Russia behind planned riot and torture hoax at Azov base near Kyiv, Ukrainian ministers say

Ukraine's foreign and interior ministers blamed Russia on 3 November for a riot outside a National Guard base near Kyiv that prosecutors say three people planned, scouting and filming the site days in advance.

Courts in Kyiv have since remanded all three in custody. Tetiana Kiriieva, 48, and Valentyna Moloda, 49, were ordered held for 60 days without bail on 4 November. On 5 November a court ordered the driver, Viktor Yena, 35, held until 3 January 2027.

The SBU charged them with obstructing the armed forces under Part 1 of Article 114-1 of the Criminal Code and with disclosing the location of military formations under Part 2 of Article 114-2. The charges carry up to eight years in prison.

The riot began with a false report that armed men were torturing about 40 people in the basement of the house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, on Kyiv's western edge. RIA Novosti, TASS and Lenta.ru presented the house as a secret Azov torture prison on 3 November. Krzysztof Bosak, Deputy Marshal of Poland's Sejm, wrote the same morning that Azov ran a covert prison there. Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, asked the German government to raise the case with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Berlin that day.

"I didn't know it was a military facility, I found out when the general arrived," Moloda told the court. She will appeal the custody order. Yena told the court he was a witness, not an accomplice, and apologised to the armed forces and to Azov for what he called inconvenience that day.

Prosecutors describe a scheme to remove a soldier who had gone absent without leave from National Guard custody, and the charges filed fall under the second part of Article 114-2, which requires no proof that information was meant for Russia. No official has published evidence that Russian services directed the three suspects. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Office of the President, said the open question was who pays for such services.

The operation

Kiriieva knew where the National Guard unit was stationed and drew Moloda and Yena into her plan, a prosecutor told the Solomianskyi District Court in Kyiv. She directed Moloda to the address, and Yena went there several days before the riot and filmed the building and the ground around it, which prosecutors said fixed the features of a military site. Kiriieva then passed information about the site through a Telegram group so that its entrances could be blocked, prosecutors said.

The Kyiv regional prosecutor's office described Kiriieva as the initiator of the blockade, who recruited people, told them where to go and coordinated them. Moloda's role was to summon a crowd. She posted videos on TikTok and Telegram saying soldiers were keeping a medic away from wounded men, and published the location of the site, which had not been officially disclosed, the office said.

Moloda began live broadcasts on TikTok on the morning of 2 November, presenting herself as an investigative journalist and saying people were being tortured in the house on Soniachna Street while the street outside was still empty. She later arrived with Yena in a car with ambulance markings, wearing medical clothing, and called the police emergency line to report that about 40 men were being held unlawfully, the head of the Kyiv regional police said.

The ambulance markings belonged to Med-Prestyzh, a clinic Moloda told police and journalists she owned. Mykhailo Furman, the company's registered owner, told Slidstvo.Info that the clinic stopped working in 2023 and that he sold the vehicle in 2024 to buyers who agreed to remove the branding. Budanov said Moloda had bought the ambulance in advance and that photographs and text messages on her phone showed the riot was premeditated.

The SBU said one of the detained women had agreed to organise the removal of a guardsman for a fee and had provoked the clashes in exchange for payment. Prosecutors told the court Moloda had asked 107,000 hryvnias (about US$2,400) for such services. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said she was also hiding her own husband, who had left his unit without leave.

The location charge

Article 114-2 was added to the Criminal Code by a law of 24 March 2022, a month into Russia's full-scale invasion. Its second part makes it a crime under martial law to spread information about the movement or location of Ukrainian forces that lets them be identified on the ground. The exception is information the General Staff, the Defence Ministry or another authorised body has already published.

Part 3 of the article covers the same acts when committed by a group in prior conspiracy, for profit or to pass the information to the state waging war on Ukraine. It carries eight to 12 years. The suspects have been charged under the second part so far, although prosecutors allege both a group plan and a fee. Ukrainian investigators can change the legal qualification of a charge as a case develops.

The National Guard disperses newly mobilised men across several sites because it cannot hold 100, 200 or 300 people in one place without the location quickly attracting attention, spokesperson Ruslan Muzychuk told journalists at the scene. Moloda's broadcasts named the street, and Yena's footage showed the building and the ground around it, according to prosecutors.

The house

The building was a temporary deployment point for military unit 3121 of the National Guard's 1st Azov Corps, where newly mobilised men and soldiers detained after going absent without leave waited for assignment, the corps said. Two of the men were absent-without-leave returnees and the rest were due to begin basic training on 9 November.

Military Ombudsman Olha Reshetylova said the men there included defenders of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol who had come back from Russian captivity and returned to service. The crowd spat at them, threw eggs and broke windows, she said.

Journalists and a representative of the State Bureau of Investigation went inside on the evening of 2 November and spoke with the soldiers, who said they had not been beaten. Journalists saw possible injuries on some of them. Major General Oleksandr Pivnenko, commander of the National Guard, put the number inside at 18, and Budanov put it at 14.

