Dzmitry Smatrytski, a British citizen, told Mediazona that police in Yessentuki beat him when he came to the city for his grandmother's funeral. According to the man, on April 3 he was walking along Karl Marx Street looking for a funeral home when a car blocked his path.
The passengers identified themselves as police officers and demanded he get into the car. When Smatrytski refused, one of the officers, whom colleagues called Khristik, hit him in the stomach and head. The beating continued at the Interior Ministry department: the man was thrown to the floor, kicked and had officers jump on his head.
Smatrytski claims the officers shouted that he was a "Tsekashnik," stripped him naked and examined him for tattoos. One of the officers, according to the Briton, told him: "We have a hunt here. Didn't you know?"
The beating stopped after a call from Smatrytski's mother. When the woman arrived at the department, the officers, as the Briton claims, demanded 300,000 rubles from her because her son had "lunged" at the police. She refused to pay.
The man was released after being registered for migration and given an administrative fine. The next day, doctors recorded fractures of his nose and two ribs, a concussion and multiple abrasions.
Smatrytski filed a complaint with the investigative department for the city of Yessentuki. Later, an investigator told him that surveillance cameras in the police department had not been working on the day of his detention and advised him to leave Russia as soon as possible. British diplomats helped him leave the country.
Smatrytski was born in Belarus and moved to Britain with his mother in the early 2000s. Until 2014, he regularly visited his grandmother in Yessentuki, and in early 2026 he received a Russian visa to visit her — by the time he arrived, the pensioner had already died.