‘They tried to break him, but they went too far’ Last year, a young Russian conscript was found hanged in the forest. The army says it was suicide — but his mother isn't buying it.
In the spring of 2024, a 20-year-old Russian conscript named Kirill Poluyanov was found hanged in a forest near a military base outside the city of Ulan-Ude. Military police and investigators claim that he took his own life, but Kirill’s mother, Anastasia Poluyanova, is convinced that her son was killed by his fellow soldiers. One of them told her that Kirill was brutally bullied and extorted by the other servicemen — and that hazing is widespread at the base. Independent forensic experts have also questioned the official account of his death. Journalists from the outlet People of Baikal spoke to Anastasia about her efforts to uncover the truth about her son’s death. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their story.
‘I was afraid he'd end up at war’
On the morning of June 26, 2024, Anastasia Poluyanova woke up to a message from Ksenia, her son Kirill's girlfriend. It was a forwarded message from Kirill, which included a geolocation tag. It read: "Forgive me, my sunshine. I can’t do this anymore. Tell my mom I love her. He won’t let me go — he says I have to."
Together with her cousin, Anastasia got in her car and drove to the tagged location. After hours of searching for Kirill with no success, they called his unit and asked for help. That evening, Anastasia was told the military unit had found her son. He was dead, hanging by a belt tied to a tree branch, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the base.
Before he joined the military, Kirill worked at a meat processing plant. According to his mother, the pay was decent — around 3,350 rubles ($40) a day. “Now the military’s spreading rumors that he had debts and that’s why he supposedly took his own life. It’s all lies,” she says. “He had money. I know that for sure — we shared an online bank account, and his balance never dropped below 50,000 rubles ($600).”
Kirill could have been exempt from the army because of his allergies and scoliosis. But on April 22, 2024, he passed his medical exam at the draft office and was assigned Category A — fit for duty. Two days later, he was posted to Military Unit No. 32364, just outside Ulan-Ude.
“Of course I didn’t want him going into the army,” Anastasia Poluyanova tells People of Baikal. “I was afraid he’d end up at war. Afraid he’d sign that contract. But I didn’t cry. It was his decision — he was a grown man.”
She felt a little better when she learned Kirill would be stationed just two kilometers (six miles) from home. “I was actually relieved,” Anastasia recalls. “We could go visit him, and they said he might even be allowed home on weekends.”
‘At least I’ll come out of it a man’
In May 2024, Kirill ran away from his unit for the first time. It happened just a few days after his first visit with his mother. His superiors found him quickly and, instead of taking him straight back to his unit, they first brought him home. His commander told Anastasia, “Don’t scold him,” and waited outside while she fed her son.
By then, Anastasia already knew that hazing was rampant in the unit. During their first visit, Kirill had told her that “all the newcomers are abused by the sergeants.”
“As soon as they stepped through the door, they were bullied — called names, kicked, slapped on the back of the head,” Anastasia recalls him saying. “Kirill said to me, ‘This isn’t what I imagined the army would be like.’” Before Kirill returned to the unit, his girlfriend Ksenia slipped him a touchscreen phone — something soldiers weren’t allowed to have.
Later, Anastasia noticed Kirill behaving strangely during their visits. “He kept looking around, like he was scared. I think they must have threatened him, told him not to say anything,” she says. She tried to persuade him to leave the army, but he always answered, “No, I’ll see it through. At least I’ll come out of it a man.”
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In early June, Kirill was admitted to the medical unit with a respiratory infection. After he recovered, his commander assigned him to work there as a clerk. Kirill called his mother, excited. “I’ve got such good news, I can’t wait to tell you!” he said.
But the job turned out to be nothing like he expected. According to Anastasia, her son wasn’t given enough time to rest — they made him paint, whitewash, plaster, repair equipment, and clean the grounds. The medical unit was preparing for an inspection ahead of the oath ceremony, and most of the prep work fell on Kirill. His mother remembers he looked exhausted and was counting down the days until the ceremony.
The whole Poluyanov family was preparing for the big event too. “After the ceremony, everyone who lived nearby was supposed to get leave,” Anastasia says. “We invited friends over and planned a real celebration. We even bought an inflatable pool and set it up in the yard.”
Looking back on those plans, she adds: “Even if he had decided to do this to himself… he would have come home first. He would have come for sure. Even if he’d had thoughts of suicide, he would have pushed them aside while he came home.”
‘The dogs were barking like crazy’
On the night Kirill died, his mother couldn’t sleep. She stayed out walking late into the night. “I wasn’t feeling anxious,” Anastasia recalls. “I just couldn’t sleep for some reason. It started raining during the night. My cousin and I stood outside for a while, smoking in the rain, then we went back inside. In the morning, I decided not to take my youngest daughter to kindergarten, so I slept in a little longer.” (Besides Kirill, the Poluyanov family has two daughters: the older one is 16, the younger is five.)
When Anastasia read the forwarded message from Ksenia the next morning, she immediately tried calling her son, but there was no answer — just a dial tone. Within five minutes, she and her cousin were in the car, searching for Kirill based on his last known location. The geolocation signal led them to a Buddhist temple deep in the forest.
“We went back there several times because the location kept pointing right to the temple,” Anastasia says. “Next to it, there’s a house where an elderly man and woman live. The woman told us the dogs were barking like crazy around 4:00 a.m., which means someone must have been nearby. But she didn’t go outside because it was raining.”
By around 10:00 a.m., Anastasia couldn’t take it anymore and called the military unit. They confirmed that Kirill was missing.