Four men were taken to hospital, two absent-without-leave returnees and two mobilised men awaiting training, Vyhivskyi said. Azov confirmed that the four had injuries without saying how they were hurt, and police had said earlier in the day that nobody inside was injured. The State Bureau of Investigation opened a separate case on 3 November under Part 5 of Article 426-1, abuse of authority by a military official under martial law. Its investigators will examine how the men were kept and whether force was used against them.

The boy on the wall

Video filmed inside the grounds showed Budanov talking to a boy wrapped in a blanket, who said he was 14 and had come with "the lads". Budanov phoned the boy's sister and asked her to take him home.

A second video shows the boy climbing the brick boundary wall, walking along it and jumping down into the grounds. He shouted insults from the wall before he jumped. Footage of him under the blanket became the most widely shared image of the night, captioned as a child tortured in an Azov basement.

Budanov told the crowd: "There are no 'hostages' in the house." His words were published at 22:41 Kyiv time on 2 November.

The crowd

Police and the SBU have identified 130 people who may have been involved, of whom 27 took an active part in unlawful acts and 24 behaved aggressively, incited others or deliberately provoked clashes with police and guardsmen. Four police vehicles and a National Guard bus were badly damaged. Journalists at the scene heard gunshots near the house at about 21:00 and again at 22:34.

Ivan Rudnytskyi, deputy head of the SBU, said on 3 November that the organisers had planned the riot to seize a soldier and to draw Kyiv residents in through public outrage. The SBU also detained a woman it said had urged the crowd to block and damage the National Guard bus.

Dmytro Zolotukhin, a former deputy minister of information policy, wrote that every post he saw about the house that day carried one or two dozen comments from bots. Coverage on that scale from so little information would need a serious budget, he wrote. Moloda had taken part a month earlier in the so-called rally for peace in Kyiv on 3 October.

The October rally

Texty.org.ua tracked the campaign behind that rally for several weeks before 3 October. It found AI-generated TikTok videos of mass protests, bot comments and calls from Russian propagandists and pro-Russian bloggers for Ukrainians to occupy the Maidan. Its monitoring counted 17 TikTok videos promoting the protest with more than 2.7 million views, and the demands were an end to the war on any terms, a change of government and open borders.

A few dozen people turned up on Independence Square. Gazeta.ru illustrated its report on the rally with a photograph from a protest in December 2019, and the SBU detained the rally's headline speaker, a serviceman named Oleksandr Todorov, Texty found. Yelyzaveta Tkachenko, a media analyst who examined the accounts promoting the rally, found signs of a possible Russian information operation.

Moloda recorded a video on 3 October saying Ukrainians had stayed away from the protest because nobody had paid them. Rudnytskyi said she had come to the SBU's attention repeatedly for discrediting the authorities.

The Russian coverage

RIA Novosti ran its account on 3 November under the headline "Those who are weaker simply die" and wrote that a secret Azov prison had been found near Kyiv. It described the 14-year-old as one of those held and cited a report that he had been beaten with a shovel. Its sources were local Telegram groups, the outlet Strana.UA and Artem Dmytruk, a former Ukrainian MP who left the country, who wrote that people had been beaten to death in the house over the previous month.

TASS cited what it called the pro-Russian underground for a report that 45 beaten Ukrainians had been held in the house and that guards tried to move them out one at a time through a back exit. Lenta.ru headlined the TASS material as an attempt to remove victims from a "secret concentration-camp house" and quoted the same source as saying the house was one of many.

A TASS feature republished that evening tied the house to a room at Mariupol airport that Russian media have called Azov's "library" and said such sites were common practice for Ukrainian nationalists. Life.ru wrote that major Western media had not covered the story. Each of the Russian outlets marked Azov as a terrorist organisation banned in Russia.

Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry's ambassador-at-large for what the ministry calls the crimes of the Kyiv regime, said a riot over torture sites in Ukraine had been a matter of time. Ukraine's Centre for Countering Disinformation had earlier identified Miroshnik as the source of an unsupported claim that Ukraine tortures Russian prisoners in secret prisons. The centre pointed to a UN report of 30 June 2025 documenting executions, electric shocks and sexual violence against Ukrainian prisoners held by Russia.

Poland and Germany

Jarosław Wolski, a Polish military analyst, published a thread at 07:59 Warsaw time on 3 November concluding that "there was no torture chamber". He wrote that the boy shown as a torture victim had fallen from the fence minutes before he was filmed being led away.

Bosak posted 30 minutes later, at 08:29. He wrote that "a covert prison run by the Azov National Guard Corps" had been discovered on the outskirts of Kyiv, where men were held and beaten. The men were freed after the address was published and protesters clashed with police, he wrote.

Budanov's statement that nobody was held hostage had been public for more than 10 hours. Wolski wrote in a reply under Bosak's post that the events had been a Russian provocation and that forced mobilisation and street seizures by Ukraine's recruitment centres remained a genuine problem.

Konrad Berkowicz, a Confederation member of the Sejm, wrote that the youngest torture victim in the secret prison near Kyiv was 14. "This is the true face of today's Ukraine," he wrote.

