Shot in Borzya: The Deserter Hunter Who Tortured Families and Was Killed in Broad Daylight

In this episode of From Russia with Fear, we go to the small town of Borzya in Zabaykalsky Krai, where 34-year-old Konstantin Ektov was shot dead in the street. A former convict turned contract soldier, Ektov came back from the war and joined an operational group that hunted deserters — kidnapping their relatives, torturing them with electric shocks and taking bribes to “leave families alone.” One of those men, 31-year-old Vladimir Popov, says he paid Ektov not to be sent to the front, until a raid left his 80-year-old grandmother with a broken leg. Popov then waited for Ektov by the garages and killed him, later sending video confessions to local media. We look at how deserter hunts work in today’s Russia, why information about Ektov’s death is being wiped from the web, and how a tortured enforcer is now quietly being rewritten as a “hero who died in SVO.”