In February 2022, Konstantin Efremov, a Russian military officer from the Republic of North Ossetia, was deployed as part of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Three months later, he quit the military, left the country, and went public with what he had seen on the front line. In interviews, Efremov spoke about Russian troops torturing Ukrainian POWs, abusing civilians, and mistreating their own soldiers who refused to fight.
Efremov has now lived in the United States for three years. In February, a Russian court sentenced him in absentia to seven years in prison on charges of spreading “disinformation” about the army. He spoke to Meduza about how he now views his time in the war, his life in the U.S., and his take on Donald Trump’s second presidency. The interview has been edited for length and clarity
‘A total mockery of the law’
— On February 20, a Russian court sentenced you in absentia to seven years for spreading “disinformation.” Do you know how the case came about?
— I found out about the verdict on the Internet. I was scrolling through YouTube and suddenly there’s my face. I already knew that they’d launched a criminal case in 2025. My mother, who lives in Vladikavkaz, told me investigators had come to see her and tried to drag her to the Investigative Committee office. She refused. They harassed her for two weeks. They even showed up on my birthday.
— What exactly were you convicted for?
— For my interview with [journalist] Farida Kurbangalieva, which came out on February 7, 2024. The logic is only intelligible to them: it wasn’t my first interview, and it wasn’t my last.
My first interview — with [Russian human rights project Gulagu.net founder Vladimir] Osechkin — initially got me a misdemeanor case. In late May 2023, I was fined 50,000 rubles ($620). I didn’t pay it, of course. They don’t deserve the honor.
— Mediazona reported that the defense lawyer at your trial asked for your acquittal. Who was representing you?
— I have no idea — a state-appointed defender, I’d assume. I was surprised he was pushing for an acquittal. The prosecutor, meanwhile, argued that they had given me time to come to my senses and get back on the right path, but I kept spreading “disinformation.” In their view, giving interviews is disinformation. The prosecutor said I had been “politically blind” and they had given me a chance to see the light — and I hadn’t taken it.
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— What else in your interviews might have provoked them, beyond your account of Russian troops torturing Ukrainian prisoners?
— I also talked about looting, the abuse of POWs and civilians — including minors and elderly people — and soldiers who refused to fight. Throughout the entire proceedings, no one ever contacted me directly, even though my mother gave the investigators my number.
— How do you feel about the sentence?
— Seven years is complete nonsense. A total mockery of the law. But they’re just pawns, trained poodles doing the regime’s bidding. And I hate all of it.
I was just doing my work, serving my country. By 2022, I had ten years of service behind me. I had my own plans for my life, and they trashed all of it. I had savings set aside. I deliberately avoided taking out a military mortgage so I wouldn’t end up in bondage, because otherwise the command can do whatever they want with you. I had another three or four years to go, and then I could have walked away with 2.5 million rubles ($31,000), maybe more, and bought a place to live. Started a family.
I wanted to get married, I wanted kids, and I genuinely loved my work as a sapper. I was proud not to be some deadweight warming a chair at headquarters. And then the war came, and they said: that’s it, go fucking die.
‘Better to go to prison than go to war’
— Where were you stationed before the war?
— I commanded a demining company within the combat engineer battalion of the 42nd Division. We spent three years working in Chechnya. We’d be deployed somewhere, set up a tent camp, and live there.
In Chechnya, to build anything or cultivate land, you need a clearance certificate from the sappers. It’s a matter of safety. Demining work would be scheduled years in advance.
It’ll be the same in Ukraine after the war: by various expert estimates, clearing the land will take between 70 and 100 years. It’s like sorting through rice grain by grain — sappers form a chain, two people working a 70-by-30-meter cell, combing every inch with a metal detector. If it beeps, you find out what’s there. It’s painstaking, tedious, grueling, and dangerous work.
In February 2022, we were told the division was being sent for exercises on the Ukrainian border. Meaning they simply abandoned the demining work in Chechnya — even though, before the [full-scale] invasion began, there was at least another five years of work left to do there. As far as I know, nobody is doing that work now. Maybe the Emergency Ministry, but even that I’m not sure about.
— After so many years of service, you abruptly left the military in 2022. Why?
— The [full-scale] war in Ukraine started. I spent three months in it, and I’ll say this: I had a much higher opinion of the Russian army and the people I served with. I was deeply disappointed. Though “shock” might be a better word. You thought the people you worked and spent every day with were more or less decent human beings. And then it turns out they’re sadists and petty thieves, small and mean-spirited. And you feel so disgusted — you don’t want any part of it.
