputating ears of prisoners in the past.
During the First Chechen War, in the 1990s, journalists and human rights activists documented multiple reports of reported mutilations by Russian troops. In 2000-2001, during the second conflict in the region, Human Rights Watch and the Russian rights group Memorial described bodies with severe mutilations, including scalping, broken limbs, and cut-off fingers and ears.
Russian media have described similar practices by Chechen fighters.
In 2022, Schemes obtained another series of recordings of calls from Russian soldiers, intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence. In one, a soldier could be heard saying of a prisoner: “He wouldn’t talk. They cut off his ear.”
Demurchiev mentioned amputating ears again in late 2024 in a voice message sent to a contact identified as Valery Nepop.
RFE/RL was able to determine that Nepop was likely an officer with the Federal Security Service, Russia’s main domestic intelligence agency.
“You’re the boss of a super organization, that’s my dream,” Demurchiev can be heard saying. “Damn, and you even cut off the ears. But at our age they don’t do that anymore; we just give out the orders.”
Of Mice And Generals
Some of the materials sent or received by Demurchiev showcased dark, juvenile, and often sadistic humor among his colleagues or acquaintances, many of whom are Russian officers.
In one received by Demurchiev in December 2023, a live mouse is shown tied up by its legs — spread-eagled, as if it were being crucified — as a Russian voice pretends to interrogate the mouse, offering it a cigarette.
Demurchiev replied with a smiley-face emoji to the video, sent by Lieutenant General Mikhail Kosobokov, commander of the 49th Combined Arms Army.
In a separate message sent to Kosobokov, Demurchiev sent a Russian language meme that said: “It’s not a war crime if it was fun.”
In another series of messages with a person who appeared to be a military intelligence officer attached to the FSB named Roman, Demurchiev asked Roman what to do about a Ukrainian prisoner in his custody.
“I’ve got one prisoner… I can gift him to you,” he wrote in the October 2023 messages. “He’s sitting in a pit… What should I do with him — dispose of him or give him to you?”
“We didn’t have time to torture him, so the info was friendly,” Demurchiev wrote. “But you’ve got plenty of time — you can use tools that make people tell the truth.”
RFE/RL identified the prisoner in question: a 42-year-old man from the southern city of Zaporizhzhya who spent nearly two years in Russian captivity, including a facility in Altai, a Russian region far from Ukraine.
In the summer 2025, the man was returned to Ukraine, as part of a prisoner exchange.
RFE/RL reporters contacted the soldier via relatives. The man declined to speak in detail, saying he was in poor physical and mental health. He only said that he had been severely beaten and subjected to electric shock.
‘Are They Dismembering Them?’
Other messages exchanged by Demurchiev point to his possible complicity not only in blatant war crimes — but also possibly outright murder.
In December 2024, Demurchiev received a video message that appears to have been taken by drone, using a thermal imaging camera. A voice speaking in Russian off-camera asks: “Are they dismembering them?”
Yeah, with a shovel,” another voice responds.
“Are they ours?” the first voice says, asking if the people wielding the shovels are Russian soldiers.
Yeah,” the second voice replies.
Holy shit!” the first exclaims.
Other messages sent by Demurchiev explain that the soldiers shown in the video were former prison inmate and that they had hacked three surrendering Ukrainians to death using sapper shovels.
“Well, I reported this to you. Two of the cons made it into the stronghold. There were three Ukrainians,” he wrote to his commanding officer, General Oleg Mityaev, using a derisive insult to describe them. “They took them prisoner and then chopped them up with shovels. Shit. Beasts. But look, shit, they executed them with sapper shovels. Shit.”
RFE/RL identified the Ukrainian military unit whose soldiers were taken prisoner and then killed by Russian troops. The unit said the incident occurred in eastern Ukraine. The unit also asked RFE/RL not to disclose its identity or the names of the deceased, saying that could traumatize relatives or survivors.
Intelligence data provided by the unit identified the former prison inmates who were mentioned by Demurchiev in the video: members of the “Black Mamba” unit of the 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiment, part of the Third Division of Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army.
In later correspondence, Demurchiev reported the details of the incident to Mityaev, who commanded the Russia’s 20th Army. Mityaev responded with praise.
“The ‘cons’ who took that location and chopped them up with shovels, God willing they’ll survive,” he said. “They should definitely be nominated for an award. Keep pushing, little by little. Well done…Good job, keep pushing, keep pushing, crush the bastards, shit.”
