Who is Yevhen Brazhnikov?
Yevhen Brazhnikov was born in 1979 in the city of Komsomolsk, 60 kilometers from Donetsk. In May 2002, he began working in the internal affairs bodies and until 2009 was an operational officer in the Criminal Investigation Department in the Donetsk region.
At the end of 2009, the then Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko restructured the criminal investigation departments in the Donetsk region and reduced the staff. All employees had to undergo certification. Brazhnikov failed it, he was demoted and appointed an operational officer in Yasynuvata, a suburb of Donetsk. He appealed this decision in court, won the case and, despite this, left the bodies.
He did not support the Revolution of Dignity, but he supported the “Russian Spring” and the occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions by pro-Russian militants. In 2015, Brazhnikov headed the security service of one of the Donetsk factories.
A year later, he was detained by officers of the so-called “MGB DPR” for being a saboteur and wanting to stage a coup against the pro-Russian leaders of Donetsk on behalf of the Ukrainian special services.
Two years later, the case was reduced to a regular crime: in 2018, Brazhnikov was found guilty of illegal possession of weapons and sentenced to 8 years in prison.
Even before the verdict, he was placed in “Isolation” — a former cultural space, and since 2014, a prison and torture chamber. Later, he was added to the list of prisoners and exchanged.
Employees of the so-called "Ministry of State Security of the Donetsk People's Republic" detain Brazhnikov in Donetsk in 2016.
Already in Ukraine, Brazhnikov was recognized by other prisoners. They stated that he had collaborated with the “Isolation” administration and tortured prisoners. Brazhnikov was detained, but he denied all charges.
Later, the investigation established that in 2017-2019 he voluntarily cooperated with the “DPR MDB”. Nine victims appeared in the case. Brazhnikov was held in pre-trial detention for six months, and when the prosecutor, in accordance with the law, asked for another preventive measure, the judge decided to let him go home to await trial.
The case was originally supposed to be heard in Pokrovsk, but at the request of the prosecution and the victims, it was transferred to the Obolonsky Court of Kyiv on September 9, 2021.
Brazhnikov did not appear at the next hearing. It soon became clear that he had fled to France. From there, he sometimes connected to court hearings online, but the case never reached the merits.
How the case ended up in France
France has the principle of universal jurisdiction. This means that the most serious international crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide can be investigated there even if the crime occurred in another country and the victims do not have a French passport. The only requirement is that the suspect himself be on French territory.
Brazhnikov threatened the victims, made posts on social media and YouTube. But when he learned about the proceedings in France, he closed his account. The posts on YouTube remained
The “Truth Hounds” NGO has been documenting Russian crimes since 2014, and its team also worked with victims of “Isolation”. When Brazhnikov fled in September 2021, and in January 2022 the court allowed him to be put on the wanted list, “Truth Hounds” decided to contact French law enforcement so that Brazhnikov would not escape responsibility, says the co-executive director of “Truth Hounds” Dmytro Koval.
They, together with two other human rights organizations, submitted the corresponding submission in April 2022. In all documents, until Brazhnikov’s guilt is proven, he is called Yevhen B. In the submission, the organization’s lawyers described what they managed to collect while working with witnesses.
The episodes coincided with those in the indictment, and in addition to them, “Truth Hounds” managed to establish additional facts, says Koval. Already on September 29, 2022, France began a preliminary investigation, no one in Ukraine knew about it.
After some time, the French National Prosecutorʼs Office informed the Prosecutor Generalʼs Office that it was investigating Brazhnikovʼs case. In response, the Ukrainian prosecutorʼs office said that it had already sent an indictment against Brazhnikov to the court. This meant that France had to close its investigation. It is impossible to try the same person twice for the same actions.
In the Ukrainian court, the case was delayed: Brazhnikov was not physically present at the trial, he asked to be included via video conference, his defense attorney filed a prosecutorʼs objection, and the case never reached the merits. There was no prospect that France would extradite Brazhnikov.
At that time, Western countries, and France in particular, were already refusing to hand over fugitives to Ukraine, citing the fact that during martial law, Ukraine would not be able to guarantee their right to a fair trial. Ukraine itself stated this.
Because of this, the prosecutor in Brazhnikovʼs case decided that it would be right to transfer the case to France. The Ministry of Justice decides such an issue, so the court had to agree to the prosecutorʼs request to the ministry.
On April 18, 2024, “Truth Hounds” filed a new complaint against Brazhnikov with French law enforcement. This time, it described new episodes, new victims, and new qualifications for the crime.
The “Truth Hounds” legal advisor Zera Kozlieva is still speaking cautiously about the case and does not want to give many details so as not to harm the investigation. According to her, “Truth Hounds” interviewed ten victims, one of whom was not recognized as a victim in the Ukrainian case.
Some of the victims are people who returned from captivity after April 2022. Two new witnesses testified about another victim. In the complaint, the witnesses spoke for the first time about Yevhen B.’s possible involvement in sexualized violence against prisoners and that he forced other prisoners to do the same.
This is what the "Isolation" cells look like, where prisoners are still held. The authenticity of the photo was confirmed by journalist and expert of the Ukrainian Institute of the Future Stanislav Aseev, who himself went through "Isolation".
While in Ukraine Brazhnikovʼs actions were classified as war crimes and terrorism, the “Truth Hounds” submission is the first to mention crimes against humanity. They are considered more serious than war crimes because of their systemic nature, meaning that criminals act according to the same patterns against a large number of people.
Such crimes appeared in the Ukrainian Criminal Code only in October 2024, after Brazhnikovʼs case was transferred to a Ukrainian court.
A new submission in this format allowed France to continue its own investigation, regardless of the decisions of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.
In August 2025, a Ukrainian court allowed the case to be transferred to France. According to Kozlieva, “Truth Hounds” coordinated work with witnesses and victims on the one hand and with law enforcement agencies of both countries on the other, and also “pushed” coordination between the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice, which was supposed to transfer the materials to France, and the Ukrainian court, which considered these materials.
“We were mediators between all participants, we had to coordinate witnesses and victims with law enforcement agencies in Ukraine and France,” says Kozlieva.
According to her, there is an instruction that describes how materials should be transferred, but this instruction is ambiguous about which body and at whose expense does the translation: the Ministry of Justice or the court. In the end, they determined that the court would do it.
Therefore, the court had to separately find money for the work of translators. But since there was no money for this in the budget of the court administration, the court determined that the prosecutorʼs office should translate. The indictment and the register of evidence were transferred in the summer of 2024.
All other case materials are still being translated and prepared for transfer.
“Truth Hounds” has been collecting testimonies about the “Isolation” torture center since 2014. Last week, Zera Kozlieva presented a report in which the organization describes the systematic torture in this prison.
Truth Hounds, Aнтон Федоров
What is happening with the case in France?
Brazhnikov is suspected of committing crimes against humanity. When the French received the second submission from Truth Hounds, they interviewed Zera Kozlieva about the circumstances of the case and confirmed that they would not wait for all the case materials from Ukraine and would conduct their own investigation.
Under French law, “Truth Hounds” became a party to the case and are acting on the side of the victims. The organizationʼs employees will be questioned in court in July as part of the pre-trial investigation. The victims have already been interviewed by the French.
It is not yet known how long the investigation will last and when the trial will begin, if it comes to it. It is also unknown whether investigators have questioned Brazhnikov. He has never been granted political asylum.