— Tell me about those “exercises” in 2022.
— Parts of our division had started moving to Crimea as far back as October or November 2021. After that, more and more units followed. Every day there were trains, personnel, equipment.
[I’m a sapper, but] I was assigned to command a rifle platoon, which [in February 2022] was also ordered to relocate. It felt very strange and made no sense, but in the army you get used to absurdity, to following orders. Everyone shrugged, nodded, chuckled: “The brass want to play war games, let them.” There was a sense in the air that war might be coming, but nothing felt like panic.
We arrived in Dzhankoi [in Crimea] and set up the whole operation on the outskirts of a village called Vynohradne. The soldiers scattered in all directions. We weren’t allowed to pitch tents. We just hung around in the open for about a week. The questions kept piling up: why are we here? A few of us rented a house.
And then on the morning of February 24th, I woke up to the sound of artillery. That’s when I understood: this fucking madman had actually started a war. This wasn’t a show of force or a bluff.
We got in a car and drove to where our battalion commander and the 42nd Division’s chief of staff were. People were already wrapping their right arms and left legs in white tape — to tell friend from foe — and painting Z markings on the Kamaz trucks and tanks.
— Was that when you decided to quit?
— Yes, I wrote my resignation report that same day and then spent the rest of the day chasing my commander around trying to hand it to him. I don’t know what I must have looked like. Rain coming down, with everyone scrambling across muddy ground on the outskirts of some godforsaken village. Nobody knew what was happening. And there I am — with my resignation letter. The company commander brushed me off.
Eventually I got to the chief of staff. I walked in and his phones were ringing off the hook. He said: “You want to resign? Do you realize guys are dying out there right now?” I told him I was aware. He pulled his pistol from its holster and said: “Maybe I should just shoot your legs off?” I said, no, just let me resign and that’s it.
That colonel — [Alexander] Sayenko — served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces until 2014 and then switched sides like a total rat.
At the time, I figured he basically didn’t object. So I left with two other guys by taxi. Then my friend called: “Hey, they’re looking for you.” It turned out Sayenko had lined everyone up and said: “Those three are traitors — cowards, all of them. I’ll have them locked up, killed, shot.”
At that point, half the company wanted to resign, but only the three of us had actually tried. We had no idea what our legal rights were — we wanted out through proper channels, not seven years in a prison camp — so we went back and fell in line. Today, knowing what I know now, I’d hold my hands out and say: “Put the cuffs on, get me to prison as fast as you can. Better to go to prison than go to war.” I’ve been saying this for four years.
There were no consequences for us. Then the order came, we loaded into the Kamazes and drove. On February 27th, we arrived in Melitopol [which Russia had occupied on February 25th] and spent several days on a bombed-out, shot-up Ukrainian Air Force airfield. Then they started forming teams to guard the artillery: one officer and ten soldiers. I was given eight men, assigned to the artillery unit, and we guarded them for about 40 days.
There was no supply chain. You ate and drank whatever you could find. All we had were dry rations. Everyone lost weight, obviously. Though complaining about that seemed absurd. When the news around you is that three of our tanks got burned out nearby in the night — and you remember seeing flashes in the dark, bullets flying, and then in the morning a burned-out tank — the thought that you’re hungry tends to disappear.
‘Don’t be a scumbag — they’re human too’
— In your first interviews, you talked about soldiers being tortured — both Russian and Ukrainian. Where did that happen?
— In the village of Kamianka, in Zaporizhzhia. In March we returned to the rifle battalion, moved locations a couple of times, and ended up in Kamianka. There was some kind of agricultural warehouse there, and that’s where they started bringing prisoners. Our job was to control access to the grounds of this collective farm where the divisional headquarters had set up. The division’s political officer, Colonel Vitaly Shopaga, was already there.
In total, I heard of at least 20 prisoners passing through the area — all servicemen from the 36th Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who had been defending the Ilyich steel plant in Mariupol before their brigade was destroyed. Russian forces had shut down the cell towers, disrupted their navigation, and hunted them down. The terrain in Zaporizhzhia is like a web — roads branching in all directions, dozens of tiny settlements — and Russian units were holding prisoners in each one. Shopaga drove a circuit between them daily to conduct interrogations.
