Nikita Zhuravel, who was sentenced to 14 years in a high-security prison, has gone missing during transfer.

Nikita Zhuravel, who was beaten by the son of Ramzan Kadyrov, has gone missing during transfer. This was reported by Eva Merkacheva, a member of the Human Rights Council.

His relatives last received a letter from him on 24 December. For three months, there has been no other information about his whereabouts. His loved ones fear that the young man may have died.

14:53 The Federal Penitentiary Service denies that Nikita Zhuravel is missing, stating that he is “in one of the institutions of the penal system of the Russian Federation.” They also claimed that on 21 January 2026 “the convicted person has already received a letter from his mother.”

Zhuravel’s mother, however, denies writing her son a letter in the colony. The woman says she has not received any notification about where her son was transferred to, and thus has not written to him at the new colony.

• In November 2024, Nikita Zhuravel was sentenced to 13.5 years in a high-security colony for treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). Taking into account his remaining time on a previous sentence, his total prison term amounted to 14 years. According to the investigation, Zhuravel contacted representatives of the Ukrainian security services offering to cooperate. In March 2023, he allegedly sent the Ukrainian side a video of a railway train transporting Russian army military equipment, of military aircraft, as well as data on the movements of a service vehicle of one of the units.
• At the end of February 2024, Nikita Zhuravel, a resident of Volgograd (a city on the Volga River in southern Russia), was sentenced to three and a half years in a colony over a video showing the burning of the Quran. He was charged with insulting the feelings of believers (part 2 of Article 148 of the Criminal Code) and hooliganism motivated by religious hatred (part 2 of Article 213 of the Criminal Code). The young man awaited sentencing at the pre-trial detention centre in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. While he was there, reports appeared online that Adam, the 15-year-old son of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, had beaten Zhuravel in detention. Later, a video of the beating was published on social media, and Chechen politicians as well as Ramzan Kadyrov himself not only failed to deny the incident, but expressed support for Adam.