Locals in a border village in Russia’s west have accused soldiers from the Chechen Akhmat unit of looting several homes and threatening residents with weapons.
According to Telegram channel Pepel, Chechen fighters carried out looting in the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka in Belgorod’s Shebekino district. Regional authorities, law enforcement agencies, and representatives of the Akhmat unit had not commented on the reports at the time of publication.
According to Pepel, the incident took place on 9 April, with several vehicles carrying Chechen soldiers arriving on Grazhdanskaya Street, with the word Akhmat displayed in place of number plates. The soldiers then allegedly broke into houses and garages and looted household appliances and generators.
Residents cited by the Telegram channel said that attempts to stop the looting were met with an aggressive response. According to them, the soldiers threatened them with weapons and ordered them not to interfere. Residents also reported the incident to the police and via radio, after which military police arrived at the scene. However, according to Pepel’s sources, the military police did not take action to stop the looting.
‘The military police arrived, but they were also sworn at. They couldn’t do anything. They were simply afraid. We appealed to [the Head of the Novaya Tavolzhanka administration, Sergei] Parika — he just shrugs his shoulders. Local channels are silent. How are we supposed to live like this? Drones, shelling. There were cases of theft and looting before, but not in broad daylight. Soldiers who were former convicts walk around the village drunk. But the most frightening are these bearded men with rifles, whom even the military police are afraid of’, residents of Tavolzhanka said.
According to Pepel, one resident tried to record acts of looting but was struck with the butt of a rifle.
Pepel also reported that several residents of Novaya Tavolzhanka who have temporarily left the village confirmed the looting based on accounts from those who remained.
According to Pepel editor Nikita Parmenov, it is extremely difficult to obtain details from the area, but ‘as far as we know, no one has been detained since 9 April, and there have been no proceedings on the matter so far’.
‘This is outright banditry that is not controlled by anyone at all. There is, in fact, something deeply alarming about this’, Parmenov said on the Russian independent television channel Dozhd (TV ‘Rain’).
The village of Novaya Tavolzhanka is located in close proximity to the border with Ukraine and is regularly subjected to shelling. Authorities in the Belgorod region have previously reported a difficult situation in border settlements, including the evacuation of residents and damage to infrastructure.
The Akhmat unit was formed in Chechnya and is subordinated to the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya). Its fighters are involved in military operations in Ukraine.
In 2024, in the evacuated settlement of Glushkovo in the Kursk region, a mobile phone shop was robbed by two Chechen soldiers — one of whom was identified as a member of Rosgvardiya. The Akhmat special forces formally fall under this structure when deployed to the Kursk region, which saw heavy fighting after a Ukrainian incursion in 2024. Calls to punish those responsible came not only from pro-war bloggers but also from officials.
In November 2022, video recordings allegedly showing looting in the Russian-occupied Kherson region of Ukraine were found in the possession of Vladislav Dyatlov, who had served in the 94th operational regiment of Rosgvardiya based in the Chechen town of Urus-Martan and was killed in Ukraine.
In September 2022, owners of stolen phones in Russian-occupied Mariupol traced their devices to an electronics shop in the Chechen capital Grozny. Representatives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stated that the phones had been taken by force by fighters from pro-Kadyrov units.
In April 2022, agricultural machinery stolen in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol and valued at €1.5 million ($1.8 million) was reportedly located in the Chechen village of Zakan-Yurt near Grozny.
Residents of border areas in the Belgorod region have been reporting looting for several years. In the summer of 2025, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov spoke about mass appeals from residents asking for increased security. In April of the same year, a video circulated online in which residents complained that Russian soldiers had looted homes in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district after locals had left due to shelling. At the time, Gladkov confirmed that he had received information about at least three such incidents and had passed it to the military police. However, the regional Interior Ministry later reported that it had not registered a single case under the article on looting.
Two years earlier, Gladkov said he suspected individuals wearing insignia of regional self-defence units of being involved in looting.
