Russian veteran turned city council chairman caught on video threatening constituent: ‘I’ll smash your face’
Sergey Sechenov, the city council chairman of the Siberian city of Tomsk, threatened to “smash the fucking face” of a local resident during a confrontation between the two men. Journalist Andrey Ostrov published video of the exchange.
According to Sechenov, the clip shows a fragment of a meeting he held with residents in response to “an ongoing dispute between two apartment buildings over the location of a trash container site.”
In the video, Sechenov tells the man to “lower his voice by three tones.” The man replies by telling Sechenov not to yell at him.
“Listen, if you talk to me like that again, I’ll break your fucking face,” Sechenov says. When the man insists that Sechenov can’t speak to him that way, the Duma chairman responds: “I’m telling you again — I’ll take your damn head off if you keep yelling at me.”
Shortly after the blowup, Sechenov posted a statement on Telegram expressing regret that “the full video of the meeting wasn’t shown — where it’s clear that this man spent the entire time trying to provoke a scandal and insulting those around him.”
The situation was fairly tense, but people controlled themselves. When he started insulting women, though, I couldn’t let that slide. I won’t let anyone insult women — ever. That’s how I was raised, and I’ll stand by that for the rest of my life. I’m a tough person, and maybe I came across as harsh, but I apologize to the people of Tomsk for that.
Sechenov became chairman of the Tomsk City Duma in November 2024. In 2022, he led an assault unit in Ukraine, and in 2023, he became chief of staff of the unit’s airborne battalion. Local media describe him as the founder of the Association of Special Military Operation Veterans.
Sign up for Meduza’s daily newsletter
A digest of Russia’s investigative reports and news analysis. If it matters, we summarize it.