Russian Convicted In Belarus For Arson Attack On Official’s Car Says He Was Beaten By Ivan Kubrakou

Russian citizen Anton Lysov was detained in Belarus for setting fire to the car of the head of the State Committee of Forensic Examinations, Aliaksei Volkau, in 2021. He described how he was detained and how he was beaten by Belarusian Interior Minister Ivan Kubrakou, according to Mediazona.

Lysov was born in the Russian city of Cheboksary. In 2021 he was 22 years old and looking for temporary work when he found an advertisement on the darknet: the client promised $2,000 for setting a car on fire in Minsk. At the time Lysov was in Saint Petersburg. He agreed to the job and travelled to Minsk via Moscow.

Lysov says he did not link the order to politics and simply wanted to earn money.

In Minsk he discovered that the ordered Toyota Land Cruiser was under guard. He waited until the guards left and on the night of October 1 poured gasoline on the car and set it on fire. After that he returned to his rented apartment, where he was detained 11 hours later. That same night 18-year-old Zakhar Tarazevich was detained. He was supposed to photograph the burned vehicle. Tarazevich and Lysov were charged in the same criminal case.

The burned car belonged to the chairman of the State Committee of Forensic Examinations, Aliaksei Volkau. Lysov and Tarazevich were accused of terrorism.

According to Lysov, he was taken to the police station with a bag over his head. Along the way he says officers beat him, twisted his fingers and applied choking holds.

“They tortured me, tortured me — who are you, what are you. I said I didn’t know anything, I denied it until the end, said I didn’t set the fire. I thought it might work — but in Belarus it doesn’t work. There is no justice there at all, and I also got caught up in a political mess. If I had been Belarusian, they probably would have simply hanged me in the forest — they told me that when I was detained, that they would just take me into the forest right now and that would be it,” Lysov said.

Lysov claims that Interior Minister Ivan Kubrakou came to see him at the police department. According to him, Kubrakou began pressing painful points on his face and behind his ears while Lysov was sitting with his hands tied behind his back.

“I started making sounds, growling. He says: growling, you little bastard? That’s right! After that he smashed my head against the wall and said that if in 20 minutes I didn’t confess, they would run a train on me. I didn’t say anything, and they took me to the detention center on Akrestsina,” Lysov said.

The charges were later reclassified under an article on destruction of property. In November 2022 Lysov was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum-security penal colony. In December 2023 he was extradited to Russia and sent to a penal colony in Cheboksary.

In Russia he was tried in a new criminal case. After the verdict he signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defence and went to fight in Ukraine. After being wounded he deserted and in February 2026 reached Yerevan.