A 36-year-old British citizen, Dzmitry Smatrytski, who was born in Belarus, says police officers beat him in Yessentuki, where he had traveled to attend his grandmother’s funeral. He told Mediazona about the incident.
According to him, on April 3 he was walking along Karl Marx Street looking for a funeral home. Several men got out of a car, stopped him and demanded to see his documents.
“I asked, ‘And who are you?’ He said, ‘We’ll tell you who we are in a moment,'” Smatrytski recalled.
Only then did the strangers identify themselves as police officers. One of them showed him an ID, but the British citizen did not have time to examine it. After Smatrytski refused to get into the car, one of the police officers, whom his colleagues called “Khristik,” began hitting him on the head and stomach.
The man was then taken to the city police department. According to him, the beating continued there. Two officers knocked him to the floor, after which “Khristik” beat him and jumped on his head with his feet. The police allegedly called him a “TCC officer,” stripped him naked in an office and checked him for tattoos.
According to Smatrytski, one of the police officers told him: “We’re hunting here. Didn’t you know?”
He said the beating stopped after his mother called. The police officer who answered the phone explained that the man had been detained because of his suspicious appearance. When the woman arrived at the police department, officers, according to the British citizen, demanded 300,000 rubles from her, claiming that her son had “attacked” police officers. She refused to pay.
Smatrytski spent several hours in a cell. He was then registered with the migration authorities and given an administrative fine. He did not retain a copy of the ruling. The man was then released.
The following day, he sought medical attention. At a trauma clinic, doctors recorded fractures of his nose and two ribs, a concussion and multiple abrasions.
On April 13, Smatrytski filed a complaint with the Yessentuki investigative department. Senior investigator Ebzeyev ordered a forensic medical examination that same day.
Later, according to the British citizen, the investigator told him that the surveillance cameras at the police department had not been working on the day of his detention and advised him to leave Russia as soon as possible. Smatrytski informed British diplomats about what had happened, and they helped him leave. He departed the country on April 30.
Smatrytski was born in Belarus and moved to the United Kingdom with his mother in the early 2000s. Until his Belarusian passport expired in 2014, he regularly visited Yessentuki, where his grandmother lived. In early 2026, the pensioner told her relatives that her health was deteriorating. Smatrytski and his mother obtained Russian visas to visit her, but she died before they arrived.
