Pavel Guguev

A resident of the Moscow region. In 2013, he was sentenced to 12 years in a high-security penal colony for murder (Part 1, Article 105 of the Criminal Code), inflicting medium bodily harm (Part 1, Article 112), and theft (Subparagraph “c”, Part 2, Article 158). The previous year, the same court had given him a suspended sentence of one and a half years in another theft case. He served ten years in prison.

In May 2023, he went to fight in the war in Ukraine, and a few weeks later was taken prisoner. While in captivity, the former inmate gave an interview to a Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Karpenko, in which he spoke about the heavy losses suffered by the Russian forces. The recording was published on Vladimir Zolkin’s YouTube channel.

Guguev was later returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange. While back in Russia, he gave a second interview to Dmytro Karpenko, released in July 2023, in which he again described conditions within the Russian army. He also claimed that soldiers who had been recruited from penal colonies and later returned from Ukrainian captivity had not been allowed to go home for more than a month. Guguev added that he had been asked to publicly state that he had been “forced” to give his interview while in Ukraine.

Another former prisoner of war told Kholod that Guguev had recorded his second interview from a military unit in the Moscow suburbs. According to this source, the day after the interview was released, all former captives in the unit had their mobile phones confiscated, were forbidden from leaving their quarters or receiving parcels, and Guguev himself was placed for several days in a room previously used for storing weapons.

In December 2023, Guguev was taken into custody on charges of engaging in confidential cooperation with a foreign state.

By autumn 2025, he had been sentenced to four years in a general-regime colony.