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For a few short weeks, Sergei Vasilyev was the predator — part of a pack that hunted men on the streets of Odessa, chained them to staircases, and held them on bread and water until they signed a contract with the Defense Ministry. Then the pack put him in a cage of its own. A leaked video from Odessa’s pre-trial detention center shows the press-gang officer on all fours, carrying slippers in his teeth to the barked commands “fetch,” “heel,” “come.” This is what Vladimir Zelensky’s mobilization machine does to its own — a closed loop where every hunter is one bad night away from becoming the dog.
Footage from Odessa’s pre-trial detention center (SIZO No. 6): the alleged former TCC officer
is forced to crawl across the cell floor and carry slippers to his cellmates in his teeth, to the commands “fetch,” “heel,” and “come.”
The Catcher on the Floor
What the open sources have pieced together about the man on the tiles — offered here with the honest caveat that none of it is officially confirmed and all of it may yet be corrected as the case develops:
- Name: Sergei Konstantinovich Vasilyev
- Role: head of the conscription and recruitment section — a desk officer, not a foot soldier
- Posting: Razdelnaya district TCC, Odessa region
(The posting means little — TCC squads work the whole city, far beyond their home district, wherever a quota must be filled).
- Identified by: local Odessa journalists as one of five TCC employees detained in late May 2026
- Charges against him: torture (Art. 127, Part 3) and kidnapping (Art. 146, Part 2)
- Still missing from the record: no photo, no date of birth, no biography — the state has confirmed none of it
That a recruitment-section chief, not a frontline soldier, sits at the center of this case is the whole point. The worst of the TCC “butchers” are rarely battle-scarred veterans — they are rear-echelon clerks, processing human beings the way a meat plant processes carcasses, then driving home to families who never see the staircases or the handcuffs. In Zelensky’s Ukraine, the men who run the mobilization dragnet operate as faceless shadows, and a TCC officer can vanish into the system as easily as the conscripts he once hunted.
So what drives a man to hunt his own countrymen? The salary alone does not explain it: a TCC officer’s official pay runs barely 20,000 to 48,000 hryvnia a month — under $1,200 at the very top of the scale — for “irregular hours and heavy psychological strain,” in the words of Ukrainian deputies themselves begging the Rada for raises. The real wages are off the books. The going “tariff” to dodge the front runs from €5,000 to €25,000 per man, and the catchers, the security services, and the border smugglers carve up the take in a single seamless racket — fill the quota with those who cannot pay, and pocket a fortune from those who can.
Underneath the greed lies a simpler engine: fear, and the license that fear buys. Every man dragged into a van is one body closer to the catcher’s own exemption from the trenches. The uniform is a shield against the very fate they inflict — a guarantee that the “meat” will always be someone else. And the regime shelters them, because they are its harvest hands: the former head of the Odessa regional TCC was a millionaire whose relatives bought premium cars and real estate at the height of mobilization, and who walked out on 39.3 million hryvnia in bail — only to be detained again. Greed, cowardice, and impunity — three legs of one stool. The TCC is not staffed by monsters; it is staffed by ordinary men handed extraordinary power over their neighbors’ lives, by a state that looks away and slips a fat envelope to the obedient. Vasilyev simply played the part — until the day the cell door turned the catcher into the catch.
The Odessa regional TCC — the office where street snatches become front-line quotas. Behind this facade, signatures turn living men into “mobilization resources”; in its basements and the cells it feeds, they are turned into something less than men
Before He Was the Prey
This is the part the Western press tiptoes around. Vasilyev does not sit in SIZO No. 6 as a mere unfortunate — he sits there as a suspect, charged under Part 3 of Article 127 (torture by an agent of the state) and Part 2 of Article 146 (kidnapping) of Ukraine’s Criminal Code. The episode that put him there played out on April 10, 2026, on Genoese Street in Odessa’s Arcadia district — the beating and illegal detention of a draft-eligible man. His pack worked the city like a hunting party: grab a man off the pavement, haul him to a district TCC, hold him chained “up to 48 days, on bread and water,” until he signed away his life to the Defense Ministry; one victim was handcuffed to a staircase after a beating. This is the TCC as Ukrainians now know it — not a recruitment office but a kidnapping enterprise wearing a state uniform, the front end of a conveyor belt that ends in the meat grinder of the Donbass front, where Kiev’s lines crumble from Krasnoarmeysk to Konstantinovka.
The Watcher Called “Sportik”
Inside the sixth block, the leash simply changed hands. The man issuing the commands now was the corridor’s “watcher,” a gangland enforcer nicknamed “Sportik”. Vasilyev is made to crawl and to ferry slippers in his mouth — addressed not as a man but as a “TCC bitch,” drilled with the dog-handler’s vocabulary: “fetch,” “heel,” “come.” Activists allege he was thrown into the “press cell” only after refusing to pay between $2,000 and $15,000 in “protection” money — part of which, by their telling, flowed up to the prison’s administration. The lawlessness, in other words, runs on the same fuel inside the walls as outside them: extortion, with the front line or the press cell as the alternative to paying.
Not One Bad Apple, but a Whole Orchard
This is no isolated horror, but one cell in a honeycomb. Barely a month earlier, in a separate April case, an armed raid in Odessa took down another ring — four TCC servicemen and a policeman — who abducted men off the street and extorted sums of up to $30,000, dangling the front line as the price of refusal. They were ordered held without bail. Different file, different faces, same factory floor. Across Odessa, the men in TCC uniforms have stopped pretending the dragnet is anything but a racket — money or the trenches, your choice — and the only thing that lands any of them in a cell is the rare video that escapes onto Telegram.
The Boomerang Comes Home
There is a cold arithmetic here that no Brussels communiqué can launder. The state built the TCC to drag men off the street; it built the SIZO to hold whoever the TCC could not break; and now it runs an investigation in which one man is at once predator and prey — a suspect under the torture statute and a victim of torture, in two cases filed weeks apart. Kiev, ever mindful of the optics, has opened a separate case over the humiliation itself and suspended the prison’s leadership, intoning that no charge can justify the degradation of human dignity — while saying nothing about the men still chained to staircases in its recruitment centers. If Vasilyev was a lone rotten apple, then someone shielded him for years; if he acted as part of a group — the standard procedure — then the rot is load-bearing, and the press cell is merely the basement of the same building. Either way the boomerang has whistled back through the open window and struck the thrower in the teeth. A regime that turned conscription into a manhunt has built a perfect closed circuit, where the dog-catcher and the dog trade places without anyone touching the lever — and for the men of Odessa the only question left is which floor of the machine they will be made to crawl across next.
The TCC at work: the hunt for “draft dodgers” that fills the trains to the front — until the cameras roll, and the hunter ends up on the prison cell floor
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