The family spent the entire day searching for him and contacting the military police, but received no help. That evening, Anastasia heard from friends that a lot of military vehicles had gathered on a hill not far from where they had searched that morning.
Still, the first official word came from Ksenia. “She said, ‘They found Kirill,’” Anastasia recalls. “I was so relieved. I said, ‘Thank God! Where is he?’ And she answered, ‘He hanged himself.’”
When Kirill’s parents arrived at the scene, they found the area cordoned off. Anastasia remembers demanding to be let through. She says she was “screaming like a madwoman,” but military police blocked her from reaching the place where the body was found. The investigative team didn’t arrive until 10:00 p.m. that night. Kirill’s father volunteered to do the formal identification — they wouldn’t let Anastasia in.
According to Anastasia, her husband immediately noticed that the boots on Kirill’s body were loosely hanging off his feet and his uniform looked far too big, as if it belonged to someone else. It was also strange that Kirill had no personal belongings on him — not even a pack of cigarettes, even though he was a heavy smoker. But those weren’t the only things that immediately convinced Anastasia that her son had been killed inside the unit and then dumped in the forest.
“They transported his body by car,” she says firmly. “There are security cameras on the base, but suddenly they just ‘happened to be broken.' That’s what the investigator told me — that the cameras weren’t working. But honestly, I'm sure there were no cameras running at all. Everyone on the base knew what had happened. The higher-ups knew. They all knew. They were just figuring out what to do. And they decided to move his body and stage a suicide.”
Anastasia also says that Kirill's body appeared far too clean for someone who had supposedly walked 10 kilometers (six miles) through heavy rain. “I later saw the photos the officers took at the scene,” Anastasia says. “His clothes were spotless, like they’d been freshly washed. It rained heavily that night. If he had really walked all that way, he would have been covered in mud.”
According to Anastasia, hazing was rampant in Kirill’s former unit. She claims that in the spring of 2024, no fewer than 11 cases of large-scale extortion were under investigation there. Allegedly, the victims were mostly soldiers returning from combat zone in Ukraine — contract soldiers and mobilized men with injuries who had received significant payouts. Other soldiers beat them and forced them to transfer money from their bank accounts, she says.
People of Baikal was unable to independently verify these claims.
‘They tried to break him, but they went too far’
Kirill was buried on June 29, 2024 — the same day he was supposed to take his military oath and celebrate with his family. For the funeral, the family rented a special event space. It was there that Kirill’s mother noticed her son’s broken lips and smashed teeth.
Immediately after the funeral, Anastasia recorded a video asking for help and posted it on social media. In response, several petitions demanding an investigation into Kirill’s death began circulating online, each gathering over a thousand signatures. Only after that was a criminal case opened — officially to investigate “incitement to suicide.”
“If I hadn’t done anything, nothing would have happened. The investigators immediately said it was a suicide and weren’t planning to look into it,” Anastasia says.
The authorities opened a criminal case over his death on July 19, 2024. By July 25, Anastasia had already pushed through an exhumation and an independent forensic examination. Specialists from Russia’s Self-Regulatory Organization of Forensic Experts found serious issues with the original autopsy and said that its results did not allow for any clear conclusions about the cause of death. “It’s possible that signs of resistance or unconsciousness were present,” the report states, “which could suggest either a body being hanged after death or death by strangulation with someone holding the legs.”
The experts also pointed out that the official autopsy selectively and inaccurately described the strangulation marks around Kirill’s neck. Deeming the examination of possible signs of strangulation incomplete, they noted that critical signs typically seen in hangings were simply missing. Namely, there was no feces, urine, saliva, or blood in the mouth — all of which would usually be present if someone had died by hanging.
The experts concluded that the official autopsy shouldn't be used in court: it lacked a full analysis of the findings and the available evidence did not support its conclusions. In short, the military pathologists’ report could not prove that Kirill Poluyanov had died by suicide.
Kirill was buried for a second time on September 11, 2024. Three months later, the criminal investigation into the alleged “incitement to suicide” was closed due to “lack of evidence.” Anastasia says she was never even officially notified. Now, investigators are only pursuing extortion charges against one of Kirill’s fellow soldiers, Alexey Sidorov. His trial began on April 7, 2025.
Sidorov was also serving mandatory military duty but had been drafted six months earlier than Kirill, giving him “seniority” according to the army’s unwritten rules. According to investigators, sometime between June 23 and June 26, 2024, Sidorov demanded 500 rubles ($6) and the smartphone with Internet access that Ksenia had given to Kirill. By that time, according to Anastasia, Kirill had permission to use a touchscreen phone, as he was working as a clerk in the medical unit.
Another of Kirill’s fellow soldiers, Dmitry Markelov, corroborated the extortion, telling Anastasia: "I saw with my own eyes how they abused him." According to Markelov, Sidorov and another soldier name Cherkashin "would humiliate Kirill, beat him up, and extort money." "It happened all the time," he added.
Anastasia believes that multiple soldiers were involved her son’s death. “There were four or five of them who killed him,” she says. “I know this because people told me that that night, he fought with two of them and gave them a good beating. So they called for backup. Kirill was strong, physically fit. He was a real man — he wouldn’t bow down to them. They tried to break him, but they went too far.”
When asked what keeps her going after her son’s death, Anastasia says, “I still hope for a miracle.” Then she adds, “The real miracle will be when everyone responsible is punished — not just for the extortion, but for the murder, too.”
Story by Natalia Fedotova for People of Baikal
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