Weidel posted about the boy at 08:44 Berlin time and said she expected the German government to raise the matter during Zelenskyy's visit to Berlin that day. Her post went up 11 hours after Budanov's statement that there were no hostages.

The Ukrainian government's case

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on Facebook on 3 November that "there is no doubt that the enemy is behind stoking this provocation". Vyhivskyi said the events were part of Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine.

Budanov said it was known for certain that the riot had not happened without outside influence. He said in a television interview that investigators were establishing whether the organisers acted for personal or anti-state reasons, for attention or for money.

Brigadier General Denys Prokopenko, commander of Azov, said in a video address on the night of the riot that Russia wanted to divide Ukrainian society from its army, destabilise the country and tarnish the military's image. The information campaign around the house met every one of those aims, he said.

What the Russian government gains

Sybiha cited intelligence in the same statement that the Russian government aims to split its opponents along three lines: between Europe and the U.S., between member states of the EU and NATO and within democratic societies. He said the Russian government planned to commit large resources to that effort this year and next. Within 24 hours of the riot the false claims about the house had been repeated by the deputy speaker of Poland's parliament and by the co-leader of Alternative for Germany.

The 2nd Corps of the National Guard, known as Khartiia, said after the riot that Russia would try to weaken the Ukrainian army through information attacks as its advance on the battlefield slowed. Earlier attacks had targeted mobilisation, the corps said, and their targets now included individual soldiers and units, through provocations and so-called investigations into how troops are trained, supplied and treated.

Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Centre for Countering Disinformation, has said Russian networks push videos of forced conscription, known in Ukraine as busification, to Western and especially U.S. audiences. The centre has also traced staged abuse videos about the recruitment offices, including one of a woman supposedly tortured in a well by recruitment officers.

Russia's Supreme Court designated Azov a terrorist organisation on 2 August 2022, opening captured Mariupol defenders to terrorism trials. The Russian government had cited Azov to justify the invasion it calls the denazification of Ukraine. RIA Novosti, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Lenta.ru carried the false claim of an Azov torture basement and a beaten child with the terrorist label attached to Azov's name.

The SBU warned in February 2025 that Russian services were using bot farms on TikTok and Telegram to spread false reports of unrest in Ukraine and were offering Ukrainians money to join protests. Prosecutors in the Petropavlivska Borshchahivka case allege a paid organiser, a crowd recruited through Telegram and the disclosure of a military site.

Earlier operations

Russia's Channel One broadcast an interview on 12 July 2014 with Galina Pyshnyak, who said Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a three-year-old boy in the main square of Sloviansk. Reporters who went to Sloviansk found no resident who had seen or heard of it, and Channel One admitted on 21 December 2014 that it had no evidence for the story.

A 13-year-old Russian-German girl in Berlin, identified in Russian media as Lisa, said in January 2016 that migrants had abducted and raped her. Channel One reported the claim as fact, Russian Germans demonstrated outside the Chancellery and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused German authorities of a cover-up before prosecutors said she had admitted the story was untrue. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the Russian government not to use the case for political propaganda.

A video circulated in June 2023 in which a woman introduced as Vera Vayiman, a former OSCE observer, said Ukrainian nationalist battalions killed children for their organs. The OSCE said that neither Vayiman nor Vera Nikulina, her name under another surname, had ever worked for it and that it had no record of organ harvesting in Ukraine. Nikulina lived in Vladivostok and had headed a youth chamber attached to the city's Duma.

France's foreign interference agency Viginum attributed dozens of operations between August 2023 and March 2025 to a Russian network that Microsoft designated Storm-1516. It estimated that more than half used people recruited to record voiceovers, pose as whistleblowers or take part in staged events. The network's output included a fabricated story that Azov had trained jointly with Hamas, and influencers tied to Yevgeny Prigozhin's Foundation to Battle Injustice amplified much of it.

Moldovan police said on 12 March 2023 that an undercover officer had infiltrated groups, some of them Russian citizens, promised US$10,000 to organise mass disorder. The target was an anti-government protest led by the Russia-aligned Shor Party. U.S. intelligence officials had said days earlier that actors with ties to Russian intelligence planned to use protests in Moldova to foment an insurrection.

The SBU said in October 2023 that Russian services had used a far-right Telegram channel to recruit Ukrainian schoolchildren aged 13 to 17 to deface Holocaust memorials in Zhytomyr region, Dnipro, Lviv and Vinnytsia. The Russian services then pushed the footage to foreign media as evidence of Ukrainian antisemitism.

The investigations

The SBU, the National Police and the Prosecutor General's Office are assessing the actions of every active participant, and the SBU has opened a third case for mass riots. The State Bureau of Investigation case on the soldiers' treatment runs in parallel.

The photographs and messages Budanov said were on Moloda's phone and Yena's footage of the site would show how the riot was prepared. The Telegram group Kiriieva used to share the location and the payment trail behind the 107,000-hryvnia fee would show whether anyone beyond the three suspects directed it. The medical records of the four hospitalised men would establish how they were injured.