In Kamianka we had three prisoners. Sober, Shopaga interrogated them brutally. Drunk, he was a whole different perso. One Ukrainian soldier who admitted to being a sniper was beaten badly — by both Shopaga and the battalion commander, Major Dutov. They kept demanding he name “nationalists.” That was the only question I ever heard from Shopaga, like a broken record. He would blindfold the prisoner and fire a pistol next to his face to deafen him.
The holding area was a garage, and anyone could walk in — so I saw all of this in detail. At one point Shopaga pulled down the man’s pants and underwear and said: “I’m going to call in a guy from Dagestan to rape you. We’ll film it and send it to your mother.” Then: “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Yes.” “We’ll send it to her too.”
The rank-and-file soldiers kept trying to get into the garage. One young idiot I had posted as a guard just opened the door and let them in. They went in and started abusing the prisoners, who were bound and blindfolded. The sniper was crouching on the floor and one soldier kicked him and broke his nose. During another interrogation, Shopaga simply shot the same man through the hand and leg.
— Did you try to stop it? Was that even possible?
— I don’t want to make myself out to be some kind of hero. The one useful thing I did was this: when I found out the sniper had been shot, I went to Shopaga and said, “I don’t want to be burying anyone here — he needs medical attention.” I had to play a role, pretend I didn’t care, that I just didn’t want the hassle.
In the end, they dressed the man in a Russian uniform and drove him to a field hospital, telling him to keep his mouth shut about being from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His arm was put in a cast and he was brought back — whereupon a drunk Shopaga resumed beating and torturing him. My men would wake me in the night to tell me it was happening again. I’d go and wake the FSB lieutenant colonel attached to our division as a security services liaison: “Sir, go and calm him down. He’s drunk again.” Grumbling, he’d get up, go over, and settle Shopaga down. Then my guys and I would check on the sniper.
Later, when I was in Mexico in February 2023, my interview with [Ukrainian blogger Volodymyr] Zolkin came out. One of the former prisoners showed up in the comments. He wrote that I was telling the truth, and that he and one other soldier had been released in a prisoner exchange. He had no information about what had happened to the sniper.
— Shopaga also withheld food from the prisoners?
— He threatened the cook not to give them hot food — only bread and water. The cook went along with it, but we shared what we had. My men and I brought them hot tea and cigarettes at night. We told the cook too: “Give these guys a proper meal.” He was scared, so we said: “Don’t be a scumbag — they’re human too. They need to eat, they’re prisoners.”
I often heard other soldiers say things like, “Ukrainians are the enemy,” and talk about what happens to our Russian guys when they’re captured… I argued with them. Looking back now, I wonder how I wasn’t afraid. I’d say things like, “Listen, the guys who ended up prisoners here — did anyone drag them here? Didn’t we come ourselves? What did these prisoners ever do to you?”
I didn’t manage to change anyone’s mind, of course. The best I could do was make sure the prisoners took fewer beatings when I managed to keep people away from them. It would have been much harder alone, but I was lucky — my eight men turned out to be completely decent people. They were Chechens, an Ingush, and an Ossetian.
— Were there civilian prisoners at your position as well?
— At some point they brought in an elderly man, around 65 or 70, who had been picked up at one of the checkpoints run by what they call the Donbas militia. Their job was essentially to harass the local population — stopping everyone, searching vehicles, confiscating phones — looking for anyone passing Ukrainian forces information about Russian troop movements. This man had apparently been doing exactly that. He was interrogated, but I don’t know what happened to him afterward.
There was also a teenage boy, 14 or 15, brought in for the same reason. Shopaga interrogated him too. I can’t say whether he was beaten — I didn’t see him or the old man looking injured. About a week later, the two civilians and the three Ukrainian servicemen were all taken to Melitopol, which had become the central holding point for prisoners in the area. That’s everything I know about the civilian detainees.
— What about the Russian soldiers who refused to fight? Were they mistreated too?
— There was a separate detention facility for them in Kamianka, in a school building — around 15 to 20 men who had refused to go into combat. I didn’t see them being beaten. They just sat in chairs all day under guard. But they were given nothing to eat: starved into reconsidering, into dropping their resignation requests.
They were from motorized rifle regiments who had seen the horror of frontal assaults and broken down. Though honestly, any sane person would want out. Only fanatics and fools would want to stay.
Some were cycled through two or three times. A man would spend a day in a trench, go on an assault, and come back saying: that’s it, I’m done. He’d be brought to the school, starved until he gave in, and sent back. A few days later he’d be back again: no, let me resign.
There were no guarantees we wouldn’t end up there ourselves for saying we wanted to leave. I got very lucky, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
