Kuban security officials convicted of torturing were sent to a penal colony.

As reported by the "Caucasian Knot," in May 2025, a court found police officers Yevgeny Samonov and Ivan Tatsenko guilty of beating Fyodor Valko. Samonov, the district police officer, received four years, and Tatsenko, the detective, received three and a half years in prison. Both denied their guilt and claimed that the injuries to Valko were unintentional. The court explained the lenient sentence by saying that the defendants had no "desire to inflict particular suffering on the victim." Human rights activists considered the court's interpretation erroneous, stating that it "excluded torture from the charges." The prosecutor's office requested a harsher sentence, but the Krasnodar Regional Court upheld it in September. Fyodor Valko, a watchman from the Prikubansky farmstead, was detained by police in August 2023 on suspicion of theft from a factory. While extracting a confession, security officers beat him, including with a chair, until he lost consciousness. Doctors diagnosed him with three fractured vertebrae, abrasions, bruises, and a hemorrhage in the eye. In December 2023, Valko reported that four months later, the after-effects of the beating were preventing him from working.

Former police officers Yevgeny Samonov and Ivan Tatsenko, convicted of beating Fyodor Valko, will serve their sentences in Penal Colony No. 5 in the Kirov Region. They were transferred there to serve their sentences. The court sentenced them to four and three-and-a-half years in prison. Penal Colony No. 5 in Kirovo-Chepetsk is a penal colony for former law enforcement officers, writes the "Team Against Torture"*.

According to human rights activists, the convicted former security officials will have the opportunity to be released on parole as early as April of this year.

On December 30, 2025, it became known that the Kuban District Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent Fyodor Valko an official apology for the brutal beating by police officers. The letter of apology was sent only after a request from lawyers, human rights activists noted. Valko intends to appeal the sentence against the security forces who tortured him. The apology sent to him by the Ministry of Internal Affairs was a forced formality; before the verdict, the agency had characterized the convicted officers as exemplary.

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