Ukraine’s largest assault regiment is under investigation over allegations of torturing its own recruits and at least 26 noncombat deaths
Ukraine has suspended Lieutenant Colonel Yuriy Harkavyi, commander of the 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skala,” pending a probe launched after a Babel investigation into torture and the deaths of several servicemen that the military classified as “unrelated to combat.” The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced the move on June 25.
Skala is Ukraine’s largest assault regiment, with 13,000 personnel, and is informally known as “Syrsky’s regiment,” after Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s commander in chief. It reports directly to Ukraine’s top military command rather than to any corps and has fought in some of the toughest sectors of the front, including Izium, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Pokrovsk.
On June 23, the Ukrainian outlet Babel published an investigation that found at least 25 recruits in the regiment died from noncombat causes between late 2025 and spring 2026. The servicemen, ages 31 to 53, were officially listed as having died of pneumonia or cardiovascular disease. The report drew on testimony from current and former soldiers and their relatives.
Relatives of the deceased said that many of the bodies showed signs of beatings and that medical care had been delayed. In some cases, families learned of the deaths only later, under unclear or contradictory circumstances.
The investigation also described systematic violence against recruits. According to Babel’s sources, beatings and humiliating punishments were an established disciplinary practice, not isolated incidents. Soldiers were forcibly confined, and the perimeters of tent camps and dugouts at training centers were mined. People with drug addictions and mental illnesses were also recruited into the regiment and given no medical care.
The Skala regiment denied the allegations, saying that 18 of the deaths mentioned in the report occurred not within the regiment but in a hospital or en route to one, and that they “are genuinely connected to illness or the generally poor health of the mobilized soldiers.” Andriy Suray, who heads the regiment’s civil-military cooperation group, told Radio Svoboda, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service, that two of the deaths described by Babel are under investigation and that one suspect is in custody. “We have an interest in seeing the investigation proceed,” he said.
Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation has opened a pretrial inquiry. The Ground Forces Command, which oversees the Skala regiment, said it was monitoring the case.
Ukraine’s military ombudsman, Olha Reshetylova, said her office had identified, as early as June 2025, a group of Skala instructors who were abusing servicemen at training grounds. Those individuals were barred from working with personnel, she said, but the investigation into them has yet to produce concrete results.
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