Bellingcat investigators have identified the occupier who tortured and executed a Ukrainian soldier

ALONA MAZURENKO – FRIDAY, 5 AUGUST 2022, 21:33

Investigators from the Bellingcat journalism group and The Insider, a Latvia-based independent Russian media outlet, claim that they managed to identify the Russian occupier shown on video torturing a Ukrainian soldier. He turned out to be a native of Tuva called Ochur-Suge Mongush from the Ahmat battalion.

Source: Bellingcat and The Insider

Details: Bellingcat was able to determine that the prisoner of war was being tortured in the territory of the "Pryvillia" sanatorium in Luhansk Oblast, and that militants from the "Ahmat" battalion participated in the torture.

The Insider has spoken with the main torturer, a Tuvan named Ochur-Suge Mongush (born in 1993).

They reported that he tried to deny his involvement but incriminated himself by giving a confusing testimony.

He claimed that he didn’t torture anybody and hasn’t even held a weapon in his hands. He insisted that he was just escorting Russian reporters and that the video of him was a montage.

He also claimed that right after the video emerged, his reporter friends called him.

He told them that the video had been edited, and they advised him to go to the FSB and show them his travel certificate, which showed the time of his arrival and departure.

Mongush claimed that he was detained by the FSB for two days, who checked that the video was a fake and then told him that the video had been posted by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Ukrainians got hold of the video when they caught the criminal who had raped a 10-year old child.

Mongush also claimed that a lot of people wear the same kind of hat as he does, and that he had never seen the car shown in the video of the torture.

However, Mongush did admit, and repeated several times, that he was indeed the person in [another] video released from the Azot plant [by RT in June].

A phone call therefore made it possible to establish, first of all, that the man in the RT video is indeed Ochur-Suge Mongush.

It is also obvious that Mongush was lying when he denied ever seeing the car with the letter "Z" on it, because it can clearly be seen in the video by Lancaster, the authenticity of which Mongush does not deny.

Mongush admits that his "reporter" friends, whom he had escorted, called him right after the footage was released and told him "Look, what bull**it they’ve published about you", i.e. as he put it, his friends recognised him in the video right away.

If Mongush is to be believed, the Armed Forces of Ukraine found some video footage in which a rapist is torturing a Ukrainian soldier, and then for some reason edited it to make the rapist look like Mongush, right down to minor details such as patterns on the hat and bracelets.

Background:

• On 28 July, a video was circulated on Kremlin-aligned social media. The video shows the torture and execution of a Ukrainian prisoner of war.
• The video shows soldiers wearing Russian military uniforms torturing and abusing a Ukrainian soldier who has been tied up, and then executing him with a shot in the head.

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