Nikolay Lebedev, a Moldova-born Russian vlogger known on TikTok as Nekoglai, says police beat him up and attempted to rape him with a Coca Cola bottle, as per his YouTube video.
According to Lebedev, at 20:00 Moscow time on 9 November, after a court session, three security officials wearing uniform without patches took him to a small police office with no cameras, handcuffed the vlogger and started beating him together. “They beat me like a dog, beat me with their feet and their hands <…> They beat me as hard as they could, they jumped on me,” the young man said.
At a certain point, they undressed Lebedev, took a 1 litre Coca-Cola bottle and told the vlogger that he “should sit on it”. “Obviously, I refused, after which I was severely beaten several more times, and then they tried to shove the bottle up my rectum,” the vlogger said.
According to Lebedev, the law enforcement officers tried to make him apologise for a parody video in which Nekoglai pretended to be a Russian soldier.
The photo of Lebedev's bruises. Screenshotet from YouTube
The officers also filmed the beatings and threatened to post the video on the Internet if Lebedev decided to speak about the torture.
Alexey Melnikov of the Public Supervisory Commission reported on 27 November that Nekoglai had been battered in a Moscow police department before he was sent to the temporary detention centre for foreigners. The vlogger had bruises and sores and told the Commission supervisors he had been beaten up and forcibly had his head shaved.
On 7 November, Nekoglai shot a parody TikTok referencing a video of a Russian soldier lying in a trench and “swatting away grenades falling on him with bare hands”. Later, head of the Safe Internet League Ekaterina Mizulina asked authorities to look into the video for signs of “discrediting the Russian army”.
The vlogger, 21, was ultimately deported from Russia to his native Moldova. At the court hearing, the man with tears in his eyes said that he was not abused, that he was sorry, and asked to be “deported faster”.
